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36479	----	DANTE DANTE _SIX SERMONS_ BY PHILIP H. WICKSTEED M.A. [Illustration] LONDON C. KEGAN PAUL & CO., 1 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1879 (_The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved_) _PREFACE._ The five Sermons which form the body of this little book on Dante were delivered in the ordinary course of my ministry at Little Portland Street Chapel, in the autumn of 1878, and subsequently at the Free Christian Church, Croydon, in a slightly altered form. They are now printed, at the request of many of my hearers, almost exactly as delivered at Croydon. The substance of a sixth Sermon has been thrown into an Appendix. In allowing the publication of this little volume, my only thought is to let it take its chance with other fugitive productions of the Pulpit that appeal to the Press as a means of widening the possible area rather than extending the period over which the preacher's voice may extend; and my only justification is the hope that it may here and there reach hands to which no more adequate treatment of the subject was likely to find its way. The translations I have given are sometimes paraphrastic, and virtually contain glosses or interpretations which make it necessary to warn the reader against regarding them as in every case Dante's _ipsissima verba_. For the most part the renderings are substantially my own; but I have freely availed myself of numerous translations, without special acknowledgment, whenever they supplied me with suitable phrases. I have only to add the acknowledgment of my obligations to Fraticelli's edition of Dante's works (whose numbering of the minor poems and the letters I have adopted for reference), to the same writer's 'Life of Dante,' and to Mr. Symonds' 'Introduction to the Study of Dante.' P. H. W. _June 1879._ _CONTENTS._ PAGE I. DANTE: AS A CITIZEN OF FLORENCE 1 II. DANTE: IN EXILE 29 III. HELL 59 IV. PURGATORY 89 V. HEAVEN 119 APPENDIX 145 I DANTE'S LIFE AND PRINCIPLES _I. AS A CITIZEN OF FLORENCE_ There are probably few competent judges who would hesitate to give Dante a place of honour in the triad of the world's greatest poets; and amongst these three Dante occupies a position wholly his own, peerless and unapproached in history. For Homer and Shakespeare reflect the ages in which they lived, in all their fullness and variety of life and motive, largely sinking their own individuality in the intensity and breadth of their sympathies. They are great teachers doubtless, and fail not to lash what they regard as the growing vices or follies of the day, and to impress upon their hearers the solemn lessons of those inevitable facts of life which they epitomise and vivify. But their teaching is chiefly incidental or indirect, it is largely unconscious, and is often almost as difficult to unravel from their works as it is from the life and nature they so faithfully reflect. With Dante it is far otherwise. Aglow with a prophet's passionate conviction, an apostle's undying zeal, he is guided by a philosopher's breadth and clearness of principle, a poet's unfailing sense of beauty and command of emotions, to a social reformer's definite and practical aims and a mystic's peace of religious communion. And though his works abound in dramatic touches of startling power and variety, and delineations of character unsurpassed in delicacy, yet with all the depth and scope of his sympathies he never for a moment loses himself or forgets his purpose. As a philosopher and statesman, he had analysed with keen precision the social institutions, the political forces, and the historical antecedents by which he found his time and country dominated; as a moralist, a theologian, and a man, he had grasped with a firmness that nothing could relax the essential conditions of human blessedness here and hereafter, and with an intensity and fixity of definite self-conscious purpose almost without parallel he threw the passionate energy of his nature into the task of preaching the eternal truth to his countrymen, and through them to the world, and thwarting and crushing the powers and institutions which he regarded as hostile to the well-being of mankind. He strove to teach his brothers that their true bliss lay in the exercise of virtue here, and the blessed vision of God hereafter. And as a step towards this, and an essential part of its realisation, he strove to make Italy one in heart and tongue, to raise her out of the sea of petty jealousies and intrigues in which she was plunged; in a word, to erect her into a free, united country, with a noble mother tongue. These two purposes were one; and, supported and supplemented by a never-dying zeal for truth, a never-failing sense of beauty, they inspired the life and works of Dante Alighieri. It is often held and taught, that a strong and definite didactic purpose must inevitably be fatal to the highest forms of art, must clip the wings of poetic imagination, distort the symmetry of poetic sympathy, and substitute hard and angular contrasts for the melting grace of those curved lines of beauty which pass one into the other. Had Dante never lived, I know not where we should turn for the decisive refutation of this thought; but in Dante it is the very combination said to be impossible that inspires and enthrals us. A perfect artist, guided in the exercise of his art by an unflagging intensity of moral purpose; a prophet, submitting his inspirations to the keenest philosophical analysis, pouring them into the most finished artistic moulds, yet bringing them into ever fresher and fuller contact with their living source; a moralist and philosopher whose thoughts are fed by a prophet's directness of vision and a poet's tender grace of love, a poet's might and subtlety of imagination--Philosopher, Prophet, Poet, supreme as each, unique as a combination of them all--such was Dante Alighieri! And his voice will never be drowned or forgotten as long as man is dragged downward by passion and struggles upward towards God, as long as he that sows to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, and he that sows to the spirit reaps of the spirit life everlasting, as long as the heart of man can glow responsive to a holy indignation with wrong, or can feel the sweetness of the harmonies of peace. It is little that I can hope to do, and yet I would fain do something, towards opening to one here and there some glimpse into that mighty temple, instinct with the very presence of the Eternal, raised by the master hand, nay rather wrought out of the mighty heart of Dante; but before we can even attempt to gather up a few fragments of the 'Divine Comedy,' as landmarks to guide us, in our turn, through Hell and Purgatory up to Heaven, it is needful for us to have some conception who Dante Alighieri was, and what were his fortunes in this mortal life. And here I must once for all utter a warning, and thereby discharge myself of a special duty. The Old Testament itself has not been more ruthlessly allegorised than have Dante's works and even his very life. The lack of trustworthy materials, in any great abundance, for an account of the poet's outward lot, the difficulty of fixing with certainty when he is himself relating actual events and when his apparent narratives are merely allegorical, the obscurity, incompleteness, and even apparent inconsistency of some of the data he supplies, the uncertainty as to the exact time at which his different works were composed and the precise relation in which they stand to each other, and the doubts which have been thrown upon the authenticity of some of the minor documents upon which the poet's biographers generally rely, have all combined to involve almost every step of his life in deep obscurity. Here, then, is a field upon which laborious research, ingenious conjecture, and wild speculation can find unending employment, and consequently every branch of the study has quite a literature of its own. Now into this mass of controversial and speculative writings on Dante, I do not make the smallest pretensions to have penetrated a single step. I am far from wishing to disparage such studies, or to put forward in my own defence that stale and foolish plea, the refuge of pretentious ignorance in every region of inquiry, that a mind coming fresh to the study has the advantage over those that are already well versed in it; but surely the students who are making the elucidation of Dante their life work would not ask or wish, that until their endless task is completed all those whose souls have been touched by the direct utterance of the great poet should hold their peace until qualified to speak by half a life of study. With no further apology, then, for seeming to venture too rashly on the task, we may go on to a brief sketch of Dante's life and principles. The main lines which I shall follow are in most cases traced distinctly enough by Dante's own hand, and to the best of my belief they represent a fair average of the present or recent conclusions of scholars; but, on the other hand, there have always been some who would unhesitatingly treat as allegory much of what I shall present to you as fact, who for instance would treat all Dante's love for Beatrice, and indeed Beatrice's very existence, as purely allegorical; and, again, where the allegory is admitted on all hands, there is a ceaseless shifting and endless variety in the special interpretations adopted and rejected by the experts. * * * * * Dante, or properly Durante, Alighieri was born in Florence of an ancient and noble family, in the year 1265. We may note that his life falls in a period which we used to be taught to regard as an age of intellectual stagnation and social barbarism, in which Christianity had degenerated into a jumbled chaos of puerile and immoral superstitions! We may note also that in the early years of his life the poet was a contemporary of some of the noblest representatives of the feudo-Catholic civilisation, that is to say of mediæval philosophy, theology, and chivalry, while his manhood was joined in loving friendship with the first supremely great mediæval artist, and before he died one of the great precursors and heralds of the revival of learning was growing up to manhood and another had already left his cradle. To speak of Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, and St. Louis, as living when Dante was born, of Giotto as his companion and friend, of Petrarch and Boccaccio as already living when he died, is to indicate more clearly than could be done by any more elaborate statement, the position he occupies at the very turning point of the Middle Ages when the forces of modern life had begun to rise, but the supremacy of mediæval faith and discipline was as yet unbroken. Accordingly Dante, in whom the truest spirit of his age is, as it were, 'made flesh,' may be variously regarded as the great morning star of modern enlightenment, freedom, and culture, or as the very type of mediæval discipline, faith, and chivalry. To me, I confess, this latter aspect of Dante's life is altogether predominant. To me he is the very incarnation of Catholicism, not in its shame, but in its glory. Yet the future is always contained in the present when rightly understood, and just because Dante was the perfect representative of his own age, he became the herald and the prophecy of the ages to come, not, as we often vainly imagine them, rebelling against and escaping from the overshadowing solemnity of the ages past, but growing out of them as their natural and necessary result. In the year 1265, then, Dante was born in Florence, then one of the most powerful and flourishing, but also, alas! one of the most factious and turbulent of the cities of Europe. He was but nine years old when he first met that Beatrice Portinari who became thenceforth the loadstar of his life. As to this lady we have little to say. The details which Dante's early biographers give us add but little to our knowledge of her, and so far as they are not drawn from the poet's own words, are merely such graceful commonplaces of laudatory description as any imagination of ordinary capacity would spontaneously supply for itself. When we have said that Beatrice was a beautiful, sweet, and virtuous girl, we have said all that we know, and all that we need care to know, of the daughter of Folco Portinari, who lived, was married, and died in Florence at the end of the thirteenth century. All that she is to us more than other Florentine maidens, she is to us through that poet who, as he wept her untimely death, hoped with no vain hope 'to write of her, what ne'er was writ of woman.'[1] * * * * * It puts no great strain on our powers of credence, to accept Dante's own statement of the rush of almost stupefying emotions which overwhelmed his childish heart when at the age of nine he went with his father to Portinari's house, and was sent to play with other children, amongst them the little Beatrice, a child of eight years old. The 'New Life' waked within him from that moment, and its strength and purity made him strong and pure.[2] * * * * * Nine more years have passed. Dante is now eighteen. He has made rapid progress in all the intellectual and personal accomplishments which are held to adorn the position of a Florentine gentleman. His teachers have in some cases already discerned the greatness of his powers, and he has become aware, probably by essays which never saw the light, that he has not only a poet's passions and aspirations, but a poet's power of moulding language into oneness with his thought. He and Beatrice know each other by sight, as neighbours or fellow-citizens, but Dante has never heard her voice address a word to him. Yet she is still the centre of all his thoughts. She has never ceased to be to him the perfect ideal of growing womanhood, and to his devout and fervid imagination, just because she is the very flower of womanly courtesy, grace, and virtue, she is an angel upon earth. Not in the hackneyed phrase of complimentary commonplace, not in the exaggerated cant of would-be poetical metaphor, but in the deep verity of his inmost life, Dante Alighieri believes that Beatrice Portinari, the maiden whose purity keeps him pure, whose grace and beauty are as guardian angels watching over his life, has more of heaven than of earth about her and claims kindred with God's more perfect family. Beatrice is now seventeen, she is walking with two companions in a public place, she meets Dante and allows herself to utter a few words of graceful greeting. It is the first time she has spoken to him, and Dante's soul is thrilled and fired to its very depths. Not many hours afterwards, the poet began the first of his sonnets that we still possess, perhaps the first he ever wrote.[3] * * * * * Let us pass over eight or nine years more. Dante, now about twenty-six, is the very flower of chivalry and poetry. The foremost men of his own and other cities--artists, musicians, poets, scholars, and statesmen--are his friends. Somewhat hard of access and reserved, but the most fascinating of companions and the faithfulest of friends to those who have found a real place in his heart, Dante takes a rank of acknowledged eminence amongst the poets of his day. His verses, chiefly in praise of Beatrice, are written in a strain of tender sentiment, that gives little sign of what is ultimately to come out of him, but there is a nervous and concentrated power of diction, a purity and elevation of conception in them, which may not have been obvious to his companions as separating him from them, but which to eyes instructed by the result is full of deepest meaning. And what of Beatrice? She is dead. It was never given to Dante to call her his. We know not so much as whether he even aspired to more than that gracious salutation in which, to use his own expression, he seemed to touch 'the very limits of beatitude.'[4] Be this as it may, it is certain that Beatrice married a powerful citizen of Florence several years before her death. But she was still the guardian angel of the poet's life, she was still the very type of womanhood to him; and there was not a word or thought of his towards her but was full of utter courtesy and purity. And now, in the flower of her loveliness she is cut down by death, and to Dante life has become a wilderness.[5] * * * * * Yet eight or nine years more. Dante is now in what his philosophical system regards as the very prime of life.[6] He is thirty-five. The date is 1300. Since we left him weeping for the death of Beatrice, the unity of his life has been shattered and he has lost his way, but only for a time. Now his powers and purposes are richer, stronger, more concentrated than ever. In his first passion of grief for Beatrice's death he had been profoundly touched by the pity of a gentle-eyed damsel whom a far from groundless conjecture identifies with Gemma Donati, the lady whom he married not long afterwards. With this Gemma he lived till his banishment, and they had a numerous family. The internal evidence of Dante's works, and the few circumstances really known to us, give little support to the tradition that their marriage was an unhappy one. Dante's friends had hoped that domestic peace might console him for his irreparable loss, but he himself had rather sought for consolation in the study of philosophy and theology; and it befell him, he tells us, as one who in seeking silver strikes on gold--not, haply, without guidance from on high;--for he began to see many things as in a dream, and deemed that Dame Philosophy must needs be supreme![7] But neither domestic nor literary cares and duties absorbed his energies. In late years he had begun to take an active part in the politics of his city, and was now fast rising to his true position as the foremost man of Florence and of Italy. Thus, we see new interests and new powers rising in his life, but for a time the unity of that life was gone. While Beatrice lived Dante's whole being was centred in her, and she was to him the visible token of God's presence upon earth, the living proof of the reality and the beauty of things Divine, born to fill the world with faith and gentleness. But when she was gone, when other passions and pursuits disputed with her memory the foremost place in Dante's heart, it was as though he had lost the secret and the meaning of life, as though he had lost the guidance of Heaven, and was whirled helplessly in the vortex of moral, social, and political disorder which swept over his country. For Italian politics at this period form a veritable chaos of shifting combinations and entanglements, of plots and counterplots, of intrigue and treachery and vacillation, though lightened ever and again by gleams of noblest patriotism and devotion. Yet Dante's soul was far too strong to be permanently overwhelmed. Gradually his philosophical reflections began to take definite shape. He felt the wants of his own life and of his country's life. He pierced down to the fundamental conditions of political and social welfare; and when human philosophy had begun to restore unity and concentration to his powers, then the sweet image of the pure maiden who had first waked his soul to love returned glorified and transfigured to guide him into the very presence of God. She was the symbol of Divine philosophy. She, and she only, could restore his shattered life to unity and strength, and the love she never gave him as a woman, she could give him as the protecting guardian of his life, as the vehicle of God's highest revelation.[8] * * * * * With his life thus strengthened and enriched, with a firm heart and a steady purpose, Dante Alighieri stood in the year 1300 at the helm of the State of Florence. And here accordingly it becomes necessary for us to dwell for a moment on some of the chief political forces with which he had to deal. The two great factions of the Guelfs and Ghibellines were tearing the very heart of Italy; and without going into any detail, we must try to point out the central ideas of each party. The Ghibellines, then, appear to have represented an aristocratic principle of order, constantly in danger of becoming oppressive, while the Guelfs represented a democratic principle of progress, ever verging upon chaotic and unbridled licence. The Ghibellines longed for a national unity, resting on centralisation; the Guelfs aimed at a local independence which tended to national disintegration. The Ghibellines, regarding the German Empire as the heir and representative of the Empire of Rome, and as the symbol of Italian unity, espoused the Emperor's cause against the Pope, declared the temporal power independent of the spiritual, and limited the sphere of the priests entirely to the latter. The Guelfs found in the political action of the Pope a counterpoise to the influence of the Emperor; the petty and intriguing spirit of the politics of the Vatican made its ruler the natural ally of the disintegrating Guelfs rather than the centralising Ghibellines, and accordingly the Guelfs ardently espoused the cause of the Pope's temporal power, and often sought in the royal house of France a further support against Germany. These broad lines, however, were constantly blurred and crossed by personal intrigue or ambition, by family jealousies, feuds, and rivalries, by unnatural alliances or by corruption and treachery. Now Dante was by family tradition a Guelf. Florence too was nominally the head quarters of Guelfism, and Dante had fought bravely in her battles against the Ghibellines. But the more he reflected upon the sources of the evils by which Italy was torn, the more profoundly he came to distrust the unprincipled meddling of the greedy princes of the house of France in Italian politics, and the more jealously did he watch the temporal power of the Pope. Perhaps the political opinions he afterwards held were not as yet fully consolidated, but his votes and proposals--which we read with a strange interest in the city archives of Florence nearly six hundred years after the ink has dried--show that in 1300 he was at any rate on the highway to the conclusions he ultimately reached. And we may therefore take this occasion of stating what they were. It appeared to Dante that Italy was sunk in moral, social, and political chaos, for want of a firm hand to repress the turbulent factions that rent her bosom; and that no hand except an Emperor's could be firm enough. The Empire of Rome was to him the most imposing and glorious spectacle offered by human history. God had guided Rome by miracles and signs to the dominion of the world that the world might be at peace. And parallel with this temporal Empire founded by Julius Cæsar, was the spiritual Empire of the Church, founded by Jesus Christ. Both alike were established by God for the guidance of mankind: to rebel against either was to rebel against God. Brutus and Cassius, who slew Julius Cæsar, the embodiment of the Empire, are placed by Dante in the same depth of Hell as Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus Christ, the incarnation of the Church.[9] These three had done what in them lay to reduce the world to civil and religious chaos, for they had compassed the death of the ideal representatives of civil and religious order. But both powers alike laid a mighty trust upon the human agents who administered them; and as the Empire and the Church were the sublimest and the holiest of ideal institutions, so a tyrannical Emperor and a corrupt or recreant Pope were amongst the foulest of sinners, to be rebuked and resisted with every power of body and soul. Dante could no more conceive of the spiritual life without the authoritative guidance of the all-present, all-pervading Church, than he could conceive of a well-ordered polity without the all-penetrating force of law. But it appeared to him as monstrous for the Pope to seek political influence and to use his spiritual powers for political ends as he would have judged it for the Emperor to exercise spiritual tyranny over the faith of Christians.[10] There can have been little in the political life of Florence at this time to attract one who held such views. But Dante of all men hated and despised weak shrinking from responsibility. If there is one feature in his stern character more awful than any other, it is his unutterable, withering contempt for those who lived without praise or blame, those wretches who never were alive. He saw them afterwards in the outer circle of Hell, mingled with that caitiff herd of angels who were not for God and yet were not for the rebels, but were only for themselves. Heaven drove them forth, Heaven's beauty not to stain, Nor would the deep Hell deign to have them there For any glory that the damned might gain! No fame of them survives upon the earth, Pity and Justice hold them in disdain, their cries of passion and of woe are ever whirled through the starless air, and their forgotten lot appears to them so base that they envy the very torments of the damned. 'Let us not speak of them,' says Virgil to Dante, 'but gaze and pass them by.'[11] So Dante shrank not from his task when called to public office, but laid his strong hand upon the helm of Florence. During a part of this year 1300, he filled the supreme magistracy, and at that very time the old disputes of Guelf and Ghibelline broke out in the city afresh under a thin disguise. We have seen that Dante's sympathies were now almost completely Ghibelline, but as the first Prior of Florence his duty was firmly to suppress all factious attempts to disturb the city's peace and introduce intestine discord. It was not by party broils that Italy would be restored to peace and harmony. He behaved with a more than Roman fortitude, for it is easier for a father to chastise a rebellious son than for a true friend to override the claims of friendship. Dante's dearest friend, Guido Cavalcanti, bound to him by every tie of sympathy and fellowship which could unite two men in common purposes and common hopes, was one of the leaders of the party with which Dante himself sympathised; and yet, for the good of his country and in obedience to his magisterial duty, he tore this friend from his side though not from his heart, and pronounced on him the sentence of banishment, the weight of which he must even then have known so well. It speaks to the eternal honour of Guido, as well as Dante, that this deed appears not to have thrown so much as a shadow upon the friendship of the two men.[12] Had Dante's successors in office dealt with firmness and integrity equal to his own, all might have been well; but a vacillating and equivocal policy soon opened the door to suspicions and recriminations, Florence ceased to steer her own course and permitted foreign interference with her affairs, while the Pope, with intentions that may have been good but with a policy which proved utterly disastrous, furthered the intervention of the French Prince Charles of Valois. It was a critical moment. An embassy to the Papal Court was essential, and a firm hand must meanwhile hold the reins at Florence. 'If I go, who shall stay? If I stay, who shall go?' Dante is reported to have said; and though the saying is probably apocryphal, yet it points out happily enough the true position of affairs. Dante was now no longer the chief magistrate of his city, but he was in fact, though not in name, the one man of Florence, the one man of Italy. Finally he resolved to go to Rome. But the blindness or corruption of the Papal Court was invincible; and while Dante was still toiling at his hopeless task, Charles of Valois entered Florence with his troops, soon to realise the worst suspicions of those who had opposed his intervention. Nominally a restorer of tranquillity, he stirred up all the worst and most lawless passions of the Florentines; and while Dante was serving his country at Rome, the unjust and cruel sentence of banishment was launched against him, his property was confiscated and seized, a few months afterwards he was sentenced to be burned to death should he ever fall into the power of the Florentines, and, not content with all this, his enemies heaped upon his name the foulest calumnies of embezzlement and malversation--calumnies which I suppose no creature from that hour to this has ever for one moment believed, but which could not fail to make the envenomed wound strike deeper into Dante's heart. So now he must leave 'all things most dear--this the first arrow shot from exile's bow,' in poverty and dependence his proud spirit must learn 'how salt a taste cleaves to a patron's bread, how hard a path to tread a patron's stair;' and, above all, his unsullied purity and patriotism must find itself forced into constant association or even alliance with selfish and personal ambition, or with tyranny, meanness, and duplicity.[13] How that great soul bore itself amid all these miseries, what it learnt from them, where it sought and found a refuge from them, we shall see when we take up again the broken thread which we must drop to-day. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: _Vita Nuova_, xliii.] [Footnote 2: _Vita Nuova_, i, ii.] [Footnote 3: _Vita Nuova_, iii.; _Inferno_, xv. 55 sqq. &c.] [Footnote 4: _Vita Nuova_, iii.] [Footnote 5: _Vita Nuova_, iv-xxx.] [Footnote 6: _Convito_, iv. 23.] [Footnote 7: _Convito_, ii. 13.] [Footnote 8: _Vita Nuova_, xxxi-xliii.; _Convito_, ii.; _Purgatorio_, xxx, xxxi.] [Footnote 9: _Inferno_, xxxiv. 55-67.] [Footnote 10: See the _De Monarchia_. Compare _Purgatorio_, xvi. 103-112; _Paradiso_, xviii. 124-136.] [Footnote 11: _Inferno_, iii. 22-51.] [Footnote 12: Compare _Inferno_, x. 52-72, 109-111.] [Footnote 13: _Paradiso_, xvii. 55-63.] II DANTE'S LIFE AND PRINCIPLES _II. IN EXILE_ A rapid sketch of the most decisive events and the leading motives of the life of Dante Alighieri has brought us to the eventful period of his Priorate in 1300 and his banishment in 1302. His unsuccessful efforts to carry out a firm and statesmanlike policy in Florence, with the wreck of his own fortunes consequent upon their failure, may be regarded as the occasion if not the cause of his conceiving his greatest work, the 'Divine Comedy.' Nineteen years elapsed between Dante's exile and his death, and both tradition and internal evidence indicate that the main strength of his life was poured during the whole of this period into the channels already laid down in its opening years. 'Forging on the anvil of incessant toil' the several parts of his great work, and 'welding them into imperishable symmetry,'[14] the might of his intellect and the passion of his heart grappled for nineteen years with the task of giving worthy utterance to his vast idea. Line by line, canto by canto, the victory was won. Dante had shown that his mother tongue could rise to loftier themes than Greek or Roman had ever touched, and had wrought out the fitting garb of a poem that stands alone in the literature of the world in the scope and sublimity of its conception. Barely to realise what it was that Dante attempted, wakes feelings in our hearts akin to awe. When we think of that work and of the man who, knowing what it was, deliberately set himself to do it, an appalling sense of the presence of overwhelming grandeur falls upon us, as when a great wall of rocky precipice rises sheer at our side, a thousand and yet a thousand feet towards heaven. Our heads swim as we gaze up to the sky-line of such a precipice, the ground seems to drop from beneath our feet, all our past and present becomes a dream, and our very hold of life seems to slip away from us. But the next moment a great exultation comes rushing upon our hearts, with quickened pulses and drawing deeper breath we rise to the sublimity of the scene around us, and our whole being is expanded and exalted by it. After holding converse with such grandeur our lives can never be so small again. And so it is when the meaning of Dante's Comedy breaks upon us. When we follow the poet step by step as he beats or pours his thought into language, when we note the firmness of his pace, the mastery with which he handles and commands his infinite theme, the unflinching directness, the godlike self-reliance, with which he lays bare the hearts of his fellow-men and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Eternal, when we gaze upon his finished work and the despair of Hell, the yearning of Purgatory, the peace of Heaven, sweep over our hearts, we are ready to whisper in awe-struck exultation: What immortal hand or eye Dared form thy fearful symmetry? The allegory with which the 'Divine Comedy' opens, shadows forth the meaning and the purpose of the whole poem. In interpreting it we may at first give prominence to its political signification, not because its main intention is certainly or probably political, but because we shall thus be enabled to pass in due order from the outer to the inner circle of the poet's beliefs and purposes. In the year 1300, then, Dante Alighieri found that he had wandered, he knew not how, from the true path of life, and was plunged into the deadly forest of political, social, and moral disorder which darkened with terrific shade the fair soil of Italy. Deep horror settled upon the recesses of his heart during the awful night, but at last he saw the fair light of the morning sun brightening the shoulders of a hill that stretched above: this was the peaceful land of moral and political order, which seemed to offer an escape from the bitterness of that ghastly forest. Gathering heart at this sweet sight, Dante set himself manfully to work, with the nether foot ever planted firmly on the soil, to scale that glorious height. But full soon his toilsome path would be disputed with him. The dire powers of Guelfism would not allow the restoration of peace and order to Italy. His first foe was the incurable factiousness and lightness of his own fair Florence. Like a lithe and speckled panther it glided before him to oppose his upward progress, and forced him once and again to turn back upon his steps towards that dread forest he had left. But though forced back, Dante could not lose hope. Might he not tame this wild but beauteous beast? Yes; he might have coped with the fickle, lustful, factious, envious but lovely Florence, had not haughty France rushed on him like a lion, at whose voice the air must tremble, had not lean and hungry Rome, laden with insatiable greed, skulked wolf-like in his path. It was the wolf above all that forced him back into the sunless depths of that forest of dismay, and dashed to the ground his hopes of gaining the fair height. When could he, when could his Italy, rise from this chaos and be at peace? Not till some great political Messiah should draw his sword. With no base love of pelf or thirst for land, but fed with wisdom, love, and virtue, he should exalt the humbled Italy and drive away her foes. Like a noble hound, he should chase the insatiable wolf of Roman greed from city to city back to the Hell from which it came.[15] Dante's hope in this political Messiah rose and fell, but never died in his heart. Now with the gospel of Messianic peace, now with the denunciation of Messianic judgment on his lips, he poured out his lofty enthusiasm in those apostolic and prophetic letters, some few of which survive amidst the wrecks of time as records of his changing moods and his unchanging purposes. Now one and now another of the Ghibelline leaders may have seemed to Dante from time to time to be the hero, the Messiah, for whom he waited. But again and yet again his hopes were crushed and blighted, and the panther, the lion, and the wolf still cut off the approach to that fair land. More than once the poet's hopes must have hung upon the fortunes of the mighty warrior Uguccione, whose prodigies of valour rivalled the fabled deeds of the knights of story. To this man Dante was bound by ties of closest friendship; to him he dedicated the Inferno, the first cantica of his Comedy, and he may possibly have been that hero ''twixt the two Feltros born'[16] to whom Dante first looked to slay the wolf of Rome. Far higher probably, and certainly far better grounded, were the poet's hopes when Henry VII. of Germany descended into Italy to bring order into her troubled states. To Dante, as we have seen, the Emperor was Emperor of Rome and not of Germany. He was Cæsar's successor, the natural representative of Italian unity, the Divinely appointed guardian of civil order. With what passionate yearning Dante looked across the Alps for a deliverer, how large a part of the woes of Italy he laid at the feet of Imperial neglect, may be gathered from many passages in his several works; but nowhere do these thoughts find stronger utterance than in the sixth canto of the Purgatory. The poet sees the shades of Virgil and the troubadour Sordello join in a loving embrace at the bare mention of the name of Mantua, where both of them were born. 'O Italy!' he cries, 'thou slave! thou hostelry of woe! Ship without helmsman, in the tempest rude! No queen of provinces, but house of shame! See how that gentle soul, e'en at the sweet sound of his country's name, was prompt to greet his fellow-citizen. Then see thy living sons, how one with other ever is at war, and whom the self-same wall and moat begird, gnaw at each other's lives. Search, wretched one, along thy sea-bound coasts, then inward turn to thine own breast, and see if any part of thee rejoice in peace. Of what avail Justinian's curb of law, with none to stride the saddle of command, except to shame thee more? Alas! ye priests, who should be at your prayers, leaving to Cæsar the high seat of rule, did ye read well the word of God to you, see ye not how the steed grows wild and fell by long exemption from the chastening spur, since that ye placed your hands upon the rein? O German Albert! who abandonest, wild and untamed, the steed thou should'st bestride, may the just sentence from the stars above fall on thy race in dire and open guise, that he who follows thee may see and fear. For, drawn by lust of conquest otherwhere, thou and thy sire, the garden of the empire have ye left a prey to desolation. Come, thou insensate one, and see the Montagues and Capulets, Monaldi, Philippeschi, for all whom the past has sadness or the future fear. Come, come, thou cruel one, and see oppression trampling on thy faithful ones, and heal their ills.... Come thou, and see thy Rome, who weeps for thee, a lonely widow crying day and night, "My Cæsar, wherefore hast thou left me thus?" Come, see how love here governs every heart! Or if our sorrows move thee not at all, blush for thine own fair fame.--Nay, let me say it: O Thou God Most High, Thou Who wast crucified for us on earth, are Thy just eyes turned otherwhither now? Or in the depth of counsel dost Thou work for some good end, clean cut off from our ken? For all Italia's lands are full of tyrants, and every hind--so he be factious--grows Marcellus-high.'[17] Such was the cry for deliverance which went up from Dante's heart to the Emperor. Picture his hopes when Henry VII. came with the blessing of the Pope, who had had more than his fill of French influence at last, to bring peace and order into Italy; picture the exultation with which he learnt alike from Henry's deeds and words that he was just, impartial, generous, and came not as a tyrant, not as a party leader, but as a firm and upright ruler to restore prosperity and peace; picture his indignation when the incurable factiousness and jealousies of the Italian cities, and of Florence most of all, thwarted the Emperor at every step; picture the bitterness of his grief when, after struggling nigh three years in vain, Henry fell sick, and died at Buonconvento. In Paradise the poet saw the place assigned to 'Henry's lofty soul--his who should come to make the crooked straight, ere Italy was ready for his hand;' but the dream of his throne on earth was broken for ever.[18] Henry died in 1313. This blow was followed by the fall of Uguccione when he seemed almost on the point of realising some of Dante's dearest hopes. The poet and the warrior alike found refuge at Verona now, with Can Grande della Scala, to whom Dante dedicated the third cantica of his Comedy, the Paradise.[19] Did the exile's hopes revive again at the Court of Verona? Did the gallant and generous young soldier whose gracious and delicate hospitality called out such warm affection from his heart,[20] seem worthy to accomplish that great mission in which Uguccione and Henry had failed? It is more than probable that such thoughts found room in Dante's sorrow-laden heart. And yet we cannot but suppose that while his certainty remained unshaken that in God's good time the deliverer would come, yet the hopes which centred in any single man must have had less and less assurance in them as disappointment after disappointment came. Be this as it may, near the close of his life Dante was still able to make Beatrice testify of him in the courts of Heaven: 'Church militant has not a son stronger in hope than he. God knows it.'[21] Simple as these words are, yet by him who has scanned Dante's features and pondered on his life, they may well be numbered amongst those moving and strengthening human utterances that ring like a trumpet through the ages and call the soul to arms. But were Dante's hopes all concentrated on the advent of that political Messiah who was not to come in truth till our own day? Had it been so, the 'Divine Comedy' would never have been born. When Dante realised his own helplessness in the struggle against the panther of Florence, the lion of France, and the wolf of Rome, when he saw that to reorganise his country and remodel the social and political conditions of life would need the strong hand and the keen sword of some great hero raised by God, he also saw that for himself another way was opened, an escape from that wild forest into which his feet had strayed, an escape which it must be the task of his life to point out to others, without which the very work of the hero for whom he looked would be in vain. The deadly forest represented moral as well as political confusion; the sunlit mountain, moral as well as political order; and the beasts that cut off the ascent, moral as well as political foes to human progress. From this moral chaos there was deliverance for every faithful soul, despite the lion and the wolf; and though the noble hound came not to chase the foul beasts back to Hell, yet was Dante led from the forest gloom even to the light of Heaven. And how was he delivered? By Divine grace he saw Hell and Purgatory and Heaven--so was he delivered. He saw the souls of men stripped of every disguise, he saw their secret deeds of good or ill laid bare. He saw Popes and Emperors, ancient heroes and modern sages, the rich, the valiant, the noble, the fair of face, the sweet of voice; and no longer dazzled, no longer overawed, he saw them as they were, he saw their deeds, he saw the fruits of them. So was he delivered from the entanglements and perplexities, from the delusions and seductions of the world, so were his feet set upon the rock, so did he learn to sift the true from the false, to rise above all things base, and set his soul at peace, even when sorrow was gnawing his heart to death. He, while yet clothed in flesh and blood, went amongst the souls of the departed, 'heard the despairing shrieks of spirits long immersed in woe, who wept each one the second death; saw suffering souls contented in the flames, for each one looked to reach the realms of bliss, though long should be the time,' and lastly he saw the souls in Heaven, and gazed upon the very light of God.[22] All this he saw and heard under the guidance of human and Divine philosophy, symbolised, or rather concentrated and personified, in Virgil and Beatrice. Of Virgil, and the unique position assigned to him in the Middle Ages, it is impossible here to speak at length. Almost from the first publication of the Æneid, and down to the time when the revival of learning reopened the treasures of Greek literature to Western Europe, Virgil reigned in the Latin countries supreme and unchallenged over the domain of poetry and scholarship. Within two generations of his own lifetime, altars were raised to him, by enthusiastic disciples, as to a deity. When Christianity spread, his supposed prediction of Christ in one of the Eclogues endowed him with the character of a prophet; and a magic efficacy had already been attributed to verses taken from his works. Throughout the Middle Ages, his fame still grew as the supreme arbiter in every field of literature, and as the repositary of more than human knowledge, while fantastic legends clustered round his name as the great magician and necromancer. To Dante there must also have been a special fascination in the Imperial scope and sympathies of the Æneid; for Virgil is pre-eminently the poet of the Roman Empire. But we must not pause to follow out this subject here. Suffice it that Dante felt for Virgil a reverence so deep, an admiration so boundless, and an affection so glowing, that he became to him the very type of human wisdom and excellence, the first agent of his rescue from the maze of passion and error in which his life had been entangled. But Beatrice, the loved and lost, was the symbol and the channel of a higher wisdom, a diviner grace. She it was round whose sweet memory gathered the noblest purposes and truest wisdom of the poet's life. If ever he suffered the intensity of his devotion to truth and virtue for a moment to relax; if ever, as he passed amongst luxurious courts, some siren voice soothed his cares with a moment of unworthy forgetfulness and ignoble ease; if ever he suffered meaner cares or projects to draw him aside so much as in thought from his great mission, then it was Beatrice's glorified image that recalled him in tears of bitter shame and penitence to the path of pain, of effort, and of glory. It was her love that had rescued him from the fatal path; Virgil was but her agent and emissary, and his mission was complete when he had led him to her. Human wisdom and virtue could guide him through Hell and Purgatory, could show him the misery of sin, and the need of purifying pain and fire, but it was only in Beatrice's presence that he could _feel_ the utter hatefulness and shame of an unworthy life, could _feel_ the blessedness of Heaven.[23] Under the guidance of Virgil and Beatrice, then, Dante had seen Hell and Purgatory and Heaven. This had snatched his soul from death, had taught him, even in the midst of the moral and political chaos of his age, how to live and after what to strive. Could he show others what he himself had seen? Could he save them, as he was saved, from the meanness, from the blindness, from the delusions of the life they led? He could. Though it should be the toil of long and painful years, yet in the passionate conviction of his own experience he felt the power in him of making real to others what was so intensely real to him. But what did this involve? The truth if wholesome was yet hard. He had dear and honoured friends whose lives had been stained by unrepented sin, and whose souls he had seen in Hell. Was he to cry aloud to all the world that these loved ones were amongst the damned, instead of tenderly hiding their infirmities? Again, he was poor and an exile, he had lost 'all things most dear,' and was dependent for his very bread on the grace and favour of the great; yet if he told the world what he had seen, a storm of resentful hatred would crash upon him from every region of Italy. How would proud dames and lords brook to be told of their dead associates in sin and shame cursing their names from the very depths of Hell, and looking for their speedy advent there? How would pope and cardinal and monarch brook to be told by the powerless exile what he had heard from souls in Heaven, in Purgatory, and in Hell? E'en let them brook it as they might. His cry should be like the tempest that sweeps down upon the loftiest forest trees, but leaves the brushwood undisturbed. The mightiest in the land should hear his voice, and henceforth none should think that loftiness of place or birth could shield the criminal. He would tell in utter truth what he had seen. He knew that power was in him to brand the infamous with infamy that none could wash away, to rescue the fair memory of those the world had wrongfully condemned, to say what none but he dare say, in verse which none but he could forge, and bring all those who hearkened through Hell and Purgatory into Heaven.[24] To deliver this message was the work of his life, the end to which all his studies were directed, from the time of his exile to that of his death. Hence his studious labours came to have a representative and vicarious character in his mind. He was proudly conscious that he lived and worked for mankind, and that his toil deserved the grateful recognition of his city and his country. This trait of his character comes out with striking force in the noble letter which he wrote in answer to the proffered permission to return to his beloved Florence, but upon disgraceful conditions which he could not accept. The offer came when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb. Henry VII. was dead, Uguccione had lost his power. All hope of the exile's returning in triumph seemed at an end. Then came the offer of a pardon and recall, for which he had longed with all the passionate intensity of his nature. And yet it was but a mockery. It was a custom in Florence upon the Day of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of the city, to release certain malefactors from the public gaols on their performing set acts of contrition; and a decree was passed that all the political exiles might return to their home on St. John's Day in 1317 if they would pay a sum of money, walk in procession, with tapers in their hands and with other tokens of guilt and penitence, to the church, and there offer themselves as ransomed malefactors to the saint. Many of the exiles accepted the terms, but Dante's proud and indignant refusal shows us a spirit unbroken by disappointment and disaster, scorning to purchase ease by degradation. 'Is this,' he cries to the friend who communicated to him the conditions upon which he might return, 'is this the glorious recall by which Dante Alighieri is summoned back to his country after well-nigh fifteen years of exile? Is this what innocence well known to all, is this what the heavy toil of unbroken study, has deserved? Far be it from him who walks as her familiar with Philosophy to stoop to the base grovelling of a soul of clay and suffer himself thus to be treated like a vile malefactor. Far be it from the preacher of justice, when suffering outrage, to pay the acknowledgment of fair desert to the outrageous. 'Not by this path can I return. But let a way be found that hurts not Dante's honour and fair fame, and I will tread it with no tardy feet. If no such road leads back to Florence, then will I never enter Florence more. What! can I not gaze, wherever I may be, upon the spectacle of sun and stars? Can I not ponder on the sweetest truths in any region under heaven, but I must first make myself base and vile before the people of the State of Florence?'[25] Such was the answer of Dante Alighieri to that cruel insult which makes our cheeks glow even now with indignation. Such was the temper of the man who had seen Hell and Purgatory and Heaven, and who shrank not from the utterance of all that he had seen. * * * * * Dante must now have been engaged in writing the Paradise. Amongst the sufferings and burdens which were fast drawing him to the grave, amongst the agonies of indignation, of regret, of hope, of disappointment which still wracked his soul, the deep peace of God had come upon him; beneath a storm of passion at which our hearts quail was a calm of trustful self-surrender which no earthly power could disturb; for the harmonies of Paradise swelled in the poet's heart and sought for utterance in these last years. But though his spirit was thus rapt to Heaven, he never lost his hold upon the earth; never disdained to toil as best he might for the immediate instruction or well-being of his kind. More than once his eloquence and skill enabled him to render signal service to his protectors in conducting delicate negotiations, and at the same time to further that cause of Italian unity which was ever near his heart. Nor did the progress of his great work, the Comedy, withhold him from a varied subsidiary activity as a poet, a moralist, and a student of language and science. One characteristic example of this by-work must suffice. In the last year but one of his life when he must have been meditating the last, perhaps the sublimest, cantos of the Paradise, when he might well have been excused if he had ceased to concern himself with any of the lower grades of truth, he heard a certain question of physics discussed and re-discussed, and never decided because of the specious but sophistical arguments which were allowed to veil it in doubt. The question was whether some portions of the sea are or are not at a higher level than some portions of the land; and Dante, 'nursed from his boyhood in the love of truth,' as he says, 'could not endure to leave the question unresolved, and determined to demonstrate the facts and to refute the arguments alleged against them.'[26] Accordingly he defended his thesis on a Sunday in one of the churches of Verona under the presidency of Can Grande. This essay is a model of close reasoning and sound scientific method, and the average nineteenth century reader, with the average contempt for fourteenth century science, would find much to reflect upon should he read and understand it. The vague and inconclusive style of reasoning against which Dante contends is still rampant everywhere, though its forms have changed; while the firm grasp of scientific method and the incisive reasoning of Dante himself are still the exception in spite of all our modern training in research. Thus Dante was engaged to the last upon the whole field of human thought. Such was the scope and power of his mind that he could embrace at the same moment the very opposite poles of speculation; and such was his passion for truth that, when gazing upon the very presence of God, he could not bear to leave men in error when he could set them right, though it were but as to the level of the land and sea. * * * * * But we must hasten to a close. Let us turn from the consideration of Dante's work to a picture of personal character drawn by his own hand. It is his ideal of a life inspired by that 'gentleness' for which, since the days of chivalry, we have had no precise equivalent in language, and which is itself too rare in every age. The soul that this celestial grace adorns In secret holds it not; For from the first, when she the body weds, She shows it, until death: Gentle, obedient, and alive to shame, Is seen in her first age, Adding a comely beauty to the frame, With all accomplishments: In youth is temperate and resolute, Replete with love and praise of courtesy, Placing in loyalty her sole delight: And in declining age Is prudent, just, and for her bounty known; And joys within herself To listen and discourse for others' good: Then in the fourth remaining part of life To God is re-espoused, Contemplating the end that draws a-nigh, And blesseth all the seasons that are past: --Reflect now, how the many are deceived![27] Cherishing such an ideal, Dante wandered from court to court of Italy, finding here and there a heart of gold, but for the most part moving amongst those to whom grace and purity and justice were but names. Can we wonder that sometimes the lonely exile felt as if his own sorrow-laden heart were the sole refuge upon earth of love and temperance? Three noble dames, he tells us--noble in themselves but in nought else, for their garments were tattered, their feet unshod, their hair dishevelled, and their faces stained with tears--came and flung themselves at the portal of his heart, for they knew that Love was there. Moved with deep pity, Love came forth to ask them of their state. They were Rectitude, Temperance, and Generosity, once honoured by the world, now driven out in want and shame, and they came there for refuge in their woe. Then Love, with moistened eyes, bade them lift up their heads. If they were driven begging through the world, it was for men to weep and wail whose lives had fallen in such evil times; but not for them, hewn from the eternal rock--it was not for them to grieve. A race of men would surely rise at last whose hearts would turn to them again. And hearing thus how exiles great as these were grieved and comforted, the lonely poet thought his banishment his glory. Yet when he looked for his sweet home and found it not, the agony that could not break his spirit fast destroyed his flesh, and he knew that death had laid the key upon his bosom.[28] When this sublime and touching poem was composed we have no means of knowing, but it can hardly have been long before the end. When that end came, Dante can barely have completed his great life work, he can barely have written the last lines of the 'Divine Comedy.' He had been on an unsuccessful mission in the service of his last protector, Guido da Polenta of Ravenna. On his return he was seized with a fatal illness, and died at Ravenna in 1321, at the age of fifty-six. Who can grudge him his rest? As we read the four tracts of the 'Convito,' which were to have been the first of fourteen, but must now remain alone, as we are brought to a sudden stand at the abrupt termination of his unfinished work on the dialects and poetry of Italy,[29] as we ponder on the unexhausted treasures that still lay in the soul of him who could write as Dante wrote even to the end, we can hardly suppress a sigh to think that our loss purchased his rest so soon. But his great work was done; he had told his vision, that men might go with him to Hell, to Purgatory, and to Heaven, and be saved from all things base. Then his weary head was laid down in peace, and his exile was at an end. 'That fair fold in which, a lamb, he lay'[30] was never opened to him again, but he went home, and the blessings of the pure in heart and strong in love go with him. * * * * * The thoughts with which we turn from the contemplation of Dante's life and work find utterance in the lines of Michael Angelo. 'The works of Dante were unrecognised, and his high purpose, by the ungrateful folk whose blessing rests on all--except the just. Yet would his fate were mine! For his drear exile, with his virtue linked, glad would I change the fairest state on earth.' FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 14: See Symonds, p. 186.] [Footnote 15: See _Inferno_, i. 1-111.] [Footnote 16: _Inferno_, i. 105.] [Footnote 17: _Purgatorio_, vi. 76-126.] [Footnote 18: See especially Epistolæ v-vii.; _Paradiso_, xxx. 133-138.] [Footnote 19: See Epistola xi.] [Footnote 20: _Paradiso_, xvii. 70-93.] [Footnote 21: _Ibid._ xxv. 52-54.] [Footnote 22: _Inferno_, i. 112-129.] [Footnote 23: _Inferno_, i. 121-123, ii. 52-142; _Purgatorio_, xxx. sqq.; _Paradiso_, passim.] [Footnote 24: _Paradiso_, xvii. 103-142.] [Footnote 25: Epistola x.] [Footnote 26: _Quæstio de Aqua et Terra_, § 1.] [Footnote 27: Canzone xvi., 'Le dolci rime,' st. vii. See _Convito_, trat. iv. Translation slightly altered from Lyell.] [Footnote 28: Canzone xix., 'Tre donne.'] [Footnote 29: _De Vulgari Eloquio._] [Footnote 30: _Paradiso_, xxv. 5.] III HELL The first cantica of the 'Divine Comedy'--the Inferno or Hell--is the best known of all Dante's works in prose or verse, in Latin or Italian; and though students of Dante may sometimes regret this fact, yet no one can be at a moment's loss to understand it. For the attributes of heart and brain requisite for some kind of appreciation of the Inferno are by many degrees more common than those to which the other works of Dante appeal. It is easy to imagine a reader who has not even begun truly to understand either the poet or the poem nevertheless rendering a sincere tribute of admiration to the colossal force of the Inferno, and feeling the weird spell of fascination and horror ever tightening its grasp on him as he descends from circle to circle of that starless realm. There is no mystery in the inveterate tendency to regard Dante as pre-eminently the poet of Hell. Nor is it a new phenomenon. Tradition tells of the women who shrank aside as Dante passed them by, and said one to another, shuddering as they spoke, 'See how his black hair crisped in the fire as he passed through Hell!' But no tradition tells of awe-struck passers-by who noted that the stains had been wiped from that clear brow in Purgatory, that the gleam of that pure and dauntless eye had been kindled in Heaven. The machinery of the Inferno, then, is moderately familiar to almost all. Dante, lost in the darksome forest, scared from the sunlit heights by the wild beasts that guard the mountain side, meets the shade of Virgil, sent to rescue him by Beatrice, and suffered by Omnipotence to leave for a time his abode in the limbo of the unbaptised, on this mission of redeeming love. Virgil guides Dante through the open gate of Hell, down through circle after circle of contracting span and increasing misery and sin, down to the central depth where the arch-rebel Satan champs in his triple jaws the arch-traitors against Church and State, Judas Iscariot, and Brutus and Cassius.[31] Through all these circles Dante passes under Virgil's guidance. He sees and minutely describes the varying tortures apportioned to the varying guilt of the damned, and converses with the souls of many illustrious dead in torment. And is this the poem that has enthralled and still enthrals so many a heart? Are we to look for the strengthening, purifying, and uplifting of our lives, are we to look for the very soul of poetry in an almost unbroken series of descriptions, unequalled in their terrible vividness, of ghastly tortures, interspersed with tales of shame, of guilt, of misery? Even so. And we shall not look in vain. But let us listen first to Dante's own account of the subject-matter of his poem. Five words of his are better than a volume of the commentators. 'The subject of the whole work, literally accepted,' he says, 'is the state of souls after death.... But if the work is taken allegorically the subject is MAN, as rendering himself liable, by good or ill desert in the exercise of his free will, to rewarding or punishing justice.'[32] According to Dante, then, the real subject of the Inferno is 'Man, as rendered liable, by ill desert in the exercise of his free will, to punishing justice.' Surely a subject fraught with unutterable sadness, compassed by impenetrable mystery, but one which in the hands of a prophet may well be made to yield the bread of life; a subject fitly introduced by those few pregnant words, 'The day was going, and the dusky air gave respite to the animals that are on earth from all their toils; and I alone girt me in solitude to bear the strain both of the journey and the piteous sight, which memory that errs not shall retrace.'[33] * * * * * Now if this be the true subject of the poem, it follows that all those physical horrors of which it seems almost to consist must be strictly subordinate to something else, must be part of the machinery or means by which the end of the poet is reached, but in no way the end itself. If the subject of the poem is a moral one, then the descriptions of physical torment and horror must never even for a moment overbalance or overwhelm the true 'motive' of the work, must never even for a moment so crush or deaden the feelings as to render them incapable of moral impressions, must never in a single instance leave a prevailingly physical impression upon the mind. And it is just herein that the transcendent power of the Inferno is displayed. Horrors which rise and ever rise in intensity till they culminate in some of the ghastliest scenes ever conceived by mortal brain are from first to last held under absolute control, are forced to support and intensify moral conceptions which in less mighty hands they would have numbed and deadened. Oh, the pity of this sin, the unutterable, indelible pity of it! Its wail can never be stilled in our hearts while thought and memory remain. The misery of some forms of sin, the foul shame of others, the vileness, the hatefulness, the hideous deformity of others yet--this, and not horror at the punishment of sin, is what Dante stamps and brands upon our hearts as we descend with him towards the central depths, stamps and brands upon our hearts till the pity, the loathing, the horror can endure no more;--then in the very depth of Hell, at the core of the Universe, with one mighty strain that leaves us well-nigh spent, we turn upon that central point, and, leaving Hell beneath our feet, ascend by the narrow path at the antipodes. With the horror and the burden of the starless land far off, we lift up our eyes again to see the stars, and our souls are ready for the purifying sufferings of Purgatory. * * * * * Sometimes the tortures of the damned are a mere physical translation, so to speak, of their crimes. Thus the ruthless disseminators of strife and dissension who have torn asunder those who belonged one to another, those who had no proper existence apart from one another, are in their turn hewn and cleft by the avenging sword; and ever as their bodies reunite and their wounds are healed, the fierce blow falls again. Amongst them Dante sees the great troubadour Bertram de Born, who fostered the rebellion of the sons of our own king Henry II. In that he made father and son each other's enemy, his head is severed from his trunk, his brain from its own root.[34] In other cases a transparent metaphor or allegory dictates the form of punishment; as when the hypocrites crawl in utter weariness under the crushing weight of leaden garments, shaped like monkish cloaks and cowls, and all covered with shining gold outside.[35] Or when the flatterers and sycophants wallow in filth which fitly symbolises their foul life on earth.[36] It is probable that some special significance and appropriateness might be traced in almost all the forms of punishment in Dante's Hell, though it is not always obvious. But one thing at least is obvious: the uniform congruousness of the impression which the physical and moral factors of each description combine to produce. In fact, the Inferno is an account of 'man, as deserving ill by the exercise of his free will,' in which all the external surroundings are brought into precise accord with the central conception. The tortures are only the background; and as in the picture of a great artist, whether we can trace any special significance and appropriateness in the background or not, we always feel that it supports the true subject of the picture and never overpowers it, so it is here. Man as misusing his free will. This is the real subject of the Inferno. All else is accessory and subordinate. But if this be so, we should expect to find an endless variety and gradation, alike of guilt and punishment, as we pass through the circles of Hell. And so we do. At one moment indignation and reproof are all swallowed up in pity, and the suffering of the exiled soul only serves to quicken an infinite compassion in our hearts, a compassion not so much for the punishment of sin as for sin itself with its woeful loss and waste of the blessings and the holiness of life. At another moment we are brought face to face with a wretch whose tortures only serve to throw his vileness into sharper relief; and when we think of him and of his deeds, of him and of his victims, we can understand those awful words of Virgil's when Dante weeps, 'Art thou too like the other fools? The death of pity is true pity here.'[37] Infinite pity would indeed embrace the most abandoned, but it is only weak and misdirected pity that wakes or slumbers at the dictate of mere suffering. And as there is infinite variety of guilt and woe, so is there infinite variety of character in Dante's Hell. Though the poet condemns with sternest impartiality all who have died in unrepented sin, yet he recognises and honours the moral distinctions amongst them. What a difference, for instance, between the wild blaspheming robber Vanni Fucci,[38] and the defiant Capaneus,[39] a prototype of Milton's Satan, the one incited by the bestial rage of reckless self-abandonment, the other by the proud self-reliance of a spirit that eternity cannot break--alike in their defiance of the Almighty, but how widely severed in the sources whence it springs. Look again where Jason strides. The wrongs he did Medea and Hypsipyle have condemned him to the fierce lash under which his base companions shriek and fly; but he, still kingly in his mien, without a tear or cry bears his eternal pain.[40] See Farinata, the great Florentine--in his ever burning tomb he stands erect and proud, 'as holding Hell in great disdain;' tortured less by the flames than by the thought that the faction he opposed is now triumphant in his city; proud, even in Hell, to remember how once he stood alone between his country and destruction.[41] See again where Pietro delle Vigne, in the ghastly forest of suicides, longs with a passionate longing that his fidelity at that time when he 'held both the keys of the great Frederick's heart' should be vindicated upon earth from the unjust calumnies that drove him to self-slaughter.[42] And see where statesmen and soldiers of Florence, themselves condemned for foul and unrepented sin, still love the city in which they lived, still long to hear some good of her. As the flakes of fire fall 'like snow upon a windless day' on their defenceless bodies, see with what dismay they gaze into one another's eyes when Dante brings ill news to them of Florence.[43] In a word, the souls in Hell are what they were on earth, no better and no worse. This is the key-note to the comprehension of the poem. No change has taken place; none are made rebels to God's will, and none are brought into submission to it, by their punishment; but all are as they were. Even amongst the vilest there is only the rejection of a thin disguise, no real increase of shamelessness. Many souls desire to escape notice and to conceal their crimes, just as they would have done on earth; many condemn their evil deeds and are ashamed of them, just as they would have been on earth; but there is no change of character, no infusion of a new spirit either for good or ill; with all their variety and complexity of character, the unrepentant sinners wake in Hell as they would wake on earth our mingled pity and horror, our mingled loathing and admiration. Man as misusing his free will, in all the scope and variety of the infinite theme, is the subject of the poem. And this brings us to another consideration: the eternity of Dante's Hell. Those who know no other line of Dante, know the last verse of the inscription upon the gate of Hell: 'All hope relinquish, ye that enter here.' The whole inscription is as follows: 'Through me the way lies to the doleful city; through me the way lies to eternal pain; through me the way lies 'mongst the people lost. 'Twas justice moved my Lofty Maker; Divine Power made me, Wisdom Supreme and Primal Love. Before me were no things created, save things eternal; and I, too, last eternal. All hope relinquish, ye that enter here.'[44] The gates of Hell reared by the Primal Love! If we believe in the eternity of sin and evil, the eternity of suffering and punishment follows of necessity. To be able to acquiesce in the one, but to shrink from the thought of the other, is sheer weakness. The eternity and hopelessness of Dante's Hell are the necessary corollaries of the impenitence of his sinners. To his mind wisdom and love cannot exist without justice, and justice demands that eternal ill-desert shall reap eternal woe. But how could one who so well knew what an eternal Hell of sin and suffering meant, believe it to be founded on eternal love? Why did not Dante's heart in the very strength of that eternal love rebel against the hideous belief in eternal sin and punishment? I cannot answer the question I have asked. Dante believed in the Church, believed in the theology she taught, and could not have been what he was had he not done so. Had he rejected any of the cardinal beliefs of the Christianity of his age and rebelled against the Church, he might have been the herald of future reformations, but he could never have been the index and interpreter to remotest generations of that mediæval Catholic religion of which his poem is the very soul. Meanwhile note this, that if ever man realised the awful mystery and contradiction involved in the conception of a good God condemning the virtuous heathen to eternal exile, that man was Dante. If ever heart of man was weighed down beneath the load of pity for the damned, that heart was Dante's. The virtuous heathen he places in the first round of Hell; here 'no plaint is to be heard except of sighs, which make the eternal air to tremble;' here, with no other torture than the death of hope without the death of longing, they live in neither joy nor sorrow, eternal exiles from the realms of bliss.[45] Dante, as we shall see hereafter, longed with a passionate thirsty longing to know how the Divine justice could thus condemn the innocent. But his thirst was never slaked. It was and remained an utter mystery to him; and there are few passages of deeper pathos than those in which he remembers that his beloved and honoured guide and master, even Virgil, the very type of human wisdom and excellence, was himself amongst these outcasts.[46] Again and again, as we pass with Dante through the circles of Hell, we feel that his yearning pity for the lost, racking his very soul and flinging him senseless to the ground for misery, shows an awakening spirit which could not long exist in human hearts without teaching them that God's redeeming pity is greater and more patient than their own. So, too, when Francesca and Paolo, touched by Dante's pitying sympathy, exclaim, 'Oh, thou gracious being, if we were dear to God, how would we pray for thee!'[47] who can help feeling that Dante was not far from the thought that all souls are dear to God? Meanwhile, how strong that faith which could lift up all this weight of mystery and woe, and still believe in the Highest Wisdom and the Primal Love! Only the man who knew the holiness of human life to the full as well as he knew its infamy, only the man who had seen Purgatory and Heaven, and who had actually felt the love of God, could know that with all its mystery and misery the universe was made not only by the Divine Power, but by the Supreme Wisdom and the Primal Love, could weave this Trinity of Power, Wisdom, Love, into the Unity of the all-sustaining God, who made both Heaven and Hell. And we still have to face the same insoluble mystery. The darker shade is indeed lifted from the picture upon which we gaze; we have no eternal Hell, no eternity of sin, to reckon with; but to us too comes the question, 'Can the world with all its sin and misery be built indeed upon the Primal Love?' And our answer too must be the answer not of knowledge but of faith. Only by making ourselves God's fellow workers till we _feel_ that the Divine Power and the Primal Love are one, can we gain a faith that will sustain the mystery it cannot solve. Alas! how often our weaker faith fails in its lighter task, how often do we speak of sin and misery as though they were discoveries of yesterday that had brought new trials to our faith, unknown before; how often do we feel it hard to say even of earth what Dante in the might of his unshaken faith could say of Hell itself--that it is made by Power, Wisdom, Love! * * * * * But perhaps we have dwelt too long already on this topic, and in any case we must now hasten on. Dante's Hell, as we have seen, represents sinful and impenitent humanity with all its fitting surroundings and accessories, cut off from everything that can distract the attention, confuse the moral impression, or alleviate its appalling strength. And as the magic power of his words, with the absolute sincerity and clearness of his own conceptions, forces us to realise the details of his vision as if we had trodden every step of the way with him, this result follows amongst others: that we realise, with a vividness that can never again grow dim, an existence without any one of those sweet surroundings and embellishments of human life which seem the fit support and reflection of purity and love. We have been in a land where none of the fair sounds or sights of nature have access, no flowers, no stars, no light, and if there are streams and hills there they are hideously transformed into instruments and emblems not of beauty but of horror. We are made to realise all this, and to feel that it is absolutely and eternally fitting as the abode of sin and of impenitence. And when once this association has been stamped upon our minds, the beauty and the sweetness of the world in which we live gain a new meaning for us. They become the standing protest of all that is round us against every selfish, every sinful thought or deed; the standing appeal to us to bring our souls into sweet harmony with their surroundings, since God in His mercy brings not their surroundings into ghastly harmony with them. When we have been with the poor wretch, deep down in Hell, who gasps in his burning fever for 'the rivulets that from the green slopes of Casentino drop down into the Arno, freshening the soft, cool channels, where they glide,'[48] and have realised that in that land there are not and ought not to be the cooling streams and verdant slopes of earth; we can never again enjoy the sweetness and the peace of nature without our hearts being consciously or unconsciously purified, without every evil thing in our lives feeling the rebuke. When we have known what it is to be in a starless land, and have felt how strange and incongruous the fair sights of Heaven would be, have felt that they would have no place or meaning there, have felt that cheerless gloom alone befits the souls enveloped there, then when we leave the dreary realms, and once more gaze upon the heavens by night and day, they are more to us than they have ever been before, they are indeed what Dante so often calls them, using the language of the falconers, the _lure_ by which God summons back our wayward souls from vain and mean pursuits. Look, again, upon this fearful picture. Dante and Virgil come to a black and muddy lake in which the passionate tear and smite one another in bestial rage; and all over its surface are bubbles rising up. They come from the cries of the morose and sullen ones 'who are fixed in the slime at the bottom of the lake. They cry: "Gloomy we were in the sweet air that the sun gladdens, bearing in our hearts the smoke of sullenness; now we are gloomy here in the black slime"--such is the strain that gurgles in their throats, but cannot find full utterance.'[49] Who that has seen those bubbles rise upon the lake can ever suffer himself again to cherish sullenness within his heart without feeling at the very instant the rebuke of the 'sweet air that the sun gladdens,' and thinking of that gurgling strain of misery? * * * * * Another of the lessons taught by the Inferno is, that no plea, however moving, can avail the sinner, or take away the sinfulness of sin, that no position can place him above punishment, that no authority can shield him from it. The guilty love of Francesca and Paolo, so strong, so deathless in that it was love, has sunk them to Hell instead of raising them to Heaven in that it was guilty. Stronger to make them one than Hell to sever them, it is powerless to redeem the sin to which it has allied itself, and its tenderness has but swelled the eternal anguish of those whom it still joins together, because it has suffered the sanctuary of life, which love is set to guard, to be polluted and betrayed. Sung in those strains of deathless tenderness and pity where 'tears seem to drop from the very words,' the story of this guilty love reveals the fatalest of all mischoice, and tells us that no passion, however wild in its intensity, however innocent in its beginnings, however unpremeditated in its lawless outburst, however overmastering in its pleas, however loyal to itself in time and in eternity, may dare to raise itself above the laws of God and man, or claim immunity from its wretched consequences for those who are its slaves. How infinite the pity and the waste, how irreparable the loss, when the love that might have been an ornament to Heaven, adds to the unmeasured guilt and anguish of Hell a wail of more piercing sorrow than rings through all its lower depths! Nor could any height of place claim exemption from the moral law. Dante was a Catholic, and his reverence for the Papal Chair was deep. But against the faithless Popes he cherished a fiery indignation proportioned to his high estimate of the sacred office they abused. In one of the most fearful passages of the Inferno he describes, in terms that gain a terrible significance from one of the forms of criminal execution practised in his day, how he stood by a round hole in one of the circles of Hell, in which Pope Nicholas III. was thrust head foremost--stood like the confessor hearing the assassin's final words, and heard the guilty story of Pope Nicholas.[50] It is characteristic of Dante that he tells us here, as if quite incidentally, that these holes were about the size of the baptising stands or fonts in the Church of San Giovanni, 'one of which,' says he, 'I broke not many years ago to save one who was drowning in it. Let this suffice to disabuse all men.' Evidently he had been taxed with sacrilege for saving the life of the drowning child at the expense of the sacred vessel, and it can hardly be an accident that he recalls this circumstance in the Hell of the sacrilegious Popes and Churchmen. These men, who had despised their sacred trust and turned it to basest trafficking, were the representatives of that hard system of soulless officialism that would pollute the holiest functions of the Church, while reverencing with superstitious scruple their outward symbols and instruments. And if the Papal office could not rescue the sinner that held it, neither could the Papal authority shield the sins of others. It is said that Catholics have not the keeping of their own consciences. Dante at least thought they had. In the Hell of fraudulent counsellors, wrapped in a sheet of eternal flame one comes to him and cries, 'Grudge not to stay and speak with me a while. Behold, I grudge it not, although I burn.' It is Guido da Montefeltro, whose fame in council and in war had gone forth to the ends of the earth. All wiles and covert ways he knew, and there had ever been more of the fox than of the lion in him. But when he saw himself arriving at that age when every man should lower sails and gather in his ropes, then did he repent of all that once had pleased him, and girding him with the cord of St. Francis he became a monk. Alas! his penitence would have availed him well but for the Prince of the new Pharisees, Pope Boniface VIII., who was waging war with Christians that should have been his friends, hard by the Lateran. 'He demanded counsel of me,' continues Guido, 'but I kept silence, for his words seemed drunken. Then he said to me, "Let not thy heart misdoubt: henceforth do I absolve thee, but do thou teach me so to act that I may cast Prenestina to the ground. Heaven I can shut and open, as thou knowest." ... Then the weighty arguments impelled me to think silence worse than speech; and so I said, "Father, since thou dost cleanse me from that guilt wherein I now must fall, long promise and performance short will make thee triumph in thy lofty seat." Then when I died St. Francis came for me, but one of the black cherubim said to him: "Do me no wrong, nor take thou him away. He must come down amongst my menials, e'en for the fraudulent advice he gave, since when I have kept close upon his hair. He who repents not cannot be absolved, nor can one will the same thing he repents, the contradiction not permitting it." Ah wretched me! how did I shudder then, for he laid hold of me, and with the cry, "Haply thou knew'st not I was a logician?" bore me to judgment.'[51] Who can fail to recognise the utter truth of Dante's teaching here? What can stand between a man's own conscience and his duty? Though the very symbol and mouthpiece of the collective wisdom and piety of Christendom should hold the shield of authority before the culprit, yet it cannot ward off the judgment for one single deed done in violation of personal moral conviction. When once we have realised the meaning of this awful passage, how can we ever urge again as an excuse for unfaithfulness to our own consciences, that the assurance of those we loved and reverenced overcame our scruples? Here as everywhere Dante strips sin of every specious and distracting circumstance, and shows it to us where it ought to be--in Hell. Contrast with the scene we have just looked upon the companion picture from the Purgatory; where Buonconte di Montefeltro tells how he fled on foot from the battle-field of Campaldino, his throat pierced with a mortal wound ensanguining the earth. Where Archiano falls into the Arno there darkness came upon him, and he fell crossing his arms upon his breast and calling on the name of Mary with his last breath. 'Then,' he continues, 'God's angel came and took me, and Hell's angel shrieked, "O thou of Heaven, wherefore dost thou rob me? Thou bear'st with thee the eternal part of him, all for one wretched tear which saves it from me. But with the other part of him I'll deal in other fashion."' Upon which the infuriated demon swells the torrent with rain, sweeps the warrior's body from the bank, dashes away the hateful cross into which its arms are folded, and in impotent rage rolls it along the river bed and buries it in slime so that men never see it more; but the soul is meanwhile saved.[52] * * * * * Here we must pause. I have made no attempt to give a systematic account of the Inferno, still less to select the finest passages from it. I have only tried to interpret some of the leading thoughts which run through it, some of the deep lessons which it can hardly fail to teach the reader. Like all great works, the Inferno should be studied both in detail and as a whole in order to be rightly understood; and when we understand it, even partially, when we have been with Dante down through all the circles to that central lake of ice in which all humanity seems frozen out of the base traitors who showed no humanity on earth, when we have faced the icy breath of the eternal air winnowed by Satan's wings, and have been numbed to every thought and feeling except one--one which has been burned and frozen into our hearts through all those rounds of shame and woe--the thought of the pity, the misery, the hatefulness of sin; then, but then only, we shall be ready to understand the Purgatory, shall know something of what the last lines of the Inferno meant to Dante: 'We mounted up, he first and second I, until through a round opening I saw some of those beauteous things that Heaven bears; and thence we issued forth again to see the stars.'[53] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 31: Compare pp. 21-23.] [Footnote 32: Epistola xi. § 8.] [Footnote 33: _Inferno_, ii. 1-6.] [Footnote 34: _Inferno_, xxviii.] [Footnote 35: _Ibid._ xxiii. 58 sqq.] [Footnote 36: _Ibid._ xviii. 103-136.] [Footnote 37: _Inferno_, xx. 27, 28: 'Qui vive la pietà quand' è ben morta.' The double force of pietà, 'pi[e]ty,' is lost in the translation.] [Footnote 38: _Ibid._ xxiv. 112-xxv. 9 &c.] [Footnote 39: _Ibid._ xiv. 43-66.] [Footnote 40: _Inferno_, xviii. 82-96.] [Footnote 41: _Ibid._ x. 22-93.] [Footnote 42: _Ibid._ xiii. 55-78.] [Footnote 43: _Inferno_, xvi. 64-85.] [Footnote 44: _Inferno_, iii. 1-9.] [Footnote 45: _Inferno_, iv. 23-45, 84.] [Footnote 46: Compare e.g. _Purgatorio_, iii. 34-45, xxii. 67-73.] [Footnote 47: _Inferno_, v. 88, 91, 92.] [Footnote 48: _Inferno_, xxx. 64-67.] [Footnote 49: _Inferno_, vii. 117-126.] [Footnote 50: _Inferno_, xix.] [Footnote 51: _Inferno_, xxvii.] [Footnote 52: _Purgatorio_, v. 85-129.] [Footnote 53: _Inferno_, xxxiv. 136-139.] IV PURGATORY 'Leaving behind her that so cruel sea, the bark of poesy now spreads her sails to speed o'er happier waters; and I sing of that mid kingdom where the soul of man is freed from stain, till worthy to ascend to Heaven.'[54] Such are the opening words of Dante's Purgatory, and they drop like balm upon our seared and wounded hearts when we have escaped from the dread abode of eternal ill-desert. 'Man, atoning for the misuse of his free will,' may be regarded as the subject of this poem. And it brings it in a sense nearer to us than either the Hell or the Paradise. Perhaps it ought not to surprise us that the Purgatory has not by any means taken such a hold of the general imagination as the Hell, and that its machinery and incidents are therefore far less widely known; for the power of the Purgatory does not overwhelm us like that of the Inferno whether we understand or no. There are passages indeed in the poem which take the reader by storm and force themselves upon his memory, but as a whole it must be felt in its deeper spiritual meaning to be felt at all. Its gentleness is ultimately as strong as the relentless might of the Hell, but it works more slowly and takes time to sink into our hearts and diffuse its influence there. Nor again need we be surprised that the inner circle of Dante students often concentrate their fullest attention and admiration upon the Paradise, for it is the Paradise in which the poet is most absolutely unique and unapproached, and in it his admirers rightly find the supreme expression of his spirit. And yet there is much in the Purgatory that seems to render it peculiarly fitted to support our spiritual life and help us in our daily conflict, much which we might reasonably have expected would give its images and allegories a permanent place in the devout heart of Christendom; for, as already hinted, it is nearer to us in our struggles and imperfections, in our aspirations and our conscious unworthiness, nearer to us in our love of purity and our knowledge that our own hearts are stained with sin, in our desire for the fullness of God's light, and our knowledge that we are not yet worthy or ready to receive it; it is nearer to us in its piercing appeals, driven home to the moral experience of every day and hour, nearer to us in its mingled longing and resignation, in its mingled consolations and sufferings, nearer to us in its deep unrest of unattained but unrelinquished ideals, than either the Hell in its ghastly harmony of impenitence and suffering, or the Paradise in its ineffable fruition. Moreover, the allegorical appropriateness of the various punishments is far more obvious and simple, and the spiritual significance of the whole machinery clearer and more direct, in the Purgatory than in the Hell. In a word, the Purgatory is more obviously though not more truly, more directly though not more profoundly, moral and spiritual in its purport than the Hell. Dante addresses some of the sufferers on the fifth circle of Purgatory as 'chosen ones of God whose pains are soothed by justice and by hope.'[55] And in truth the spirits in Purgatory are already utterly separated from their sins in heart and purpose, are already chosen ones of God. They are deeply sensible of the justice of their punishment, and they are fed by the certain hope that at last, when purifying pain has done its work, their past sins will no longer separate them from God, they will not only be parted in sympathy and emotion from their own sinful past, but will be so cut off from it as no longer to feel it as their own, no longer to recognise it as a part of themselves, no longer to be weighed down by it. Then they will rise away from it into God's presence. 'Repenting and forgiving,' says one of them, 'we passed from life, at peace with God, who pierces our hearts with longing to see Him.'[56] The souls in Purgatory, then, are already transformed by the thirst for the living water, already filled with the longing to see God, already at one with Him in will, already gladdened by the hope of entering into full communion with Him. But they do not wish to go into His presence yet. The sense of shame and the sense of justice forbid it. They feel that the unexpiated stains of former sin still cleave to them, making them unfit for Heaven, and they love the purifying torments which are burning those stains away. In the topmost circle of Purgatory, amongst the fierce flames from which Dante would have hurled himself into molten glass for coolness, he sees souls whose cheeks flush at the memory of their sin with a shame that adds a burning to the burning flame; whilst others, clustering at the edge that they may speak with him, yet take good heed to keep within the flame, lest for one moment they should have respite from the fierce pain which is purging away their sins and drawing them nearer to their desire.[57] Sweet hymns of praise and supplication are the fitting solace of this purifying pain; and as Dante passes through the first of the narrow ascents that lead from circle to circle of Purgatory, he may well contrast this place of torment with the one that he has left, may well exclaim, 'Ah me! how diverse are these straits from those of Hell!'[58] Penitence, humility, and peace--though not the highest or the fullest peace--are the key-notes of the Purgatory. * * * * * When Dante issued from the deadly shades of Hell, his cheeks all stained with tears, his eyes and heart heavy with woe, his whole frame spent with weariness and agony, the sweet blue heavens stretched above him, and his eyes, that for so long had gazed on nought but horror, rested in their peaceful depths; Venus, the morning star, brightened the east, and the Southern Cross poured its splendour over the heavens; daybreak was at hand, and the poets were at the foot of the mount of Purgatory. The sea rippled against the mountain, and reeds, the emblems of humility, ever yielding to the wave that swept them, clustered round the shore. Dante and Virgil went down to the margin, and there the living poet bathed away the stains and tears of Hell. Ere long the waves were skimmed by a light bark, a radiant angel standing in the prow, bearing the souls of the redeemed, who must yet be purified, singing the psalm, 'When Israel came out of Egypt.' Amongst the shades thus borne to the mount of purification was Dante's friend Casella, the singer and musician. How often had his voice lulled all Dante's cares to sleep, and 'quieted all his desires,' and now it seemed as though he were come to bring his troubled heart to peace, to rest him in his utter weariness of body and of soul. So, at his entreaty, Casella raised his voice, and all the shades gathered entranced around him as he sang a noble canzone composed by Dante himself in years gone by.[59] The sweet sound never ceased to echo in the poet's memory--not even the ineffable harmonies of Paradise drowned those first strains of peace that soothed him after his awful toil. But Purgatory is no place of rest, and Casella's song was rudely interrupted by the guardian of the place, who cried aloud, 'How now, ye sluggard souls! What negligence and what delay is here? Speed to the mountain! Rid you of the crust that lets not God be manifest to you!' To purge away our sins is not to rest; and no longing for repose must tempt us to delay even for a moment.[60] Dante draws no flattering picture of the ease of self-purification; Hell itself hardly gives us such a sense of utter weariness as the first ascent of the mount of Purgatory. Virgil is on in front, and Dante cries out, altogether spent, 'Oh, my sweet father, turn thou and behold how I am left alone unless thou stay;' but Virgil still urges him on, and after a time comforts him with the assurance that though the mountain is so hard to scale at first, yet the higher a man climbs the easier the ascent becomes, till at last it is so sweet and easy to him that he rises without effort as a boat drops down the stream: then he may know that the end of his long journey has come, that the weight of sin is cast off, that his soul obeys its own pure nature, and rises unencumbered to its God.[61] The lower portion of the mountain forms a kind of ante-Purgatory, where the souls in weary exile wait for admission to the purifying pain for which they long. Here those who have delayed their penitence till the end of life atone for their wilful alienation by an equal term of forced delay ere they may enter the blessed suffering of Purgatory. Here those who have lived in contumacy against the Church expiate their offences by a thirty-fold exile in the ante-Purgatory; but as we saw in Hell that Papal absolution will not shield the sinful soul, so we find in Purgatory that the Papal malediction, the thunders of excommunication itself, cannot permanently part the repentant soul from the forgiving God.[62] When this first exile is at an end, and the lower mountain scaled, the gate of the true Purgatory is reached. Three steps lead up to it, 'the first of marble white, so polished and so smooth that in it man beholds him as he is.' This represents that transparent simplicity and sincerity of purpose that, throwing off all self-delusion, sees itself as it is, and is the first step towards true penitence. 'The second step, darker than purpled black, of rough and calcined stone, all rent through length and breadth,' represents the contrite heart of true affliction for past sin. 'The third and crowning mass methought was porphyry, and flamed like the red blood fresh spouting from the vein.' This is the glowing love which crowns the work of penitence, and gives the earnest of a new and purer life. Above these steps an angel stands to whom Peter gave the keys--the silver key of knowledge and the golden key of authority--bidding him open to the penitent, and err rather towards freedom than towards over-sternness.[63] Within the gate of Purgatory rise the seven terraces where sin is purged. On the three lower ledges man atones for that perverse and ill-directed love which seeks another's ill--for love of some sort is the one sole motive of all action, good or bad.[64] In the lowest circle the pride that rejoices in its own superiority, and therefore in the inferiority of others, is purged and expiated. 'As to support a ceiling or a roof,' says Dante, 'one sees a figure bracket-wise with knees bent up against it bosom, till the imaged strain begets real misery in him who sees, so I beheld these shades when close I scanned them. True it is that less or greater burdens cramped each one or less or more, yet he whose mien had most of patience, wailing seemed to say, "I can no more!"'[65] In the second circle the blind sin of envy is expiated. Here the eyelids of the envious are ruthlessly pierced and closed by the stitch of an iron wire, and through the horrid suture gush forth tears of penitence that bathe the sinner's cheeks. 'Here shall my eyes be closed,' says Dante, half in shame at seeing those who saw him not, 'here shall my eyes be closed, though open now--but not for long. Far more I dread the pain of those below; for even now methinks I bend beneath the load.'[66] In the third circle the passionate wend their way through a blinding, stinging smoke, darker than Hell; but all are one in heart, and join in sweet accord of strain and measure singing the 'Agnus Dei.' In these three lower circles is expiated the perverse love that, in pride, in envy, or in passion, seeks another's ill. Round the fourth or central ledge hurry in ceaseless flight the laggards whose feeble love of God, though not perverse, was yet inadequate. Then on the succeeding circles are punished those whose sin was excessive and ill-regulated love of earthly things. There in the fifth round the avaricious and the prodigal, who bent their thoughts alike to the gross things of earth and lost all power of good, lie with their faces in the dust and their backs turned to heaven, pinioned and helpless. In the sixth circle the gluttonous in lean and ghastly hunger gaze from hollow eyes 'like rings without the gems,' upon the fruit they may not taste.[67] And lastly, in the seventh circle the sin of inchastity is purged, in flames as fierce as its own reckless passion. Through all of these circles to which its life on earth has rendered it liable, the soul must pass, in pain but not in misery; at perfect peace with God, loving the pain that makes it fit to rise into His presence, longing for that more perfect union, but not desiring it as yet because still knowing itself unworthy. At last the moment comes when this shrinking from God's presence, this clinging to the pain of Purgatory, has its end. The desire to rise up surprises the repentant soul, and that desire is itself the proof that the punishment is over, that the soul is ripe for Heaven. Then, as it ascends, the whole mountain shakes from base to summit with the mighty cry of 'Gloria in excelsis!' raised by every soul in Purgatory as the ransomed and emancipated spirit seeks its home.[68] Through all these circles Dante is led by Virgil, and here as in Hell he meets and converses with spirits of the departed. He displays the same unrivalled power and the same relentless use of it, the same passionate indignation, the same yearning pity, which take the soul captive in the earlier poem. In the description of Corso Donati's charger dragging his mangled body towards the gorge of Hell in ever fiercer flight; in the indignant protest against the factious spirit of Italy and the passionate appeal to the Empire; in the description of the impotent rage of the fiend who is cheated by 'one wretched tear' of the soul of Buonconte; in the scathing denunciations of the cities of the Arno;[69] in these and in many another passage the poet of the Purgatory shows that he is still the poet of the Hell; but it is rather to the richness of the new thoughts and feelings than to the unabated vigour and passion of the old ones, that we naturally direct our attention in speaking of the Purgatory. And these we have by no means exhausted. When Dante first entered the gate of Purgatory he heard 'voices mingled with sweet strains' chanting the Te Deum, and they raised in his heart such images as when we hear voices singing to the organ and 'partly catch and partly miss the words.'[70] And this sweet music, only to find its fullest and distinctest utterance in the Paradise, pervades almost the whole of the Purgatory, filling it with a reposeful longing that prepares for the fruition it does not give. There is a tender and touching simplicity in the records of their earthly lives which the gentle souls in Purgatory give to our poet. Take as an example, the story of Pope Adrian V., whom Dante finds amongst the avaricious: 'A month and little more I felt the weight with which the Papal mantle presses on his shoulders who would keep it from the mire. All other burdens seem like feathers to it. Ah me! but late was my conversion; yet when I became Rome's Shepherd then I saw the hollow cozenage of life; for my heart found no repose in that high dignity, and yonder life on earth gave it no room to aim yet higher; wherefore the love of this life rose within me. Till then was I a wretched soul severed from God, enslaved to avarice, for which, thou seest, I now bear the pain.'[71] Most touching too are the entreaties of the souls in Purgatory for the prayers of those on earth, or their confession that they have already been lifted up by them. 'Tell my Giovanna to cry for me where the innocent are heard,' says Nino to Dante;[72] and when the poet meets his friend Forese, who had been dead but five years, in the highest circle but one of Purgatory, whereas he would have expected him still to be in exile at the mountain's base, he asks him to explain the reason why he is there, and Forese answers, 'It is my Nella's broken sobs that have brought me so soon to drink the sweet wormwood of torment. Her devout prayers and sighs have drawn me from the place of lingering, and freed me from the lower circles. My little widow, whom I greatly loved, is all the dearer and more pleasing to God because her goodness stands alone amid surrounding vice.'[73] Surely it is a deep and holy truth, under whatever varying forms succeeding ages may embody it, that the faithful love of a pure soul does more than any other earthly power to hasten the passage of the penitent through Purgatory. When under the load of self-reproach and shame that weighs down our souls, we dare not look up to Heaven, dare not look into our own hearts, dare not meet God, then the faithful love of a pure soul can raise us up and teach us not to despair of ourselves, can lift us on the wings of its prayer, can waft us on the breath of its sobs, swiftly through the purifying anguish into the blissful presence of God. * * * * * A feature of special beauty in the Purgatory is formed by the allegorical or typical sculptures on the wall and floor of some of the terraces, by the voices of warning or encouragement that sweep round the mountain, and by the visions that from time to time visit the poet himself. Let one of these visions suffice. Dante is about to enter the circles in which the inordinate love of earthly things, with all vain and vicious indulgence, is punished. 'In dream there came to me,' he says, 'a woman with a stuttering tongue, and with distorted eyes, all twisted on her feet, maimed in her hands, and sallow in her hue. I gazed at her, and as the sun comforts the chilled limbs by the night oppressed, so did my look give ease unto her speech, and straightway righted her in every limb, and with love's colours touched her haggard face. And when her speech was liberated thus, she sang so sweetly it were dire pain to wrest attention from her. "I," she sang, "am that sweet siren who lead astray the sailors in mid sea, so full am I of sweetness to the ear. 'Twas I that drew Ulysses from his way with longing for my song; and he on whom the custom of my voice has grown, full rarely leaves me, so do I content him."' In the end this false siren is exposed in all her foulness, and Dante turns from her in loathing.[74] Throughout Purgatory Dante is still led and instructed by Virgil. I think there is nothing in the whole Comedy so pathetic as the passages in which the fate of Virgil, to be cut off for ever from the light of God, is contrasted with the hope of the souls in Purgatory. The sweetness and beauty of Virgil's character as conceived by Dante grow steadily upon us throughout this poem, until they make the contemplation of his fate and the patient sadness with which he speaks of it more heartrending than anything that we have heard or seen in Hell. After this we hardly need to hear from Dante the direct expression he subsequently gives of his passionate thirst to know the meaning of so mysterious a decree as that which barred Heaven against the unbaptised. In Purgatory, Virgil and Dante meet the emancipated soul of the Roman poet Statius, freed at last after many centuries of purifying pain, and ready now to ascend to Heaven. Virgil asks him how he became a Christian, and Statius refers him to his own words in one of the Eclogues, regarded in those days as containing a prophecy of Christ. 'Thou,' says Statius, 'didst first guide me to Parnassus to drink in its grottoes, and afterwards thou first didst light me unto God. When thou didst sing, "The season is renewed, justice returns, and the first age of man, and a new progeny descends from Heaven," thou wast as one who, marching through the darkness of the night, carries the light behind him, aiding not himself, but teaching those who follow him the way. Through thee was I a poet, and through thee a Christian.' Not a shade of envy, not a thought of resentment or rebellion, passes over Virgil's heart as he hears that while saving others he could not save himself.[75] But now, without dwelling further on the episodes of the poem, we must hasten to consider the most beautiful and profoundest of its closing scenes. Under Virgil's guidance Dante had traversed all the successive circles of the mount of Purgatory. He stood at its summit, in the earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden which Eve had lost. There amid fairest sights and sounds he was to meet the glorified Beatrice, and she was to be his guide in Heaven as Virgil had been his guide in Hell and Purgatory. In any degree to understand what follows we must try to realise the intimate blending of lofty abstract conceptions and passionate personal emotions and reminiscences in Dante's thoughts of Beatrice. This sweet and gentle type of womanhood, round whose earthly life the genius and devotion of Dante have twined a wreath of the tenderest poetry, the most romantic love, that ever rose from heart of man, had been to him in life and death the vehicle and messenger of God's highest grace. Round her memory clustered all the noblest purposes and purest motives of his life, and in her spirit seemed to be reflected the divinest truth, the loftiest wisdom, that the human soul could comprehend. And so, making her objectively and in the scheme of the universe what she had really been and was to him subjectively, he came to regard her as the symbol of Divine philosophy as Virgil was the symbol of human virtue and wisdom. Touched by the glow of an ideal love, Dante had reached a deeper knowledge, a fuller grace, than the wisdom of this world could teach or gain. The doctors of the Church, the sweet singers, the mighty heroes, the profound philosophers, who had instructed and supported him, had none of them touched his life so deeply, had none of them led him so far into the secret place of truth, had none of them brought him so near to God, as that sweet child, that lovely maid, that pure woman, who had given him his first and noblest ideal. Now to Dante and to his age it was far from unnatural to erect concrete human beings into abstract types or personifications. Leah and Rachel are the active and the contemplative life respectively. Virgil, we have seen, is human philosophy. Cato of Utica represents the triumph over the carnal nature and the passions. And it is not only the Old Testament and classical antiquity that furnish these types. The celebrated Countess Matilda, who lived only about two centuries before Dante himself, becomes in his poem, according to the generally received interpretation, one of the attributes of God personified. And so Beatrice became the personification of that heavenly wisdom, that true knowledge of God, of which she had been the vehicle to Dante. But to the poet and to the age in which he lived, it was impossible to separate this heavenly wisdom in its simple, spiritual essence, from the form which its exposition had received at the hands of the great teachers of the Church. To them true spiritual wisdom, personal experience and knowledge of God, were inseparable from _theology_. The two united in the conception of Divine philosophy. Thus by a strange but intelligible gradation Dante blended in his conception of Beatrice two elements which seem to us the very extreme of incompatibility. She is in the first place the personification of scholastic theology, with all its subtle intricacy of pedantic method; she is in the second place the maiden to whom Dante sang his songs of love in Florence, and whose early death he wept disconsolate. And in the closing scenes of the Purgatory these two conceptions are more intimately blended, perhaps, than anywhere else in Dante's writings. After wandering, as it were, in the forest of a bewildered life, the poet is led through Hell and Purgatory until he stands face to face at last with his own purest and loftiest ideal; and the fierceness of his own self-accusation when thus confronted with Beatrice he expresses under the form of reproaches which he lays upon _her_ lips, but which we must retranslate into the reproachful utterances of his own tortured heart, if we are to retain our gentle thoughts of Beatrice. We need not dwell even for a moment on the gorgeous pageantry with which Dante introduces and surrounds Beatrice. Suffice it to say that she comes in a mystic car, which represents the Church, surrounded by saints and angels. No sooner does Dante see her, although closely veiled, than the might of the old passion sweeps upon him, and like a child that flees in terror to its mother, so does he turn to Virgil with the cry: 'Not one drop of blood but trembles in my veins! I recognise the tokens of the ancient flame.' But Virgil is gone. Dante has no refuge from his own offended and reproachful ideal. As he bursts into lamentations at the loss of Virgil's companionship, Beatrice sternly calls him back: 'Dante! weep not that Virgil has gone from thee. Thou hast a deeper wound for which to weep.' As one who speaks, but holds back words more burning than he utters, so she stood. A clear stream flowed between her and Dante, and as she began to renew her reproaches he cast down his eyes in shame upon the water;--but there he saw himself! The angels sang a plaintive psalm, and Dante knew that they were pleading for him more clearly than if they had used directer words. Then the agony of shame and penitence that Beatrice's reproof had frozen in his bosom, as when the icy north wind freezes the snow amid the forests of the Apennine, was melted by the angels' plea for him as snow by the breezes of the south, and burst from him in a convulsion of sobs and tears. How was it possible that he should have gone so far astray, have been so false to the promise and the purpose of his early life, have abused his own natural gifts and the superadded grace of heaven? How was it possible that he should have let all the richness of his life run wild? That after Beatrice had for a time sustained him and led him in the true path with her sweet eyes, he should have turned away from her in Heaven whom he had so loved on earth? How could he have followed the false semblances of good that never hold their word? His visions and his dreams of the ideal he was deserting had not sufficed, and so deep had he sunk that nothing short of visiting the region of the damned could save him from perdition. Why had he deserted his first purposes? What obstacle had baffled or appalled him? What new charm had those lower things of earth obtained to draw him to them? 'The false enticements of the present things,' he sobbed, 'had led his feet aside, soon as her countenance was hid.' But should not the decay of that fair form have been itself the means of weaning him from things of earth, that he might ne'er again be cheated by their beauty or drawn aside by them from the pursuit of heavenly wisdom and of heavenly love? When the fairest of all earthly things was mouldering in the dust, should he not have freed himself from the entanglements of the less beauteous things remaining? To all these reproaches, urged by Beatrice, Dante had no reply. With eyes rooted to the ground, filled with unutterable shame, like a child repentant and confessing, longing to throw himself at his mother's feet, but afraid to meet her glance while her lips still utter the reproof, so Dante stood. From time to time a few broken words, which needed the eye more than the ear to interpret them, dropped from his lips like shafts from a bow that breaks with excess of strain as the arrow is delivered. At last Beatrice commanded him to look up. The wind uproots the oak tree with less resistance than Dante felt ere he could turn his downcast face to hers; but when he saw her, transcending her former self more than her former self transcended others, his agony of self-reproach and penitence was more than he could bear, and he fell senseless to the ground.[76] When he awoke he was already plunged in the waters of Lethe, which with the companion stream of Eunoë would wash from his memory the shame and misery of past unfaithfulness, would enable him, no longer crushed by self-reproach, to ascend with the divine wisdom and purity of his own ideal into the higher realms. And here the Purgatory ends, the Paradise begins. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 54: _Purgatorio_, i. 1-6.] [Footnote 55: _Purgatorio_, xix. 76, 77.] [Footnote 56: _Ibid._ v. 55-57.] [Footnote 57: _Purgatorio_, xxvi. 13-15, 81; xxvii. 49-51.] [Footnote 58: _Purgatorio_, xii. 112, 113.] [Footnote 59: Canzone xv. 'Amor, che nella mente.' See also _Convito_, trat. iii.] [Footnote 60: _Purgatorio_, i. ii.] [Footnote 61: _Ibid._ iv. 37-95.] [Footnote 62: _Purgatorio_, iii. 112-145, iv. 127-135.] [Footnote 63: _Purgatorio_, ix. 76-129.] [Footnote 64: For the general scheme of Purgatory, see _Purgatorio_, xvii. 91-139.] [Footnote 65: _Purgatorio_, x. 130-139.] [Footnote 66: _Ibid._ xiii. 73, 74, 133-138.] [Footnote 67: _Purgatorio_, xxiii. 31.] [Footnote 68: _Purgatorio_, xx. 124-151, xxi. 34-78.] [Footnote 69: _Purgatorio_, v. 85-129, vi. 76-151, xiv. 16-72, xxiv. 82-87.] [Footnote 70: _Ibid._ ix. 139-145.] [Footnote 71: _Purgatorio_, xix. 103-114.] [Footnote 72: _Purgatorio_, viii. 71, 72.] [Footnote 73: _Ibid._ xxiii. 85-93.] [Footnote 74: _Purgatorio_, xix. 7-33.] [Footnote 75: _Purgatorio_, xxii. 55-73.] [Footnote 76: _Purgatorio_, xxx. 22--xxxi. 90.] V HEAVEN 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. In the Paradise, however, the allegorical and abstract element in the conception of Beatrice is generally the ruling one. She is the impersonation of Divine Philosophy, under whose guidance the spiritual discernment is so quickened and the moral perceptions so purified, that the intellect can thread its way through subtlest intricacies of casuistry and theology, and where the intellect fails the eye of faith still sees. Even in this allegorical character Beatrice is a veritable personality, as are Lucia, the Divine Grace, and the other attributes or agents of the Deity, who appear in the Comedy as personal beings with personal affections and feelings, though at the same time representing abstract ideas. Thus Beatrice, as Divine Philosophy impersonated, is at once an abstraction and a personality. 'The eyes of Philosophy,' says Dante elsewhere, 'are her demonstrations, the smile of Philosophy her persuasions.'[80] And this mystic significance must never be lost sight of when we read of Beatrice's eyes kindling with an ever brighter glow and her smile beaming through them with a diviner sweetness as she ascends through heaven after heaven ever nearer to the presence of God. The demonstrations of Divine Philosophy become more piercing, more joyous, more triumphant, her persuasions more soul-subduing and entrancing, as the spirit draws nearer to its source. But though we shall never understand the Paradise unless we perceive the allegorical significance and appropriateness not only of the general conception of Beatrice, but also of many details in Dante's descriptions of her, yet we should be equally far from the truth if we imagined her a mere allegory. She is a glorified and as it were divine _personality_, and watches over and guides her pupil with the tenderness and love of a gentle and patient mother. The poet constantly likens himself to a wayward, a delirious, or a frightened child, as he flies for refuge to his blessed guide's maternal care.[81] Again, they are in the eighth heaven, and Beatrice knows that a glorious manifestation of saints and angels is soon to be vouchsafed to Dante. Listen to his description of her as she stands waiting: 'E'en as a bird amongst the leaves she loves, brooding upon the nest of her sweet young throughout the night wherein all things are hid, foreruns the time to see their loved aspect and find them food, wherein her heavy toil is sweet to her, there on the open spray, waiting with yearning longing for the sun, fixedly gazing till the morn shall rise; so did she stand erect, her eyes intent on the meridian. And seeing her suspended in such longing I became as one who yearns for what he knows not, and who rests in hope.'[82] * * * * * Under Beatrice's guidance, then, Dante ascends through the nine heavens into the empyrean heights of Paradise. Here in reality are the souls of all the blessed, rejoicing in the immediate presence and light of God,[83] and here Dante sees them in the glorified forms which they will wear after the resurrection. But in order to bring home to his human understanding the varied grades of merit and beatitude in Paradise, he meets or appears to meet the souls of the departed in the successive heavens through which he passes, sweeping with the spheres in wider and ever wider arc, as he rises towards the eternal rest by which all other things are moved. It is in these successive heavens that Dante converses with the souls of the blessed. In the lower spheres they appear to him in a kind of faint bodily form like the reflections cast by glass unsilvered; but in the higher spheres they are like gems of glowing light, like stars that blaze into sight or fade away in the depths of the sky; and these living topaz and ruby lights, like the morning stars that sing together in Job, break into strains of ineffable praise and joy as they glow upon their way in rhythmic measure both of voice and movement. Thus in the fourth Heaven, the Heaven of the Sun, Dante meets the souls of the great doctors of the Church. Thomas Aquinas is there, and Albertus Magnus and the Venerable Bede and many more. A circle of these glorious lights is shining round Dante and Beatrice as Aquinas tells the poet who they were on earth. 'Then like the horologue, that summons us, what hour the spouse of God rises to sing her matins to her spouse, to win his love, wherein each part urges and draws its fellow, making a tinkling sound of so sweet note that the well-ordered spirit swells with love: so did I see the glorious wheel revolve, and render voice to voice in melody and sweetness such as ne'er could noted be save where joy stretches to eternity. 'Oh, senseless care of mortals! Ah, how false the thoughts that urge thee in thy downward flight! One was pursuing law, and medicine one, another hunting after priesthood, and a fourth would rule by force or fraud; one toiled in robbery, and one in civil business, and a third was moiling in the pleasures of the flesh all surfeit-weary, and a fourth surrendered him to sloth. And I the while, released from all these things, thus gloriously with Beatrice was received in Heaven.'[84] When Beatrice fixes her eyes--remember their allegorical significance as the demonstrations of Divine philosophy--upon the light of God, and Dante gazes upon them, then quick as thought and without sense of motion, the two arise into a higher heaven, like the arrow that finds its mark while yet the bow-string trembles; and Dante knows by the kindling beauty that glows in his guardian's eyes that they are nearer to the presence of God and are sweeping Heaven in a wider arc. The spirits in the higher heavens see God with clearer vision, and therefore love Him with more burning love, and rejoice with a fuller joy in His presence than those in the lower spheres. Yet these too rest in perfect peace and oneness with God's will. In the Heaven of the Moon, for instance, the lowest of all, Dante meets Piccarda. She was the sister of Forese, whom we saw in the highest circle but one of Purgatory, raised so far by his widowed Nella's prayers. When Dante recognises her amongst her companions, in her transfigured beauty, he says, '"But tell me, ye whose blessedness is here, do ye desire a more lofty place, to see more and to be more loved by God?" She with those other shades first gently smiled, then answered me so joyous that she seemed to glow with love's first flame, "Brother, the power of love so lulls our will, it makes us long for nought but what we have, and feel no other thirst. If we should wish to be exalted more, our wish would be discordant with His will who here assigned us; and that may not be within these spheres, as thou thyself mayst see, knowing that here we needs must dwell in love, and thinking what love is. Nay, 'tis inherent in this blessedness to hold ourselves within the will Divine, whereby our wills are one. That we should be thus rank by rank throughout this realm ordained, rejoices all the realm e'en as its King, who draws our wills in His. And His decree is our peace. It is that sea to which all things are moved which it creates and all that nature forges." Then was it clear to me how every where in Heaven is Paradise, e'en though the grace distil not in one mode from that Chief Good.'[85] So again in the second heaven, the Heaven of Mercury, the soul of Justinian tells the poet how that sphere is assigned to them whose lofty aims on earth were in some measure fed by love of fame and glory rather than inspired by the true love of God. Hence they are in this lower sphere. Yet part of their very joy consists in measuring the exact accord between the merits and the blessedness of the beatified. 'As diverse voices make sweet melody,' he continues, 'so do the diverse ranks of our life render sweet harmony amidst these spheres.'[86] Indeed, one of the marvels of this marvellous poem is the extreme variety of character and even of incident which we find in Heaven as well as in Hell and Purgatory. In each of the three poems there is one key-note to which we are ever brought back, but in each there is infinite variety and delicacy of individual delineation too. The saints are no more uniform and characterless in their blessedness than are the unrepentant sinners in their tortures or the repentant in their contented pain. Nor must we suppose that the Paradise is an unbroken succession of descriptions of heavenly bliss. Here too, as in Hell and Purgatory, the things of earth are from time to time discussed by Dante and the spirits that he meets. Here too the glow of a lofty indignation flushes the very spheres of Heaven. Thus Peter cries against Pope Boniface VIII: 'He who usurps upon the earth my place, _my place_, MY PLACE, which in the presence of the Son of God is vacant now, has made the city of my sepulture a sink of blood and filth, at which the rebel Satan, who erst fell from Heaven, rejoices down in Hell.' And at this the whole Heaven glows with red, and Beatrice's cheek flushes as at a tale of shame.[87] Dante is still the same. The sluggish self-indulgence of the monks, the reckless and selfish ambition of the factious nobles and rulers, the venal infamy of the Court of Rome, cannot be banished from his mind even by the beatific visions of Heaven. Nay, the very contrast gives a depth of indignant sadness to the denunciations of the Paradise which makes them almost more terrible than those of Hell itself. Interwoven too with the descriptions of the bliss of Heaven, is the discussion of so wide a range of moral and theological topics that the Paradise has been described as having 'summed up, as it were, and embodied for perpetuity ... the quintessence, the living substance, the ultimate conclusions of the scholastic theology;'[88] and it may well be true that to master the last cantica of the 'Divine Comedy' is to pierce more deeply into the heart of mediæval religion and theology than any of the schoolmen and doctors of the Church can take us. At the touch of Dante's staff, the flintiest rock of metaphysical dogma yields the water of life, and in his mouth the subtlest discussion of casuistry becomes a lamp to our feet. And beyond all this, such is the marvellous concentration of Dante's poetry, there is room in the Paradise for long digressions, biographical, antiquarian, and personal; whilst all these parts, apparently so heterogeneous, are welded into perfect symmetry in this one poem. * * * * * Amongst the most important of the episodes is the account of ancient Florence given to Dante by his ancestor Cacciaguida, who also predicts the poet's exile and wanderings, and in a strain of lofty enthusiasm urges him to pour out all the heart of his vision and brave the hatred and the persecution that it will surely bring upon him. This Cacciaguida was a Crusader who fell in the Holy Land, and Dante meets him in the burning planet of Mars, amongst the mighty warriors of the Lord whose souls blaze there in a ruddy glow of glory. There is Joshua, there Judas Maccabæus, and Charlemagne and Orlando and Godfrey and many more. A red cross glows athwart the planet's orb, and from it beams in mystic guise the Christ; but how, the poet cannot say, for words and images are wanting to portray it. Yet he who takes his cross and follows Christ, will one day forgive the tongue that failed to tell what he shall see when to him also Christ shall flash through that glowing dawn of light. Here the souls, like rubies that glow redder from the red-glowing cross as stars shine forth out of the Milky Way, pass and repass from horn to horn, from base to summit, and burst into a brighter radiance as they join and cross, while strains of lofty and victorious praise, unknown to mortal ears, gather upon the cross as though it were a harp of many strings, touched by the hand of God, and take captive the entranced, adoring soul. There Cacciaguida hailed his descendant Dante, and long they conversed of the past, the present, and the future. Alas for our poor pride of birth! What wonder if men glory in it here? For even there in Heaven, where no base appetite distorts the will and judgment, even there did Dante glow with pride to call this man his ancestor. At last their converse ended; Cacciaguida's soul again was sweeping the unseen strings of that heavenly harp, and Dante turned again to look for guidance from his guardian. Beatrice's eyes were fixed above; and quick as the blush passes from a fair cheek, so quick the ruddy glow of Mars was gone, and the white light of Jupiter shone clear and calm in the sixth heaven--the Heaven of the Just. What a storm of passions and emotions swept through Dante's soul when he learnt where he was! 'O chivalry of Heaven!' he exclaimed in agony, 'pray for those who are led all astray on earth by foul example.' When would the Righteous One again be wroth, and purge His temple of the traffickers--His temple walled by miracles and martyrdoms? How long should the Pope be suffered to degrade his holy office by making the penalties of Church discipline the tools of selfish politics--how long should his devotion to St. John the Baptist, whose head was stamped upon the coins of Florence, make him neglect the fisherman and Paul? Such were the first thoughts that rose in Dante's mind in the Heaven of the Just; but they soon gave way to others. Here surely, here if anywhere, God's justice must be manifest. Reflected in all Heaven, here must it shine without a veil. The spirits of the just could surely solve his torturing doubt. How long had his soul hungered and found no food on earth, and now how eagerly did he await the answer to his doubt! They knew his doubt, he need not tell it them; oh, let them solve it! Yes, they knew what he would say: 'A man is born upon the bank of Indus, and there there is none to speak of Christ, or read or write of him. All this man's desires and acts are good, and without sin, as far as human eye can see, in deed or word. He dies unbaptised, without the faith. Where is that justice which condemns him? Where is his fault in not believing?' Yes, they knew his doubt, but could not solve it. Their answer is essentially the same as Paul's: 'Nay, but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God?' The Word of God, say the spirits of the just, could not be so expressed in all the universe but what it still remained in infinite excess. Nay, Lucifer, the highest of created beings, could not at once see all the light of God, and fell through his impatience. How then could a poor mortal hope to scan the ways of God? His ken was lost in His deep justice as the eye is lost in the ocean. We can see the shallow bottom of the shore, but we cannot see the bottom of the deep, which none the less is there. So God's unfathomable justice is too deep, too just, for us to comprehend. The Primal Will, all goodness in itself, moves not aside from justice and from good. Never indeed did man ascend to heaven who believed not in Christ, yet are there many who cry, Lord, Lord, and in the day of judgment shall be far more remote from Christ than many a one that knew him not.[89] With this answer Dante must be content. He must return from Heaven with this thirst unslaked, this long hunger still unsatisfied. Ay, and with this answer must we too rest content. And yet not with this answer, for we do not ask this question. That awful load of doubt under which Dante bent is lifted from our souls, and for us there is no eternal Hell, there are no virtuous but rejected Heathen. Yet to us too the ocean of God's justice is too deep to pierce. And when we ask why every blessing, every chance of good, is taken from one child, while another is bathed from infancy in the light of love, and is taught sooner than it can walk to choose the good and to reject the evil, what answer can we have but Dante's? Rest in faith. You know God's justice, for you feel it with you in your heart when you are fighting for the cause of justice; you know God's justice, for you feel it in your heart like an avenging angel when you sin; you know God's justice--but you do not know it all. * * * * * There in the Heaven of the Just was David; now he knew how precious were his songs, since his reward was such. There too was Trajan, who by experience of the bliss of Heaven and pain of Hell knew how dear the cost of not obeying Christ. There were Constantine, and William of Sicily, and Ripheus, that just man of Troy. 'What things are these?' was the cry that dropped by its own weight from Dante's lips. The heathens Trajan and Ripheus here! No, not heathens. Ripheus had so given himself to justice when on earth, that God in His grace revealed to him the coming Christ, and he believed. Faith, Hope, and Charity were his baptism more than a thousand years ere baptism was known. And for Trajan, Gregory had wrestled in prayer for him, had taken the Kingdom of Heaven by storm with his warm love and living hope; and since no man repents in Hell, God at the prayer of Gregory had recalled the imperial soul back for a moment to its mouldering clay. There it believed in Christ, and once more dying, entered on his joy.[90] Thus did Dante wrestle with his faith, and in the passion of his love of virtue and thirst for justice seek to escape the problem which he could not solve. * * * * * But we must hasten to the close. Dante and Beatrice have passed through all the heavens. The poet's sight is gradually strengthened and prepared for the supreme vision. He has already seen a kind of symbol of the Uncreated, surrounded by the angelic ministers. It was in the ninth heaven, the Heaven of the Primum Mobile, that he saw a single point of intensest light surrounded by iris rings, upon which point, said Beatrice, all Heaven and all nature hung.[91] But now they have passed beyond all nine revolving heavens into the region of 'pure light, light intellectual full of love, love of the truth all full of joy, joy that transcends all sweetness.'[92] And here the poet sees that for which all else had been mere preparation. But I will not strive to reproduce his imagery, with the mighty river of light inexhaustible, with the mystic flowers of heavenly perfume, with the sparks like rubies set in gold ever passing between the flowers and the river. Of this river Dante drank, and then the true forms of what had hitherto been shadowed forth in emblems only, rose before his eyes. Rank upon rank the petals of the mystic rose of Paradise stretched far away around and above him. There were the blessed souls of the holy ones, bathed in the light of God that streamed upon them from above, while the angels ever passed between it and them ministering peace and love. There high up, far, far beyond the reach of mortal eye, had it been on earth, sat Beatrice, who had left the poet's side. But in Heaven, with no destroying medium to intervene, distance is no let to perfect sight. He spoke to her. He poured out his gratitude to her, for it was she who had made him a free man from a slave, she who had made him sane, she who had left her footprints in Hell for him, when she went to summon Virgil to his aid. Oh, that his life hereafter might be worthy of the grace and power that had so worked for him! Then from her distant place in Heaven, Beatrice looked at him and smiled, then turned her eyes upon the Uncreated Light.[93] St. Bernard was at Dante's side, and prayed that the seer's vision might be strengthened to look on God. Then Dante turned his eyes to the light above. The unutterable glory of that light dazzled not his intent, love-guided gaze. Nay, rather did it draw it to itself and every moment strengthen it with keener sight and feed it with intenser love. Deeper and deeper into that Divine Light the seer saw. Had he turned his eyes aside, then indeed he knew the piercing glory would have blinded them; but that could never be, for he who gazes on that light feels all desire centred there--in it are all things else. So for a time with kindling gaze the poet looked into the light of God, unchanging, yet to the strengthening sight revealing ever more. Mysteries that no human tongue can tell, no human mind conceive, were flashed upon him in the supreme moment, and then all was over--'The power of the lofty vision failed.' * * * * * Dante does not tell us where he found himself when the vision broke. He only tells us this: that as a wheel moves equally in all its parts, so his desire and will were, without strain or jar, revolved henceforth by that same Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.[94] This was the end of all that Dante had thought and felt and lived through--a will that rolled in perfect oneness with the will of God. This was the end to which he would bring his readers, this was the purpose of his sacred poem, this was the meaning of his life.[95] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 77: _Paradiso_, ii. 1-15.] [Footnote 78: _Paradiso_, i. 1-12.] [Footnote 79: _Ibid._ xxxiii. 58-63.] [Footnote 80: _Convito_, III. xv.] [Footnote 81: _Purgatorio_, xxx. 79-81, xxxi. 64-67; _Paradiso_, i. 100-102, xxii. 1 sqq.] [Footnote 82: _Paradiso_, xxiii. 1-15.] [Footnote 83: _Ibid._ iv. 28-48.] [Footnote 84: _Paradiso_, x. 139--xi. 12.] [Footnote 85: _Paradiso_, iii. 64-90.] [Footnote 86: _Paradiso_, vi. 112-126.] [Footnote 87: _Paradiso_, xxvii, 22-34.] [Footnote 88: Milman.] [Footnote 89: _Paradiso_, xiv. 85--xix. 148.] [Footnote 90: _Paradiso_, xx.] [Footnote 91: _Ibid._ xxviii. 41, 42.] [Footnote 92: _Ibid._ xxx. 40-42.] [Footnote 93: _Paradiso_, xxxi. 52-93.] [Footnote 94: _Paradiso_, xxxiii. 143-145.] [Footnote 95: Compare Symonds, p. 183.] APPENDIX AN ATTEMPT TO STATE THE CENTRAL THOUGHT OF THE COMEDY APPENDIX. Dante's poem--the true reflection of his mind--is a compact and rounded _whole_ in which all the parts are mutually interdependent. Its digressions are never excrescences, its episodes are never detached from its main purpose, its form is never arbitrary and accidental, but is always the systematic and deliberate expression of its substance. Moreover it is profoundly mediæval and Catholic in conception and spirit. The scholastic theology and science of the Middle Ages and the spiritual institutions of the Catholic Church were no trammels to Dante's thought and aspiration. Under them and amidst them he moved with a perfect sense of freedom, in them he found the embodiment of his loftiest conceptions. Against their abuses his impetuous spirit poured out its lava-stream of burning indignation, but his very passion against those who laid impure hands upon the sacred things of God is the measure of his reverence for their sanctity. If the Catholic poet of the fourteenth century speaks with a voice that can reach the ears and stir the hearts of the Protestant and heretic of the nineteenth, it is not so much because he rose above the special forms and conditions of the faith of his own age as because he went below them and touched the eternal rock upon which they rested. Not by neglecting or making light of the dogmas and institutions of his day, but by piercing to their very heart and revealing their deepest foundations, did he become a poet for all time. The distinction, then, which we are about to draw between the permanent realities of Dante's religion and the passing forms, the temporary conditions of belief, under which it was manifested, is a distinction which did not exist for him. His faith was a garment woven without seam, or, to use his own metaphor, a coin so true in weight and metal, so bright and round, that there was no 'perhaps' to him in its impression.[96] This unwavering certainty alike in principle and in detail, this unfaltering loyalty to the beliefs of his day alike in form and substance, is one of the secrets of Dante's strength. But, again, such compactness and cohesion of belief could not have been attained except by the strict subordination of every article of concrete faith to the great central conceptions of religion, rising out of the very nature and constitution of the devout human soul. And therefore, paradox as it may seem, the very intensity with which Dante embraced beliefs that we have definitely and utterly rejected, is the pledge that we shall find in his teaching the essence of our own religion; and we may turn to the Comedy with the certainty that we shall not only discover here and there passages which will wake an echo in our bosoms, but shall also find at the very heart of it some guiding thought that will be to us as it was to him absolutely true. Now Dante himself, as we have seen, tells us what is the subject of his Comedy. Literally it is 'The state of souls after death,' and allegorically 'Man, as rendering himself liable to rewarding or punishing justice, by good or ill desert in the exercise of his free will.' The ideal requirements of Divine Justice, then, form the central subject of this poem, the one theme to which, amidst infinite diversity of application, the poet remains ever true; and these requirements he works out in detail and enforces with all the might, the penetration, the sweetness of his song, under the conditions of mediæval belief as to the future life. But these conditions of belief are utterly foreign to our own conceptions. I say nothing of the rejection of the virtuous heathen, because Dante himself could really find no room for it in his own system of conceptions. It lay in his mind as a belief accepted from tradition, but never really assimilated by faith. Apart from this, however, we find ourselves severed from Dante by his fundamental dogma that the hour of death ends all possibility of repentance or amendment. With him there is no repentance in Hell, no progress in Heaven; and it is therefore only in Purgatory that we find anything at all fundamentally analogous to the modern conception of a progressive approximation to ideal perfection and oneness with God throughout the cycles of a future life. And even here the transition of Purgatory is but temporal, nor is there any fundamental or progressive change of heart in its circles, for unless the heart be changed before death it cannot change at all. In its literal acceptation, then, dealing with 'the state of souls after death,' the 'Divine Comedy' has little to teach us, except indirectly. But allegorically it deals with 'man,' first as impenitently sinful; second, as penitent; last, as purified and holy. It shows us the requirements of Divine Justice with regard to these three states; and whether we regard them as permanent or transitory, as severed by sharp lines one from the other or as melting imperceptibly into each other, as existing on earth or beyond the grave, in any case Dante teaches us what sentence justice must pronounce on impenitence, on penitence, and on sanctity. Nay, independently of any belief in future retribution at all, independently of any belief in what our actions will receive, Dante burns or flashes into our souls the indelible conviction of what they deserve. Now to Dante's mind, as to most others, the conceptions of _justice_ and _desert_ implied the conception of _free will_. And accordingly we find the reality of the choice exercised by man, and attended by such eternal issues, maintained with intense conviction throughout the poem. The free will is the supreme gift of God, and that by which the creature most closely partakes of the nature of the Creator. The free gift of God's love must be seized by an act of man's free will, in opposition to the temptations and difficulties that interpose themselves. There is justice as well as love in Heaven; justice as well as mercy in Purgatory. The award of God rests upon the free choice of man, and registers his merit or demerit. It is true, and Dante fully recognises it, that one man has a harder task than another. The original constitution and the special circumstances of one man make the struggle far harder for him than for another; but God never suffers the hostile influence of the stars to be so strong that the human will may not resist it. Diversity of character and constitution is the necessary condition of social life, and we can see why God did not make us all alike; but when we seek to pierce yet deeper into the mystery of His government, and ask why this man is selected for this task, why another is burdened with this toil, why one finds the path of virtue plain for his feet to tread, while one finds it beset with obstacles before which his heart stands still--when we ask these questions we trench close upon one of those doubts which Dante brought back unsolved from Heaven. Not the seraph whose sight pierces deepest into the light of God could have told him this, so utterly is it veiled from all created sight.[97] But amidst all these perplexities one supreme fact stands out to Dante's mind: that, placed as we are on earth amidst the mysterious possibilities of good and evil, we are endowed with a genuine power of self-directed choice between them. The fullness of God's grace is freely offered to us all, the life eternal of obedience, of self-surrender, of love, tending ever to the fuller and yet fuller harmony of united will and purpose, of mutually blessed and blessing offices of affection, of growing joy in all the supporting and surrounding creation, of growing repose in the might and love of God. But if we shut our eyes against the light of God's countenance and turn our backs upon His love, if we rebel against the limitations of mutual self-sacrifice to one another and common obedience to God, then an alternative is also offered us in the fierce and weltering chaos of wild passions and disordered desires, recognising no law and evoking no harmony, striking at the root of all common purpose and cut off from all helpful love. Our inmost hearts recognise the reality of this choice, and the justice and necessity of the award that gives us what we have chosen. That the hard, bitter, self-seeking, impure, mutinous, and treacherous heart should drive away love and peace and joy is the natural, the necessary result of the inmost nature and constitution of things, and our hearts accept it. That self-discipline, gentleness, self-surrender, devotion, generosity, self-denying love, should gather round them light and sweetness, should infuse a fullness of joy into every personal and domestic relation, should give a glory to every material surrounding, and should gain an ever closer access to God, is no artificial arrangement which might with propriety be reversed, it is a part of the eternal and necessary constitution of the universe, and we feel that it ought so to be. There is no joy or blessedness without harmony, there is no harmony without the concurrence of independent forces, there is no such concurrence without self-discipline and self-surrender. But these natural consequences of our moral action are here on earth constantly interfered with and qualified, constantly baulked of their full and legitimate effect. Here we do not get our deserts. The actions of others affect us almost as much as our own, and artificially interpose themselves to screen us from the results of what we are and do ourselves. Hence we constantly fail to perceive the true nature of our choice. Its consequences fall on others; we partially at least evade the Divine Justice, and forget or know not what we are doing, and what are the demands of justice with regard to us. Now Dante, in his three poems, with an incisive keenness of vision and a relentless firmness of touch, that stand alone, strips our life and our principles of action of all these distracting and confusing surroundings, isolates them from all qualifying and artificial palliatives, and shows us what our choice is and where it leads to. In Hell we see the natural and righteous results of sin, recognise the direct consequences, the fitting surroundings of a sinful life, and understand what the sinful choice in its inmost nature is. As surely as our consciences accuse us of the sins that are here punished, so surely do we feel with a start of self-accusing horror, 'This is what I am trying to make the world. This is where we should be lodged if I received what I have given. This is what justice demands that I should have. This is what I deserve. It is what I have chosen.' The tortures of Hell are not artificial inflictions, they are simply the reflection and application of the sinner's own ways and principles. He has made his choice, and he is given that which he has chosen. He has found at last a world in which his principles of action are not checked and qualified at every turn by those of others, in which he is not screened from any of the consequences of his deeds, in which his own life and action has consolidated, so to speak, about him, and has made his surroundings correspond with his heart. In the Hell, Dante shows us the nature and the deserts of impenitent sin; and though we may well shrink from the ghastly conception of an eternal state of impenitence and hatred, yet surely there is nothing from which we ought to shrink in the conception of impenitent sin as long as it lasts, whether in us or in others, concentrating its results upon itself, making its own place and therefore receiving its deserts. When we turn from Hell to Purgatory, we turn from unrepentant and therefore constantly cherished, renewed, and reiterated sin, to repentant sin, already banished from the heart. What does justice demand with regard to such sin? Will it have it washed out? Will it, in virtue of the sinner's penitence, interpose between him and the wretched results and consequences of his deeds? Who that has ever sinned and repented will accept for a moment such a thought? The repentant sinner does not _wish_ to escape the consequences and results of his sin. His evil deeds or passions must bring and ought to bring a long trail of wretched suffering for himself. This suffering is not corrective, it is expiatory. His heart is already corrected, it is already turned in shame and penitence to God; but if he had no punishment, if his evil deed brought no suffering upon himself, he would feel that the Divine Justice had been outraged. He shrinks from the thought with a hurt sense of moral unfitness. He wishes to suffer, he would not escape into the peace of Heaven if he might. Never did Dante pierce more deeply into the truth of things, never did he bring home the _justice_ of punishment more closely to the heart, than when he told how the souls in Purgatory do not wish to rise to Heaven till they have worked out the consequences of their sins. The sin long since repented and renounced still haunts us with its shame and its remorse, still holds us from the fullness of the joy of God's love, still smites us with a keener pain the closer we press into the forgiving Father's presence; and we would have it so. The deepest longing of our heart, which is now set right, is for full, untroubled communion with God, yet it is just when nearest to Him that we feel the wretched penalty of our sin most keenly and that we least desire to escape it. But if the sinful disposition be gone, then the source of our suffering is dried up with it, and the sense of oneness with God, of harmony and trust, gradually overpowers the self-reproach, until from the state of penitence and suffering the soul rises to holiness and peace. It is in giving us glimpses of this final state that Dante wields his most transforming power over our lives. He shows us what God offers us, what it is that we have hitherto refused, what it is that we may still aspire to, that here or hereafter we may hope to reach. Sin-stained and sorrow-laden as we are, it is only on wings as strong as his that we can be raised even for a moment into that Divine blessedness in which sin has been so purged by suffering, so dried up by the sinner's love of God, so blotted out by God's love of him, that it has vanished as a dream, and the soul can say, 'Here we repent not.'[98] How mighty the spirit that can raise us even for a moment from the desolate weariness of Hell, and the long suffering of Purgatory, to the joy and peace of Heaven! And here too there is justice. Here too the deserts of the soul are the gauge of its condition. For, as we have seen, in the very blessedness of Heaven there are grades, and the soul which has once been stained with sin or tainted with selfish and worldly passion, can never be as though it had been always pure. Yet the torturing sense of unworthiness is gone, the unrest of a past that thwarts the present is no more; the souls have cast off the burden of their sin, and are at perfect peace with God and with themselves. Sin, repentance, holiness, confronted with the Eternal Justice--what they are and what they deserve--such is the subject of Dante Alighieri's Comedy. Have five and a half centuries of progress outgrown the poem, or are Dante's still the mightiest and most living words in which man has ever painted in detail the true deserts of sin, of penitence, of sanctity? The growing mind of man has burst the shell of Dante's mediæval creed. Is his portrayal of the true conditions of blessedness as antiquated as his philosophy, his religion as strange to modern thought as his theology? Or has he still a power, wielded by no other poet, of taking us into the very presence of God and tuning our hearts to the harmonies of Heaven? 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KEGAN PAUL & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes Bold text is shown within =equal signs=. Text in italics is shown within _underscores_. Three asterisks represent an asterism. Five asterisks represent a thought break. Corrected unbalanced quotation marks. Made minor punctuation changes for consistency. Page 14 of Publications, under HOLROYD: Removed macron marks above both a's in Kalam. (Tas-hil ul Kalam; or, Hindustani made Easy.) Page 19 of Publications, under MACNAUGHT: Spaced out the oe ligature. (Coena Domini: An Essay on the Lord's Supper,) 
16978	----	DANTE: "THE CENTRAL MAN OF ALL THE WORLD." A Course of Lectures Delivered Before the Student Body of the New York State College for Teachers, Albany, 1919, 1920 by JOHN T. SLATTERY, Ph.D. With a Preface by John H. Finley, L.H.D. New York P. J. Kenedy & Sons 1920 Copyright, 1920, by P. J. Kenedy & Sons, New York Printed in U.S.A. DEDICATION THIS MODEST WORK OWES ITS PUBLICATION TO THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF PRESIDENT ABRAM R. BRUBACHER AND DEAN HARLAN H. HORNER OF THE STATE COLLEGE FOR TEACHERS, ALBANY, N.Y. WHERE MANY PLEASANT HOURS WERE PASSED IN DELIVERING THESE LECTURES. TO THESE FRIENDS AND TO THE STUDENT-BODY OF THE COLLEGE THE AUTHOR HAS THE HONOR OF DEDICATING THIS BOOK PREFACE I stand as does the reader at the entrance to this book which I have not as yet entered myself. I have before me the journey through the Inferno and Purgatorio, into Paradise, with a new companion. I have made the journey before many times with others, or with Dante and Virgil alone, but I know that I shall enjoy especially the companionship and comment of one with whom I have had such satisfaction of comradeship in our journey as neighbors for a little way across this earth. I invite others, and I hope they may be many, to make this brief journey with us, not because I know specifically what Dr. Slattery will say along the way, but because whatever he says out of his deep and reverent acquaintance with the Divine Comedy will help us all who follow him, whether we are of his particular faith or not, to an appreciation of the meaning of this immortal poem, and make us desire to go again and again in our reading through these spaces of the struggles of human souls. A world-literary-movement will commemorate in 1921 the six hundredth anniversary of the death of the immortal Dante. That a medievalist should call forth the homage of the twentieth century to the extent of being honored in all civilized lands and by cultured peoples who, for the most part, do not know the language spoken by him, or who do not profess the religion of him who wrote the most religious book of Christianity, is a marvel explainable by the fact that the Divine Comedy is a drama of the soul,--the story of a struggle which every man must make to possess his own spirit against forces that would enslave it. The central interest of the poem is in the individual who may be you or I instead of Dante the subject of the work, and that fact exalts the personal element and gives the spiritual value which we of modern times appreciate as well as did the thirteenth century. The Divine Comedy is attractive for other reasons. It may appeal to us as it did to Tennyson, because of "its divine intensity," or it may affect us as it did Charles Eliot Norton by "its powerful exposition of moral penalties and rewards," showing that righteousness is inexorable; or it may interest us because of its solid realism, its pure strength of conception, its surpassing beauty, its vivid imaginative power, its perfection of diction "without superfluousness, without defect." Whatever be the reason of our interest in Dante, the study of his Divine Comedy will ever be both a discipline "not so much to elevate our thoughts," says Coleridge, "as to send them down deeper," and a delight calling forth the deepest emotions of our being. JOHN H. FINLEY. CONTENTS PAGE Dante and His Time 1 Dante, The Man 49 Dante's Inferno 101 Dante's Purgatorio 151 Dante's Paradiso 219 DANTE AND HIS TIME DANTE AND HIS TIME To know Dante we must know the age which produced Christianity's greatest poet, he whom Ruskin calls "the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties, all at their highest." Other writers are not so dependent upon their times for our clear understanding of their books. Dante to be intelligible to the modern mind, cannot be taken out of the thirteenth century. "Its contemporary history and its contemporary spirit" says Brother Azarias in his Phases of Thought and Criticism, "constitute his clearest and best commentary." Only in the light of this commentary can we hope to know his message and realize its supremacy. And that it is worth while to make the study there can be no doubt upon the part of any seeker of truth and admirer of beauty. Emerson said: "I think if I were a professor of rhetoric I should use Dante for my text-book. Dante is the rhetorician. He is all wings, pure imagination and he writes like Euclid." James Russell Lowell told his students in answer to the question as to the best course of reading to be followed: "If I may be allowed a personal illustration, it was my own profound admiration for the Divina Commedia of Dante that lured me into what little learning I possess." Gladstone declared: "In the school of Dante I learned a great part of that mental provision ... which has served me to make the journey of human life." It surely must be of inestimable advantage to sit under the instruction of one of the race's master teachers who stimulates one to lofty thinking and deep feeling, leads one into realms of wider knowledge and helps one to know his own age by revealing a mighty past. To see that mighty past, to live again with Dante in the thirteenth century is possible only after we have cleared the way with which ignorance and misrepresentation have encumbered the approach. Here, perhaps, more than in any other period of civilization is the dictum true that history is often a conspiracy against the truth. We moderns who are not only obsessed with the theory of evolution, but are dominated by the idea that nothing of permanent value can come from medievalism, arrogantly proclaim that ours is the greatest of centuries because we have not only what all other centuries had, but something else distinctively our own--a vast contribution to the world's progress. This self-complacency makes us forget that whatever truth there may be in the great theory of evolution, certainly the validity of the theory is not confirmed by the intellectual history of the human race. As was said of the Patriarchal Age so we may say of Dante's times "there were giants in those days" which we presume to ignore. Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, indeed stand forth in irrefutable protest against the questionable assertion of evolution that the present is intellectually superior to the past. The evolutionary theory prejudices our age against acknowledging the high accomplishments of the past. So to know the truth we must overcome the conspiracy with which so-called history has enveloped the past, especially those generations immediately prior to Dante's. How that ignorance of the history and spirit of that period can blind even a great writer to the wonderful feats inherited from the centuries immediately preceding the thirteenth, is revealed by the assertion of Carlyle that "in Dante ten _silent_ centuries found a voice." To state what history now regards as fact, it must be said that while Dante by his giant personality and sublime poetic genius could alone ennoble any epoch he was not "a solitary phenomenon of his time but a worthy culmination of the literary movement which, beginning shortly before 1200, produced down to 1300 such a mass of undying literature" that subsequent generations have found in it their model and inspiration and have never quite equalled its originality and worth. In verification of this statement I have only to mention to you the names of the Cid of Spain, the Arthurian Legends of England, the Nibelungen Lied of Germany and the poems of the Meistersingers, the Trouveres and the Troubadours. The authors of these works had been taught to make themselves eternal as Dante says Brunetto Latini taught him. They are proof against the alleged dumbness of the ages just preceding Dante's. Of those times speaks Dr. Ralph Adams Cram, renowned equally for historical study and for architectural ability: "The twelfth was the century of magnificent endeavors and all that was great in its successor is here in embryo not only in art but in philosophy, religion and the conduct of life. The eleventh century is a time of aspiration and vision, of the enunciation of new principles and of the first shock of the contest between the old that was doomed and the new that was destined to unprecedented victories." (The Substance of Gothic, p. 69.) Let us now make a general survey of Dante's century and then consider the more particular events and circumstances of his environment. It may be a surprise to you to know that there is a book entitled The Thirteenth, the Greatest of Centuries by Dr. James J. Walsh, in its fifth edition with a sale of 70,000 copies. He indeed is not the only man of letters who signalizes that century for its greatness. To confine the quotations to two writers well known in our day, I find that Fiske in his Beginnings of New England says of the thirteenth century: "It was a wonderful time but after all less memorable as the culmination of medieval empire and medieval church than as the dawning of the new era in which we live today." Frederic Harrison, in his Survey of the Thirteenth Century says, "Of all the epochs of effort after a new life that ... is the most spiritual, the most really constructive and indeed the most truly philosophic. It had great thinkers, great rulers, great teachers, great poets, great artists, great moralists, and great workmen. It could not be called the material age, the devotional age, the political age or the poetic age in any special degree. It was equally poetic, political, industrial, artistic, practical, intellectual and devotional. And these qualities acted on a uniform conception of life with a real symmetry of purpose." Ours is an age of thought but of thought finding concrete expression in practical invention and especially in activities in the line of manufacture and commerce. Posterity will probably characterize our age as the Industrial Age, a phrase that will signalize our period both for the development of industries not thought possible a century ago and for the evolution of the industrial worker to a position of striking importance and power. For the first time in the history of humanity the workman's status is the subject of international agreement. The League of Nations promises to treat Labor from a humanitarian point of view and so to place it on the broad, firm pathway leading to industrial peace and economical solidarity for the common good. That would seem a necessity in view of the strides of progress in other directions. Now wireless telegraphy crosses oceans and unites continents. The wireless telephone between ships and shore is in operation. It has been found practicable to transport by submarine a cargo from Bremen to Baltimore. In aircraft the development has been just as wonderful. Less than ten years ago the world's record for long flight by aeroplane was made, with no regard for time, with two stops between Albany and New York. In July, 1919, an aeroplane making no stop covered the distance between New York and Chicago in some six hours. Furthermore an American seaplane, in three stages made the trip from New York to England and then a British Dirigible without making a stop came from England to Long Island in ninety-six hours. "This is the end and the beginning of an age" says the author of Mr. Brittling Sees It Through. "This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it." We indeed consider it the age of "big things." Dynasties fall and republics spring up. When war breaks out it is a World War involving twenty-four nations and causing 7,781,806 deaths (Nelson's Encyclopedia, V. iv, p. 519) and costing $200,000,000,000. In the first year in which we were at war, our country spent more than had been the cost of conducting the government for 124 years, including the expenses of the Civil and the Spanish-American Wars. Yes, it is an age of "big things." The Allies in the Champagne offensive of September, 1915, threw 50,000,000 shells into the German lines in three days. Was it one out of sympathy with "big things," one intent on the quiet of the higher life as contrasted with the din of the day, who said that "modern civilization is noise and the more civilization progresses, the greater will be the noise?" In any event the muses who inspired Dante, are almost dumb. Now the captains of industry are the commanding figures of the day and the student, the poet, the philosopher, the statesman have gone into innocuous desuetude. Amy Lowell is preferred to Longfellow: Charlie Chaplin draws bigger crowds than Shakespeare can interest. Trainmen get wages higher than are the salaries of some of our governors. Unskilled labor is paid more than the teachers of our youth receive. The cost of living was never higher in the history of mankind. How illuminating to turn from this picture to that of Dante's age. Then in Florence, a bushel of wheat cost about fifteen cents, a carpenter could buy a broad ax for five cents, a saw for three cents, a plane for four cents, a chisel for one cent. The average daily wage of a woolworker was about thirty-six cents. In view of the high purchasing power of money in Dante's age, the fact that he borrowed at least seven hundred and fifty seven and a half golden florins, a debt that was not paid until after his death, leads one to think that he must have been regarded by his contemporaries as prodigal in the use of money. His financial difficulties must have given him an uneasy conscience for he insists repeatedly on the wickedness of prodigality. In fact he makes the abuse of money on the part either of a miser or of a spendthrift a sin against the social order punishable according to the gravity of the offence in Hell or Purgatory. To return to the matter of prices in Dante's day. In England a goose could be bought for two and a half pence. A stall-fed ox commanded twenty-four shillings while his fellow brought up on grass was sold for sixteen shillings. A fat hog, two years old,--and this is interesting to us who pay seventy-five cents a pound for bacon--a fat hog two years old cost only three shillings four pence and a fat sheep shorn, one shilling and two pence. A gallon of oysters was purchasable for two pence, a dozen of the best soles for three pence. A yard of broadcloth cost only one shilling one pence, a pair of shoes four pence. These figures of English money are taken from an act of Edward III of England who was born seven years after Dante's death. Parliamentarian enactment under the same king fixed a table of wages. For a day's work at haymaking or weeding of corn, for instance, a woman got one penny. For mowing an acre of grass or threshing a quarter of wheat a man was paid four pence. The reaper received also four pence for his day's labor. Eight hours constituted a working day. The people of the Middle Ages not only had the Saturday half-holiday but they enjoyed release from work on nearly forty vigils of feast days during the year. That they were as well off, e.g. as the unskilled laborer of our day, who demands from four to eight dollars a day as a wage, is evident from the fact that while he has to pay forty cents a pound for mutton, the workman of Edward the Third's day earned enough in four days to buy a whole sheep and a gallon of ale. So plentiful was meat in England that it was the ordinary diet of the poor. A preamble of an act of Parliament of the fourteenth century in specifying beef, pork, mutton and veal declares that these are "the food of the poorer sort." (The Thirteenth, the Greatest of Centuries, p. 479.) Speaking of live-stock leads to the observation that the people of Dante's time for the most part lived in the country. Cities had not yet become magnets. London is supposed to have had a population of twenty-five thousand, York ten thousand four hundred, Canterbury, four thousand seven hundred, Florence, in the year 1300, according to Villani, a contemporary of Dante, had "ninety thousand enjoying the rights of citizenship. Of rich Grandi, there were fifteen hundred. Strangers passing through the city numbered about two thousand. In the elementary schools were eight thousand to ten thousand children." (Staley's Guilds of Florence, p. 555.) The means of travel and communication, of course, were few and difficult. The roads were bad and dangerous. In France, Germany and Italy there were so many forms of government, dukedoms, baronies, marquisates, signories, city republics, each with its own custom regulations, not to speak of each having its own coinage and language, that travelers encountered obstacles almost at every step. For the most part, journeys had to be made afoot and a degree of safety was attained only if the traveler joined a large trade caravan, a pilgrimage or a governmental expedition. Night often found the party far from a hospice or inn and so they were obliged for shelter to camp on the highway or in the fields. Necessarily the traveler was subjected to innumerable privations and sufferings. I have not been able to get accurate information as to the exact length of time required to make a trip, say from London to Paris--a distance covered the other day by an aeroplane in eighty minutes. But, the "Consuetudines" of the Hereford Cathedral, England, afford us some data upon which to base the conclusion that six weeks were necessary for such a trip, allowing another week for religious purposes. The "Consuetudines" after specifying that no canon of the cathedral was to make more than one pilgrimage beyond the seas in his lifetime, allows the clergyman seven weeks' absence to go abroad to the tomb of St. Denis in the suburbs of Paris, sixteen weeks to Rome and a year to Jerusalem. A table of time limits between Florence and the principal cities of Europe and the East made by the Florentine Banking houses in Dante's day, showed the number of days required for consignments of specie and goods to reach their destination. Rome was reached in fifteen days, Venice and Naples in twenty days, Flanders in seventy days, England and Constantinople in seventy-five days, Cyprus in ninety days. How long it took Dante to make the trip from Florence to Rome, we do not know but history tells us that he went to the Eternal City in the year 1300. He was indeed a great traveler. During his twenty years' exile, we know that our poet's itinerary led him among other places to Padua, Venice, Ravenna, Paris and there is good reason to believe, as Gladstone contends, that he went for study to Oxford. The regret is permissible that he did not leave us an account of his journeyings. "Had he given us pictures--as he alone could have painted them--of scenes by the wayside and of the courts of which he was an honored guest," says Dr. J.A. Zahm in his Great Inspirers, "we should have had the most interesting and the most instructive travel book ever written." We cannot but notice one great effect brought about by traveling in those days, especially by pilgrimages and by the Crusades formed in defence of pilgrimages to the Holy Land and that is, that there arose on all sides a desire for liberty and the growth of a spirit of nationality that worked to the destruction of absolute government. The power of the common people began to assert itself. In 1215, England forced from John Lackland the Magna Charta, the foundation of all the liberty of English speaking people even in modern times. The very year in which Dante was born, representatives of the townspeople were admitted as members of the English Parliament. In France, during the thirteenth century, the centralization of power in the hands of the kings went forward with the gradual diminution of the influence of the nobility--a fact operating to the people's advantage. In 1222 the nobles forced Andrew II of Hungary to issue the Golden Bull, the instrument which Blackstone later declared turned "anarchy into law." In Germany and Sicily Frederick II published laws giving a larger measure of popular freedom. In Italy, the existence of the city republics--especially those of Florence, Sienna, Pisa--showed how successfully the ferment of liberty had penetrated the mass of the body-politic. Coming now to regard the characteristics of Dante's age we must say that the first big thing that looms in sight is the fact that this was the golden age of Christian faith. Everywhere the Cross, the symbol of salvation, met the eye. It was the age when men lived in one faith, used one ritual, professed one creed, accepted a common doctrine and moral standard and breathed a common religious atmosphere. Heresy was not wholly absent but it was the exception. Religion regarded then not as an accident or an incident of life but as a benign influence permeating the whole social fabric, not only cared for the widow and orphan and provided for the poor, but it shaped men's thoughts, quickened their sentiments, inspired their work and directed their wills. These men believed in a world beyond the grave as an ever present reality. Hell, Purgatory, Heaven were so near to them that they, so to speak, could touch the invisible world with their hands. To them, as to Dante, "this life was but a shadowy appearance through which the eternal realities of another world were constantly betraying themselves." Of the intensity and universality of faith in that life beyond death, Dante is not the exception but the embodiment. His poem has no such false note of scepticism as we detect in Tennyson's In Memoriam. Note the words of the modern poet: "I falter where I firmly trod And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world's altar stairs That slope through darkness up to God, I stretch lame hands of faith and grope And gather dust and chaff and call To what I feel is Lord of all And faintly trust the larger hope." Not thus does Dante speak. As the voice of his age he begins with faith, continues with faith and leads us to the unveiled vision of God. He both shows us his unwavering adherence to Christian doctrine in that scene in Paradiso where he is examined as to his faith by St. Peter and he teaches us that the seen is only a stepping stone into the unseen. It has been said of him in reference to his Divina Commedia, "The light of faith guides the poet's steps through the hopeless chambers of Hell with a firmness of conviction that knows no wavering. It bears him through the sufferings of Purgatory, believing strongly fits reality: it raises him on the wings of love and contemplation into Heaven's Empyrean, where he really hopes to enjoy bliss far beyond that whereof he says." (Brother Azarias.) Leading the religious awakening of the thirteenth century and making possible Dante's work at the end of the century were two of the world's greatest exponents of the spiritual life, both signalized in the Paradiso. St. Dominic characterized by Dante (Par. XII, 56) as "a jealous lover of the Christian faith with mildness toward his disciples but formidable to his foes," founded an order to be "the champions of Faith and the true lights of the world." Even in its early days it gave to the world eminent scholars such as Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas, and it has never ceased to number among its members great thinkers, ardent apostles, stern ascetics and profound mystics. In Dante's time it was the only order specially charged with the office of preaching and from its founder's time down to the present day the one who acts as the Pope's Theologian has been taken from the ranks of this order. Besides preaching to all classes of Christian society and evangelizing the heathen, the Dominicans in Dante's day fought against heresy and schism, lectured in the universities, toiled among the poor, activities in which the order is still engaged. But perhaps the man whose spiritual influence was greatest in medievalism, if not in all the history of Christianity, was Francis of Assisi, who "all seraphical in order rose a sun upon the world." (Par. XI, 37.) Born at Assisi in Umbria in 1182, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant and of Pica, a member of a noble family of Provence, Francis grew up a handsome, gay and gallant youth "the prime favorite among the young nobles of the town, the foremost in every feat of arms, the leader of civil revels, the very king of frolic." A low fever contracted when with his fellow citizens he fought against the Perugians turned his thoughts to the things of eternity. Upon his recovery he determined to devote himself to the service of his fellow man for the honor of God. His renunciation of the things of this life was dramatic. To swerve him from the new life his father had cited him to appear before the Bishop. Francis, unmoved by the appeal of his father persisted in his resolution. Stripping himself of the clothes he wore, the Bishop covering his nakedness, Francis gave his clothes to his father saying, "Hitherto I have called you Father, henceforth I desire to say only Our Father who art in heaven." Then and there as Dante sings, were solemnized Francis' nuptials with his beloved Spouse, the Lady Poverty, under which name, in the mystical language afterwards so familiar to Francis, "he comprehended the total surrender of all wordly goods, honors and privileges." He went forth and attracted disciples. With these partaking of his zeal and animated by his charity, he labored to make his generation turn from the sordid to the spiritual, diffusing over all the people a tender love of nature and God. Among his disciples--great minds of the time--were Thomas of Celano, one of the literary geniuses of the day, the author of the sublime Dies Irae--a religious poem chanted to this day at every funeral high mass in the Catholic Church, and frequently sung or played in great opera houses,--Bonaventure, professor of philosophy and theology at the university of Paris, Roger Bacon, the friar, the renowned teacher at Paris and Oxford, Duns Scotus, the subtile doctor. In the Third Order established for those not following the monastic life the membership, in the course of time, embraced among others St. Louis, King of France, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and Dante. He, towards the end of his exile, footsore, weary and discouraged, buffeted by the adverse winds of fortune knocked, a stranger, at the gates of the Franciscan monastery at Lunigiana. "As neither I nor any of the brothers recognized him," writes Brother Hilary, the Prior, "I asked him what he wished. He made no answer but gazed silently upon the columns and galleries of the cloister. Again I asked him what he wished and whom he sought and slowly turning his head and looking around upon the brothers and me, he answered 'Peace.'" The monks spoke gently to him, ministered with kindly and delicate sympathy to his bodily and spiritual needs. His reticence left him and his reserve melted away. Here the object of loving hospitality, he remained finding means and opportunity for profound study. Before he departed he drew from his bosom a part of the precious manuscript of Divina Commedia and trustingly giving it into the hands of the Prior said, "Here, Brother, is a portion of my work which you may not have seen: this remembrance I leave with you: forget me not." That he himself was not unforgetful of the sympathy of the simple and warm-hearted followers of St. Francis is evident from the fact that he gloried in his membership of the Third Order, wearing about his body the Franciscan cincture for chastity and it is not unlikely that at Ravenna before he finally closed his eyes upon the turmoil of the world full of vicissitudes, he modestly requested that he be buried in the simple habit of the order and be laid to rest in a tomb attached to their monastery. In any event such was his burial. For our sympathetic understanding of the supremacy of religion in Dante's day, may I again quote Ralph Adams Cram, whose words on the eleventh century are equally applicable to the era of our Florentine and to his country? Dr. Cram writes: "It is hard for us to think back into such an alien spirit and time as this and so understand how with one-tenth of its present population England could support so vast and varied a religious establishment, used as we are to an age where religion is only a detail for many and for most a negligible factor. We are only too familiar with the community that could barely support one parish church, boasting its one-half dozen religious organizations, all together claiming the adherence of only a minority of the population, but in the Middle Ages, religion was not only the most important and pervasive thing, it was a moral obligation on every man, woman and child, and rejection or even indifference was unthinkable. If once we grasp this fact," continues Cram, "we can understand how in the eleventh century, the whole world should cover itself with 'its white robe of churches.'" The second great fact observable in the times of Dante is that it was an age of inquiry and of efficient craftsmanship. Many of our generation think that Dante's day being so far removed from the age of printing and the spirit of positivism, and being given to the upholding of authority almost as an unexhaustible source of knowledge, was wholly unacquainted with scientific research. Furthermore they declare that education then was almost at its minimum stage. A little study will show that the people of that era were not unacquainted with the scientific spirit and it will also prove that if education did not prevail, in the sense that everybody had an opportunity to read and write--a consummation hardly to be expected--education in the sense of efficiency--education in the etymological sense, i.e. the training of the faculties so that the individual might develop creative self-expression and especially that he might bring out what was best in him, all which meant knowledge highly useful to himself and others--that kind of education was not uncommon. To give an idea of the scientific inquiry and sharp observation of mind in those days, I might cite Dante as a master exponent of nature study, and adept of science. Passing over his experiment in optics given in Paradiso, given so naturally as to justify the inference that investigation in physics was then not an uncommon mode of gaining knowledge, I call your attention to an observation made by Alexander Von Humboldt, the distinguished scientist, to prove that nothing escaped the eyes of Dante, intent equally upon natural phenomena and the things of the soul. Von Humboldt suggests that the rhetorical figure employed by Dante in his description of the River of Light with its banks of wonderful flowers (Par. XXX, 61) is an application of our poet's knowledge of the phosphorescence of the ocean. If you have ever looked down the side of a steamship at night as it ploughed its way forward, and if you have ever observed in the sea the thousand darting lights just below the water line your enjoyable experience will enable you to appreciate the beauty of this passage. I now quote: "I saw a glory like a stream flow by In brightness rushing and on either side Were banks that with spring's wondrous hues might vie And from that river living sparks did soar And sank on all sides in the flow'rets bloom Like precious rubies set in golden ore Then as if drunk with all the rich perfume Back to the wondrous torrent did they roll And as one sank another filled its room." Commenting on this passage, Von Humboldt says "It would seem as if this picture had its origin in the poet's recollection of that peculiar and rare phosphorescent condition of the ocean in which luminous points appear to rise from the breaking waves and, spreading themselves over the surface of the waters, convert the liquid plain into a moving sea of stars." This mention of a sea brings to mind the striking fact that Dean Church has pointed out, viz., when Dante speaks of the Mediterranean, he speaks not as a historian or an observer of its storms or its smiles but as a geologist. The Mediterranean is to him: "The greatest _valley_ in which water stretcheth." (Par. IX, 82.) So also when he speaks of light he regards it not merely in its beautiful appearances but in its natural laws (Purg. XV). And when Dante comes to describe the exact color, say of an apple blossom, his splendid and unequalled power as a scientific observer of Nature and a poet is most evident. Ruskin (Mod. Painters III, 226) commenting on the passage: flowers of a color "less than that of roses but more than that of violets" (Purg. XXXII, 58) makes this interesting remark: "It certainly would not be possible in words, to come nearer to the _definition_ of the exact hue which Dante meant--that of the apple blossom. Had he employed any simpler color phrase, as 'pale pink' or 'violet pink' or any other such combined expression, he still could not have completely got at the delicacy of the hue; he might, perhaps, have indicated its kind, but not its tenderness; but by taking the rose-leaf as the type of the delicate red, and then enfeebling this with the violet gray he gets, as closely as language can carry him to the complete rendering of the vision although it is evidently felt by him to be in its perfect beauty ineffable." These examples of Dante's interest in scientific observation prove his fitness to be considered a representative of his age in its love for science. Instead, however, of proposing Dante as a typical example of the experimental inquiry of his age--you may say that he is _sui generis_--I shall call forth other witnesses. First let Albertus Magnus speak. He was distinguished as a theologian and philosopher and was also renowned as a scientist. In his tenth book after describing all the trees, plants and herbs then known, he says: "All that is here set down is the result of our own observation or has been borrowed from others whom we have known to have written what their personal experience has confirmed, for in these matters, experience alone can give certainty (_experimentum solum certificat in talibus_)." We may be sure that such an investigator showing in his method a prodigious scientific progress was on the line so successfully followed by modern natural philosophy. This conclusion is confirmed by evidence from his other books showing that he did a great deal of experimental work, especially in chemistry. In his treatise De Mineralibus, Albertus Magnus keen to observe natural phenomena, enumerates different properties of natural magnets and states some of the properties commonly attributed to them. In his book on Botany he treats of the organic structure and physiology of plants so accurately as to draw from Meyer, a botanist of the nineteenth century, this appreciative tribute. "No botanist who lived before Albert can be compared to him unless Theophrastus, with whom he was not acquainted: and after him none has painted nature with such living colors or studied it so profoundly until the time of Conrad Gesner and Cesalpino"--a high compliment indeed for Albertus for leadership in science for three centuries. To quote Von Humboldt again, "I have found in the book of Albertus Magnus, De Natura Locorum, considerations on the dependence of temperature concurrently on latitude and elevation and on the effect of different angles of incidence of the sun's rays in heating the ground, which have excited my surprise." Albertus Magnus gains renown also from his distinguished pupil Roger Bacon who, some think, should have the honor of being regarded as the father of inductive science--an honor posterity has conferred upon another of the same family name who lived 300 years later. We, who wear eye-glasses would be willing, I think, to vote the honor to the elder Bacon, because if we do not owe to him the discovery of lenses, we are his debtors for his clarification of the principles of lenses and for his successful efforts in establishing them on a mathematical basis. In any event, he was a pioneer in inductive science. Before gunpowder is known to have been discovered in the West, the friar Roger Bacon must have made some interesting experiments along the line of explosives, else he could not have made the following remarkable statement as to the property of gunpowder: "One may cause to burst from bronze, thunderbolts more formidable than those produced by nature. A small quantity of prepared matter causes a terrible explosion accompanied by a brilliant light. One may multiply this phenomenon so far as to destroy a city or an army." Anticipating the use of even motor boats and automobiles driven by gasoline, this thirteenth century scientist wrote: "Art can construct instruments of navigation such that the largest vessels governed by a single man will traverse rivers and seas more rapidly than if they were filled with oarsmen. One may also make carriages which, without the aid of any animal, will run with remarkable swiftness." This man whose clarity of vision anticipated those discoveries of the nineteenth century, left three disciples after him,--John of Paris, William of Mara and Gerard Hay--who followed their master's methods, especially of testing by observation and by careful searching of authorities, every proposition that came up for study. Perhaps the most striking argument in favor of the experimental attitude of Dante's century is that afforded by certain facts in the history of medicine of that epoch. Then surgery began to make vast strides. Pagel, regarded in our time as the best informed writer on the history of medicine, has this to say of the surgery in Dante's age. "The stream of literary works on surgery flows richer during this period. While surgeons are far from being able to emancipate themselves from the ruling pathological theories, there is no doubt that in one department, that of manual technics, free observation came to occupy the first place in the effort for scientific progress. Investigation is less hampered and concerns itself with practical things and not with artificial theories. Experimental observation was in this not repressed by an unfortunate and iron-bound appeal to reasoning." (The Popes and Science, p. 172.) As to medical practice in the thirteenth century, interesting data are furnished by the Bulletin of Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Journal of the American Medical Association, January, 1908. The former publication gives us remarkable instances of surgical operations and of the treatment of Bright's disease, matters which we might have thought possible only in the nineteenth century; the latter publishes in full the law for the regulation of the practice of medicine issued by Emperor Frederick II in 1240 or 1241. According to that law binding on the two Sicilies, three years of preparatory university work were required before the student could begin the study of medicine. Then he had to devote three years to the study of medicine and finally he had to spend a year under a physician's direction before a license was issued to him. In connection with this high standard of a medical education, the law of Frederick II forbade not only the sale of impure drugs under penalty of confiscation of goods, but also the preparation of them under penalty of death--stern legislation, anticipating by nearly seven centuries the American Pure Drug Law. (The Popes and Science, p. 419.) Undoubtedly the experimental demonstration and original observation of Dante's time sprang either from the training or pedagogical methods of the great universities of that period. There were universities at Oxford, Paris, Cologne, Montpelier, Orleans, Angers. Spain had four universities; Italy, ten. The number of students in attendance must amaze us if we think that higher education did not then prevail. Professor Thomas Davidson in his History of Education, says: "The number of students reported as having attended some of the universities in those early days almost passes belief, e.g. Oxford is said to have had about 30,000 about the year 1300 and half that number as early as 1224. The numbers attending the University of Paris were still greater. The numbers become less surprising when we remember with what poor accommodations--a bare room and an armful of straw--the students of those days were content and what numbers of them even a single teacher like Abelard could, long before, draw into lonely retreats." That in the twelfth and following centuries there was no lack of enthusiasm for study, notwithstanding the troubled conditions of the times, is very clear. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, education rose in many European states to a height which it had not attained since the days of Seneca and Quintilian. The curriculum followed by a student in Dante's time embraced the seven liberal arts of the Trivium and the Quadrivium, namely Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry and Astrology. The higher education comprised also Physics, Metaphysics, Logic, Ethics, and Theology. Of the cultural effect of the old education, Professor Huxley spoke in the highest praise on the occasion of his inaugural address as rector of Aberdeen University. "I doubt," he said, "if the curriculum of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of what is meant by culture as the old Trivium and Quadrivium does." (The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries, p. 466.) Speaking of education in those distant days, one thinks of the supreme intellect of medieval life, the giant genius St. Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophy was the food of Dante and became the basis not only of Dante's great poem but of Christian Apologetics down to our own day, when Pope Leo XIII directed that all Catholic seminaries and universities implant the doctrine expounded by Thomas, Angel of the Schools. A philosopher whose breadth and lucidity of mind gave such perennial interest to a system of thought that it is still followed more generally than that of any other school of philosophy--taught in the regular course even at Oxford, Harvard, Columbia--such a philosopher could have left the impress of his genius upon seven succeeding centuries only if his work had been to philosophy what Dante's Divina Commedia is to literature. The subject of scholastic philosophy now more or less claims attention here, since the coming to our country of the most distinguished exponent of Neo-scholasticism. Cardinal Mercier before becoming a prince of the Church, held the chair of neo-scholastic philosophy at Louvain where he made his department so distinguished for deep scholarship that pupils came from afar to sit under his instruction or to prepare themselves for a doctorate of philosophy whose requirements at Louvain were perhaps, more exacting than at any other modern university. In 1889 Bishop John H. Keane engaged in the task of getting together a faculty for the Catholic University at Washington went to Louvain to see Dr. Mercier. "I want you to go to Washington and become head of our school of philosophy," said the visitor. "I am perfectly willing to go, nothing could please me more. But we must first get the permission of the Pope," answered the Belgian scholar. Bishop Keane went to Rome and presented the matter to Leo XIII. "Better leave him where he is," replied the Pope. "He is more needed in Belgium than in the United States." So it was owing to the wisdom of Pope Leo in keeping the right man in the right place that Belgium's strongest man was held for his country against the evil hour to be a terror to wrongdoers and an inspiration and object of reverence. The World's War revealed Belgium's Primate not only as a great lucid thinker who shattered the subtilities with which the philosophy of might tried to confuse the mind of the world, but also as an undaunted leader who could not be frightened or defeated by all the forces of militarism. To my mind the secret of the dominating influence working upon Cardinal Mercier's character and making him a world-hero came from his training in scholastic philosophy and from his having assimilated the spirit of the thirteenth century. That period indeed not only trained its people to a high spiritual ideal but gave them golden opportunities to express themselves and to put forth, under the inspiration of religion, the best that was in them. The medium was the guild system which, working from a self-protecting alliance of traders, extended itself to every existing form of industry and commerce and gave "the workman a position of self-respect and independence such as he had never held before and has failed to achieve since" (Cram). A remarkable thing about the guild system was that it established and maintained what we, today, call technical schools for the training of apprentices. But more remarkable was the spirit which animated the system. _Operare est orare_ was its principle. As a result of that teaching that labor is practical prayer, that the worker should labor not simply for a wage, but for perfection, men with untiring energy straining for finer and better work came to make the best things their minds could conceive, their taste could plan, their hands could fashion. Bell-making in Dante's day attained such perfection that the form and composition of bells have ever since been imitated. Workers of precious metals produced such wonderful chalices that succeeding generations have never equalled the ancient model. The masonry of medievalism has secrets of construction lost to our age. Mechanical engineering solved without the use of steel girders problems in the structural work of cathedrals, palaces, fortresses and bridges that causes open-eyed astonishment in the twentieth century. Wood carving as seen in many medieval chairs, tables, and choir equipment is of design so exquisite and of finish of detail so artistic that it is the despair of the cabinet makers of our age. The beauty of the thirteenth century needlework made into chasubles, copes, albs, stoles, altar covers,--triumphs of artistic excellence, is seen in the typical example of the Cope of Ascoli for which Mr. Pierpont Morgan about ten years ago, paid sixty thousand dollars. So high a price was paid for this ecclesiastical vestment not because it was an antique but because marvelous expertness in artcraft had given it such value. Be it recorded to the honor of the American millionaire, that he returned the treasure to a church in Italy when he discovered that he had unknowingly bought stolen property. Of iron-mongery of Dante's time, the author of the Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries writes as follows: "It is difficult to understand how one of the village blacksmiths of the time made a handsome gate that has been the constant admiration of posterity ever since, or designed high hinges for doors that artists delight to copy, or locks and latches and bolts that are transported to our museums to be looked at with interest not only because they are antiques but for the wonderful combination of the beautiful and the useful which they illustrate. The surprise grows the greater when we realize that these beautiful objects were made not only in one place or even in a few places, but in nearly every town of any size in England, France, Italy, Germany and Spain at various times during the thirteenth century and that at any time a town of considerably less than ten thousand inhabitants seemed to be able to obtain among its own inhabitants, men who could make such works of art not as copies nor in servile imitation of others, but with original ideas of their own, and make them in such perfection that in many cases they have remained the models for many centuries." That is especially true of the thirteenth century glass windows as seen, for example, in the Cathedrals of York, Lincoln, Westminster, Canterbury, Chartres, Rheims, and in Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle, Paris. Modern art with all its boasting cannot begin to make anything comparable to that antique glass made and put in place by faith and love long before Columbus discovered America. There are tiny bits of it in this country as a result of the relic hunting of our soldiers in the World's War. Many of them got a fragment of the shattered glass of Rheims, "petrified color" deep sky blue, ruby, golden green, and sent it home to a sweetheart, a wife or sister to be mounted on a ring or set in a pin. The donors for the most part of the glass of the thirteenth century Cathedrals, were guilds at that time. For the Cathedral of Chartres e.g. the drapers and the furriers gave five windows, the porters one, the tavern-keepers two, the bakers two. In Dante's time glass-making reached its climax and then the curve began to decline, until in the eighteenth century and in the early part of the nineteenth century glass-making reached its lowest point. Great as was Dante's day in the efficiency and education promoted by the Guild system--Dante himself was a member of it--the achievement of his era in architecture was the "most notable perhaps because what happened there epitomizes all that was done elsewhere and the nature of what was accomplished is precisely that which informed the whole body of medieval achievement." (The Substance of Gothic, p. 137.) In the course of the century that gave birth to Dante, architecture rose to a glory never equalled before or after. In France alone between the years of 1180 and 1270 eighty great cathedrals and five hundred abbey houses were constructed. It was in this century that Notre Dame, Paris, arose, "the only un-Greek thing" said R.M. Stevenson, "which unites majesty elegance and awfulness." But it was not alone. Other Notre Dames sprung up in Germany, Italy and Spain. In England also, in that period there were more than twenty cathedrals in the course of construction, some of them in places as small as Wells, whose population never exceeded four thousand. To look today upon Wells with its facade of nearly three hundred statues, one hundred and fifty-three of which are life size or heroic and then to realize that this magnificent poem in stone was composed by villagers unknown to us and unhonored and unsung, is to open our eyes to the wonders accomplished by the foremost age of architecture. So wonderful are those cathedrals that Ferguson, the standard English authority on Gothic architecture, does not hesitate to say; "If any one man were to devote a lifetime to the study of one of our great cathedrals, assuming it to be complete in all its medieval arrangements--it is questionable whether he would master all its details and fathom all the reasonings and experiments which led to the result before him. "And when we consider that not only in the great cities alone, but in every convent and in every parish, thoughtful men were trying to excel what had been done and was doing by their predecessors and their fellows, we shall understand what an amount of thought is built into the walls of our churches, castles, colleges and dwelling houses. My own impression is that not one-tenth part of it has been reproduced in all the works written on the subject up to this day and much of it is probably lost never again to be recovered for the instruction and delight of future ages." The irreparable shattering of the greatest of these monuments of the past, occurred in our day. The Cathedral of Rheims, the crowning perfection of architecture having survived "the ravages of wars, the brutishness of revolutions, the smug complacency of restoration which had stripped it of its altars, its shrines and its tombs of unnumbered kings" was the target for two years of German shell and shrapnel and today it stands gaunt and scathed in a circle of ruin. But even in its ruin it shows infinite majesty and if it is left as it is,--and may that be so--for restoration would only vulgarize its incomparable art, Rheims will stand as a monument both to the thirteenth century which had made it the supreme type of the Gothic ideal to raise men's souls to God, and to the twentieth century against whose materialism it was an offence and a protest. The third characteristic of the age of Dante is its chivalry, which placed woman on the highest pedestal she had ever occupied. In literature that unique influence is seen in a new and an exalted conception of love. Love is now coupled with nobility of life. The troubadours had sung of love as a quality belonging to gentle folk, meaning by that phrase the nobility, and nobility had been defined by the Emperor Frederick II, patron of the troubadours, as a combination of ancestral wealth and fine manners. In the Banquet (bk. IV) Dante rejects that definition and transfers nobility from the social to the moral order holding that "nobility exists where virtue dwells." Love, the flowering of this nobility, may be found in the heart of him even lowest in the social scale provided that he is a virtuous man. It is not an affair solely of gentle blood. It has no pedigree of birth or richness. "In this sense the true lover need not be a _gentleman_ but he must be a _gentle man_, loving not by genteel code of caste but by gentle code of character." (J.B. Fletcher: Dante p. 27.) Thus Dante makes Guido Guinicelli say: "Love and the gentle heart are one and the same thing." And Dante himself in one of his Canzoni writes: "Let no man predicate That aught the name of gentleman should have Even in a king's estate Except the heart there be a gentle man's." Love, Then, Became In Literature Such A Refined Emotion That To Quote Dante: "It Makes Ill Thought To Perish, It Drives Into Foul Hearts A Deadly Chill" And On The Other Hand It Fills Indeed The Lover With Such Delicacy Of Sentiment For His Beloved That She Is His Inspiration To Virtue And The Muse Who Directs His Pen. In Harmony With "The Sweet New Style" Of Sincerity With Which Dante Treats Of Love, Thomas Bernart De Ventadorn Sings: "It is no wonder if I sing better than any other singer, for my heart draws near to Love and I am a better man for Love's command." Not in literature alone but in actual life did chivalry exalt "the eternal womanly." In Dante's age, to quote the author of Phases of Thought and Criticism, "Knights passed from land to land in search of adventure, vowed to protect and defend the widow and the orphan and the lonely woman at the hazard of their lives: they went about with a prayer on their lips and in their hearts the image of the lady-love whom they had chosen to serve and to whom they had pledged loyalty and fidelity: they strove to be chaste in body and soul and as a tower of strength for the protection of this spirit of chastity, they were taught to venerate the Virgin Mother Mary and cultivate toward her a tender devotion as the purest and holiest ideal of womanhood. This spirit of chivalry is the ruling spirit of Dante's life and the inspiration of some of his sublimest flights." All these high achievements of Dante's century are all the more notable in view of the fact that war with its horror and destruction was never absent from those times. Every European country was involved often in war and Asia and Africa were not free from its devastation. In such stirring times, Dante was born at Florence. A city of flowers and gay festivities, the home of a cultured pleasure-loving people, it was the frequent scene of feuds and factions handed down from sire to son. The hatred they engendered and the desolation they caused may be understood from the reading of Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy whose scene is laid in Verona in the year 1303 and to the families concerned in which Dante makes allusion in the sixth canto of his Purgatorio. But Verona and Florence were not the only cities involved by the militarism of the age. Especially in northern Italy were strife and bloodshed common. Province, city, town, hamlet and even households were torn by internal dissensions, which only complicated the main conflict of that day, viz., the world struggle for supremacy of pope and emperor. The imperial party called Ghibellines, composed mainly of aristocrats and their followers, aimed to break down the barriers which kept the German Emperor out of Italy, their object being to have him subjugate the whole country, even the states of the Pope. The papal or popular party, known as Guelfs, had as its purpose the independence of Italy--the freedom and alliance of the great cities of the north of Italy and dependence of the center and southern parts on the Roman See. A few months after Dante's death, the Ghibellines, the imperial party, suffered a defeat by the overthrow of King Manfred from which they never recovered. But in Florence for many years they maintained their struggle. To add to the confusion of the Florentines whose sympathy was mostly Guelf--i.e. favorable to the papal or popular cause--the Guelf party of Florence was divided into two factions, the Bianchi and the Neri, the history of whose tumults often leading to blood and mischief may be known by the frequent allusions of our poet. Embroiled by those feuds, Dante is found not only as a prior among the ruling Bianchi but as a soldier under arms at the battle of Campaldino and at the siege of Caprona. Later when the Neri were restored to power, Dante was banished and never again beheld his beloved city. In exile Dante transferred his allegiance to the Ghibellines though he upheld the Guelf view as to the primacy of the Church. Subsequently he tried, but in vain, to form a party independent of Guelf, Ghibelline, Bianchi or Neri. May I conclude this chapter by giving you another view of Dante's environment? To point out the degeneracy of Florence, Dante becomes a _laudator acti temporis_ in a picture of the earlier Florence that has never been equalled. "Florence was abiding in peace, sober and modest. She had not necklace or coronal or women with ornamented shoes or girdle which was more to be looked at than the person. Nor yet did the daughter at her birth give fear to her father, for the time and dowry did not outrun measure on this or that side. She had not houses empty of families. I saw Bellencion Berti go girt with leather and bone and his lady come from the mirror with unpainted face. I saw him of the Nerlo and him of the Vecchio satisfied with unlined skin and their ladies with the spindle and the distaff. O! fortunate women, each was sure of her burial place" (Paradiso IV, 97). But time changed all that. With her population vastly increased in Dante's day and her commerce on all seas and on every road and her banking system controlling the markets of Europe and the East, Florence had become such a mighty city that Pope Boniface VIII could say to the Florentine embassy who came to Rome to take part in the Jubilee of 1300: "Florence is the greatest of cities. She feeds, clothes, governs us all. Indeed she appears to rule the world. She and her people are, in truth, the fifth element of the universe." (The Guilds of Florence, p. 562.) Such greatness was attained according to Dante only at the loss of pristine simplicity and virtue. So he apostrophizes his native city: "Rejoice O Florence, since thou art so mighty that thou canst spread thy wings over sea and land and thy name is known throughout Hell." Notorious for crime Florence still kept a big place in her life for religion. There "religion was abused but its beneficial effects continued to be manifest--vice was flagrant but it never lost the sense of shame--men were cruel but their cruelty was followed by sincere regrets--misfortunes were frequent and signal but they were accepted with resignation or with the hope of retrieval or men gloried in them on account of the cause in which they suffered." (Brother Azarias.) And, meanwhile, side by side with fierce and bloody struggles the creative forces of art and architecture were making marvelous progress before the very eyes of Dante. Niccolo Pisano had finished his Sienna pulpit and with his son was engaged on his immortal works of sculpture. Orcagna had made a wonderful tabernacle for the Florentine church of San Michele, Cimabue had painted the Madonna which is now in the Rucellai chapel. Giotto had completed his work at Assisi and Rome and would soon give to the world the Florentine Campanile. Fra Sisto and Fra Ristoro had built the church Santa Maria Novella at Florence and Arnolfo di Cambio, while Dante was writing sonnets, had begun the duomo or cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. The stout walls and lofty tower of the Bargello had sprung into beauteous being. Santa Croce destined to be the burial place of illustrious Italians, had been built and remains today one of Florence's greatest churches. St. John's Baptistry, _il mio bel Giovanni_, had received its external facing of marble, and in ten years after Dante's death would get its massive bronze doors which are unparalleled in the world. The century closed with the opening of the great Jubilee at Rome. March twenty-fifth of the following year, 1300, Dante places as the time for his journey through the realms of the unseen--the story of which is told in the Divina Commedia. If sympathy with Dante and his work is not aroused already, perhaps these two quotations may quicken your interest. Charles Elliot Norton writes: "There are few other works of man, perhaps there is no other, which affords such evidence as the Divine Comedy, of uninterrupted consistency of purpose, of sustained vigor of imagination, and of steady force of character controlling alike the vagaries of the poetic temperament, the wavering of human purpose, the fluctuation of human powers, the untowardness of circumstances. From the beginning to the end of his work of many years there is no flagging of energy, no indication of weakness. The shoulders burdened by a task almost too great for mortal strength, never tremble under their load." And Dr. Frank Crane, a foremost writer of the syndicate press, says "I have put a good deal of hard labor digging into Dante and while I cannot say that I ever got from him any direct usable material, yet I no more regret my hours spent with him than I regret the beautiful landscapes I have seen, the great music I have heard, the wise and noble souls I have met, the wondrous dreams I have had. These are all a part of one's education, of one's equipment for life and perhaps the best part." DANTE THE MAN DANTE THE MAN Fifty-five years ago when called on for a poem to celebrate the sixth hundredth anniversary of Dante's birth, Tennyson, feeling his own littleness before "this central man of all the world," wrote: "King, that has reigned six hundred years and grown In power and ever growest I, wearing but the garland of a day, Cast at thy feet one flower that fades away." New tributes to the genius of Dante will be offered by our generation, for already great preparations are under way in all parts of Italy and the literary world to commemorate in 1921, the six hundredth anniversary of the death of the author of the greatest of all Christian poems. The question naturally suggests itself: Has not the world moved forward many centuries from Dante's viewpoint and lost interest in many things regarded as truths or at least as burning issues by Dante? Who is now concerned with the Ptolomaic system of astronomy, which is so often the subject of Dante's thought? Who is now interested in the tragic jealousies and injustices suffered by the people of Florence which led to the bitter feuds that helped to make Dante the great poet? Who, in this twentieth century so intent upon making the world safe for democracy, has sympathy with Dante's advocated scheme of a world-wide absolute monarchy as the cure for the ills of the society of his day? Is this generation which sees Italy united as a result of the overthrow of the Papal states, so universally concerned with Papal claims which were matters of vital importance to Dante and his generation? Is our era, which unfortunately looks upon religion as a negligible factor and not as the animating principle of life, interested in the golden age of faith of which Dante is the embodiment, and his message in which the eternal is the object? Yet, Dante's following is today larger than ever before; his empire over minds and hearts is more extensive. The moving pictures feature his Inferno; the press issues, even in languages not his own, such a mass of books and articles concerning him that a specialist can hardly keep track of the output. In the universities, especially of Harvard, Cornell and Columbia, not to speak of those in other lands, the courses on Dante attract an unusually large number of students. Outside of the academic atmosphere there are thousands of readers who still find in his writings, a solace in grief, a strength in temptation, a deep sense of reality, permanent though unseen, of the love of God and of His justice. The reasons are not far away. "Our poet," says Grandgent "was a many sided genius who has a message for nearly everyone." Dante's compelling renown among us, is due says Dr. Frank Crane both "to the intrinsic greatness of the man's personality and to the sheer beauty of his craftsmanship." "The secret of Dante's power" writes James Russell Lowell "is not far to seek. Whoever can express _himself_ with the full force of unconscious sincerity will be found to have uttered something ideal and universal." Whether one or all these reasons are the true explanation of the twentieth century's great interest in Dante, the fact remains, as Tennyson said, that far from being a waning classic, Dante "in power ever grows," and the interest he calls forth constitutes, as James Bryce observed in his Lowell Institute lectures "the literary phenomenon of England and America." Now to Dante as the man let us turn. To know the fibre of his manhood will help us to appreciate the genius of his art. "It is needful to know Dante as man" wrote Charles Elliot Norton, "in order fully to appreciate him as poet." The thought is expressed in another way by James Russell Lowell: "The man behind the verse is far greater than the verse itself and Dante is not merely a great poet but an influence, part of the soul's resources in time of trouble. From him the soul learns that 'married to the truth she is a mistress but otherwise a slave shut out of all liberty'" (The Banquet). But that knowledge is dependent upon our intimacy with the life and spirit of Dante. In many other cases the knowledge of the life and personality of an author may not be essential to either our enjoyment or our understanding of his work. In the case of Dante "he faces his own mirror and so appears in the mid-foreground of his reflected word." Before looking into that mirror for Dante's picture, let us first recall some of the established facts in his life and then see what manner of man he appeared to those who were his contemporaries or who lived chronologically near him. Dante was born in Florence in the year 1265. His father was a notary belonging to an old but decadent Guelph family, his mother, named Bella, was a daughter of Durante Abati, a Ghibelline noble. Whether his own family was regarded among the first families of nobility or not, it is certain that Dante enjoyed the honor of knowing that one of his forebears, Cacciaguida, had been knighted by Emperor Conrad II on the Second Crusade. Precocious Dante must have been, as a boy, with faculties and emotions extraordinarily developed, for in his ninth year, while attending a festal party, he fell in love with a little girl named Beatrice Portinari, eight years old. "Although still a child" to quote Boccaccio his earliest biographer "he received her image into his heart with such affection that from that day forward never so long as he lived, did it depart therefrom." She became the wife of Simone dei Bardi, and died in her twenty-fourth year, the subject of many sonnets from her mystic lover who, if he had never written anything else, would have been entitled, by his book of sonnets, his New Life, to rank as a poet of the first class. Two years after the death of Beatrice, Dante married Gemma Donati, a member of an old aristocratic family of Florence and by her had four children. In the period between the death of Beatrice and his marriage he had seen military service, having borne arms as a Guelph at the battle of Campaldino (Purg. V, 91-129) in which the Florentines defeated the Ghibelline league of Arezzo and he took part at the siege of Caprona and was present at its surrender by the Pisans (Inf., XXI, 95.) When he was thirty years old he became a member of the Special Council of the Republic, consisting of eight of the best and most influential citizens and in 1300, at the age of thirty-five, midway in the journey of his life, he was elected one of the six Priors (chief magistrates of his city) for the months of June and July. Shortly after this Dante with three others went to Rome on an embassy to Pope Boniface VIII to get that pontiff's veto to the intervention of Charles de Valois, brother of Philip IV of France, in the affairs of Florence. But there was delay in the transaction of the business and that gave the stranger time to win the city by treachery. When the news reached Dante, he hurried homeward. At Sienna he learned that his house had been pillaged and burned and he himself had been accused of malfeasance in office. Without a trial he was condemned to a heavy fine and to perpetual banishment under penalty that if he returned he would be burned alive. Then began his twenty years' exile--years in which he went sometimes almost begging and at all times even when he was an honored guest in the home of nobility--knowing as only an exile can know "how bitter is the bread of dependence and how steep the stranger's stairs." It was during his exile that Dante completed his immortal Divina Commedia, the child of his thought "cradled into poetry by wrong." Dante never again saw Florence for which he yearned with all the intensity of the Hebrew captives weeping on the rivers of Babylon for a sight of Jerusalem. Death came to free his undaunted soul in the year 1321 while he was a guest at Ravenna of Guido Novello da Polenta, a nephew of Francesca da Rimini. At Ravenna the last seat of Roman arts and letters, in a sepulchre attached to the convent of the Franciscan monks, he was buried with the honors due to a saint and a sage. The inscription on his epitaph said to have been composed by him on his deathbed, is paraphrased by Lowell in the following words: "The rights of Monarchy, the Heavens, the stream of Fire, the Pit In vision seen, I sang as far as to the Fates seemed fit. But since my soul, an alien here, hath flown to nobler wars, And happier now, hath gone to seek its Maker with the stars, Here am I, Dante, shut, exiled from the ancestral shore Whom Florence, the fairest of all-least-loving mothers, bore." Such is the brief outline of the outward life of him of whom Michelangelo declared: "Ne'er walked the earth a greater man than he." It will help us to a better understanding of that man if his likeness is impressed upon our memory. The portrait made by his friend Giotto, shows him as a young man perhaps of twenty to twenty-five years, with a face noble, beardless, strong, intelligent and pensive--a face which would not lead one to suspect an appreciation of humor. Yet writers find two distinct forms of that quality--a playfulness in his eclogues and a grotesqueness in certain of his assignments to punishments in Hell. Contrasting with this picture of his early life is the face of his death mask and of the Naples bust, suggesting the lines "How stern of lineament, how grim The father was of Tuscan song." Here we see him mature with strength of character in every feature and a seriousness of mien which shows a man with whom one might not take liberties. It was of Dante in mature life that Boccaccio wrote: "Our poet was of moderate height and after reaching maturity was accustomed to walk somewhat bowed with a slow and gentle pace, clad always in such sober dress as befitted his ripe years. His face was long, his nose aquiline and his eyes rather large than small. His jaws were large and his lower lip protruded beyond the upper. His complexion was dark and his expression very melancholy and thoughtful. His manners, whether in public or at home, were wonderful, composed and restrained, and in all ways he was more courteous and civil than any one else." Bruni, on the other hand, who wrote a century later describes Dante as if he had in mind Giotto's fresco of the poet. This is Bruni's word-picture: "He was a man of great refinement, of medium height and a pleasant but deeply serious face. It was remarkable that although he studied incessantly, none would have supposed from his happy manner and youthful way of speaking that he had studied at all." However well these pictures may visualize the poet for us, I cannot help thinking that Dante himself, after the manner of great artists who paint their own pictures, gives us a far better portrait of himself. What we know of him from others is as nothing compared to the revelation he has made of himself in his writings. For, as Dr. Zahm, in his Great Inspirers, has said: "Dante, although the most concealing of men was, paradoxical as it may seem, the most self-revealing." The indirect recorder of his own life, he discloses to us an intimate view of his spiritual struggles, of the motives which actuated him, of the passions he experienced, not to speak of the judgments he formed upon all great questions. "So true is this that if it were possible to meet him, we should feel that he was an intimate friend who had never concealed anything from us--who had discoursed with us on all subjects; science, literature, philosophy, theology, love, poetry, happiness, the world to come and all that of which it most imports us to have accurate knowledge." Let us then see the man as reflected in his writings. First of all he reveals himself as a man profoundly animated by religion. He is not a Huysmanns or a François Coppée, a Brunetiere, a Paul Bourget, forsaking the religious teachings of his youth only to embrace them in mature life. Never for a moment did he deflect from the Catholic doctrine, though his studies led him to the consideration of the most subtle arguments raised against it. He was indeed the defender and champion of faith, having no sympathy for a mind which would lose itself in seeking the solution of the incomprehensible mysteries of religion. So he has Virgil say: "Insensate he who thinks with mortal ken To pierce Infinitude which doth enfold Three persons in one substance. Seek not, then, O Mortal race, for reasons, but believe And be content, for had all been seen No need there was for Mary to conceive. Men have ye known who thus desired in vain And whose desires, that might at rest have been, Now constitute a source of endless pain. Plato, the Stagerite, and many more I here allude to. Then his head he bent, Was silent and a troubled aspect wore." (Purg., III, 34.) Guided by the wisdom he thus enunciated Dante from youth to death maintained a child-like faith that satisfied his intellect and animated his sentiments. His faith really grew into a passion. His fidelity to the truth of the doctrines of the Church or to the sacred offices of the papacy was never shaken either by the scandals of clerical life or the opposition of different popes to his political ideals. Frequently he raised his voice in protest yet, notwithstanding his censures against what he considered abuses in the external administration of the Church and the policy of her popes, on his part there was not the least suspicion of unsettled faith or revolutionary design. Strongly convinced of the divinity of the Church, his passionate nature could not help execrating the human element that would weaken her influence. "He teaches that the mystical Vine of the Church still grows and Peter and Paul who died for it, still live. He holds by that Church. He begs Christians not to be moved feather-like by every wind of doctrine. 'You have' he tells them 'the Old Testament and the New. The Pastor of the Church guides you, let this suffice for your salvation'" (Brother Azarias). In his devotional life Dante is just as ardent as he is firm in his adherence to dogma. While all Catholics are held to profess a common creed, each may follow the bent of his disposition and sympathy in pious practices, theologically called devotions. It seems to me that Dante had three such devotions which he practised intensely in his inner life. First, devotion to the sacred Humanity of Christ. In eleven places does he speak at length of Christ's two-fold nature as God and Man; in ten places does he refer to Christ as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, and wherever Cristo occurs at the end of a line, Dante out of reverence for the Sacred Person does not rime with it, but repeats the name itself. The climax of the Purgatorio is the apparition of the Griffin, the symbol of Christ. Further, on the stellar white cross of red-glowing Mars the poet shows the figure of the Redeemer. In the Empyrean Christ is represented in the unveiled glory of His human and divine natures. So teaching the doctrine of the Incarnation most clearly and most ardently Dante seeks to promote this cultus as the soul of the Catholic religion. Dante's second special devotion is to the Blessed Virgin. His Paradiso contains the best treatise on Mariology. The whole Divine Comedy indeed is the poet's loving testimonial of gratitude to the Madonna. It was through Mary that his visionary voyage to the other world was made possible. She rescued him when he was enslaved by sin and sent as his successive guides Virgil, Beatrice and St. Bernard. She of all creatures is proclaimed on every terrace of Purgatory first in virtue and highest in dignity and her example is exhibited as an unfailing source of inspiration to the Souls, to endure suffering cheerfully and to make themselves, like her, the exemplars of goodness in the highest degree. In Paradiso she is seen by the poet in all her unspeakable loveliness and beatitude and as Queen of Angels and of Saints her intercession is favorably invoked that Dante might enjoy the Vision of God himself. In the last canto of the poem her super-eminence and incomparable excellence are sung "with a sweetness of expression, a depth of philosophy and a tenderness of feeling that have never been surpassed in human language." "Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son, Humble and high beyond all other creatures, The limit fixed of the eternal counsel; Thou art the one who such nobility To human nature gave that its Creator Did not disdain to make Himself its creature. Within thy womb rekindled was the love By heat of which in the eternal peace, After such wise, this flower was germinated. Here unto us thou art a noonday torch Of charity, and below there among mortals Thou art the living fountainhead of hope. Lady, thou art so great and so prevailing, That he who wishes grace nor runs to thee, His aspirations without wings would fly. Not only thy benignity gives succor To him who asketh it, but oftentimes Forerunneth of its own accord the asking. In thee compassion is, in thee is pity, In thee magnificence; in thee unites Whatever of goodness is in any creature." The third private devotion of Dante is devotion to the Souls in Purgatory--a pious practice founded upon the scriptural words: "It is a holy and a wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins." Not only does Dante answer the objection raised as to the efficacy of prayer offered for the souls in Purgatory (VI, 28) but in many passages he promises his own prayers and works and seeks to arouse in others on earth a helpful sympathy for those souls. "Truly" he says, "we ought to help them to wash away their stains which they have borne hence, so that, pure and light, they may go forth to the starry spheres," (Purg. VI, 34.) To sum up Dante's attachment to his religion we can truly say not only his life but his great poem radiates the spirit and doctrine of the Church. Hettinger says of Dante: "In truth he anticipated the most pregnant developments of Catholic doctrine, mastered its subtlest distinctions and treated its hardest problems with almost faultless accuracy. Were all the libraries in the world destroyed and the Sacred Scripture with them, the whole Catholic system of doctrine and morals might be almost reconstructed out of the Divina Commedia." Intensity, indeed, is the characteristic of Dante's spiritual life. In bringing that quality to his faith and religious practice he was only manifesting the operation of the dominating quality which regulated his whole life and shaped all his mental and emotional habits. The realm of his thought and feeling was truly the land of the strenuous life. Having once set out to say of Beatrice what had never been said of any woman, Dante applied himself to his prodigious task with a consistency of purpose that was unmoved by persecution and unshaken by time. In all the years that he spent in the composition of the Divina Commedia there was no flagging of interest, no indication of weakness. No one ever applied himself with more complete absorption or with greater power of unfaltering concentration, just as no one ever felt more deeply the outrageous arrows of fortune or the transcendent supremacy of love. It is precisely because of this intensity that his thoughts and feelings affect us so profoundly six centuries later. Intense in his own life Dante had no sympathy with slackers or the lukewarm whom he characterizes as never having been alive, i.e. of never having awakened to responsibility to take part in good or evil. As a consequence they never contributed anything to society. Because in this life they shifted from one side to another, they are now depicted running perpetually after an aimlessly dodging banner. Here is the description of the punishment of the lukewarm: "Now sighs, cries, and shrill shrieks rang through the starless air: Whereat at first I began to weep, strange tongues, hurried speech, words of pain, accents of wrath, voices loud and weak, and the sound of hands accompanying them, made a tumult which revolves forever in that air endlessly dark, like sands blowing before a whirlwind. And I, whose head was hooded with horror, exclaimed: 'Master, what is it I hear? What kind of people is it that seems so vanquished by grief? And he replied: 'This is the miserable way followed by the sorry souls of those who lived without infamy and without glory. They are mingled with the mean choir of those angels who were not rebels and were not faithful to God, but were for themselves. Heaven cast them out lest its beauty should be spoiled; and deep Hell will not receive them, because the damned might derive some satisfaction from them.' "'Master,' I said, 'what is so grievous to them which makes them complain so loud?' 'I shall tell thee right briefly' he answered. 'These people have no hope of death and their blind life's so vile that they are envious of any other lot. The world allows no report of them to last: mercy and justice disdain them. Let us not speak of them but look and pass by!' And I, looking, saw a banner which ran circling so swift that it seemed scornful of all rest: and after it there came trailing such a long train of people that I should never have thought death had undone so many. When I had made out one or two of them I saw and recognized the shade of him who, for cowardice, made the great refusal. Forthwith I understood and was convinced that this was the sect of poltroons, obnoxious both to God and to God's enemies. These luckless creatures who never had been really alive, were naked and badly stung by flies and wasps which were there. These insects streaked their faces with blood which, mixed with tears, was caught by disgusting worms at their feet--" (Inferno III, 33. Grandgent's translation.) In reading that description of the punishment of the lukewarm, one cannot fail to observe that not one is called by name. Because they "lived without infamy and without glory" their name deserves to be lost forever to the world. Of the renown of Dante's own name our poet has no misgivings. He reveals himself as a man having supreme confidence in his own powers. Boccaccio represents him as saying when he was with his party at the head of the government of the republic of Florence, and when there was question of sending him on an embassy to Rome, "If I go, who stays? And if I stay, who goes?" "As if he alone," is the comment of Boccaccio, "was worth among them all, and as if the others were nothing worth except through him." It is certain that Dante put a high valuation upon his genius, an estimate due, perhaps, to the belief he held, like Napoleon, in the potency of his star. He was born under the constellation of the Gemini and to them in gratitude for his self-recognized talent he gives praise: "O glorious stars, O light impregnated With mighty virtue, from which I acknowledge All of my genius whatso'er it be, With you was born, and hid himself with you, He who is father of all mortal life, When first I tasted of the Tuscan air." (Par. XXII, 112) Certain it is that Dante acted on the counsel which, addressed to himself, he puts into the mouth of his beloved teacher, Brunetto Latini, "Follow thy star and thou cans't not miss the glorious port." (Inf., XV, 55.) In Purgatorio Dante says: "My name as yet marks no great sound," but he boasts that he will surpass in fame the Guidos, writers of verse: "Perchance some one is already born who will drive both from out the nest." He is so sure that posterity will confer immortality upon his work that he does not hesitate to make himself sixth among the greatest writers of the world. This passage occurs when he enters Limbus accompanied by Virgil to whom a group of spirits, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, make salutation. (Inf., IV, 76.) Posterity has bestowed greater renown on Dante's name than even he presumed to hope, for it has placed him in the Court of Letters with only one of the writers of antiquity, Homer, and with two subsequent writers, Cervantes and Shakespeare. Naturally we think that a writer who was so positively confident and boastful of his powers must have been given to pride and Dante indeed plainly indicates to us that he was guilty of this. But it was pride, we think, that was honorable and not a vice, a pride of which a lesser light, Lacordaire says, "By the grace of God, I abhor mediocrity." In the dark wood Dante represents the Lion (Pride) as preventing him from ascending the mountain--"He seemed to be coming to me with head upreared and with such raging hunger, that the air appeared to be in fear of him." (Inf., I, 43.) And that the poet's trepidation was justified he later makes known (Purg. XI, 136) when he expresses the fear that for pride he may be eternally punished. Perhaps it was because Dante recognized the pride of his learning, of his ancestry, of his associations with distinguished personages as his besetting sin that he exercised his skill as a master in showing us profound imagery representing the characteristics of pride. Carved out of the mountain in the first circle of a terrace of Purgatory are scenes illustrative of humility. While looking on these scenes, which seem to live and speak in their beautiful and compelling reality, the poet turns and sees approaching the forms of the proud. On earth they had exalted themselves as if they had the weight of the world on their shoulders, so now they are seen bent under huge burdens of stone, crumpled up in postures of agonizing discomfort. The poet, to let us know that he shares in their punishment, says: "With equal pace as oxen in the yoke, I, with that laden spirit, journey'd on Long as the mild instructor suffer'd me." (Purg. XII, 1) He apostrophizes them, but the words are really an upbraiding of himself for pride. "O ye proud Christians, wretched weary ones, Who in the vision of the mind infirm, Confidence have in your backsliding steps, Do ye not comprehend that we are worms Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly That flieth unto judgment without screen? Who floats aloft your spirit high in air? Like are ye unto insects undeveloped Even as the worm in whom formation fails! As to sustain a ceiling or a roof In place of corbel, sometimes a figure Is seen to join unto its knees its breast Which makes of the unreal, real anguish Arise in him who sees it: fashioned thus Beheld I these, when I had ta'en good heed True is it, they were more or less bent down According as they were more or less laden And he who had most patience on his looks Weeping did seem to say I can no more." (Purg. X, 121) Like all great men of undoubted sincerity Dante was intellectually big enough to change his mind when a new view presented itself in condemnation of an earlier judgment. So his "Vernacular Composition" retracts a statement he had made in the New Life where he had held that as amatory poems were addressed to ladies ignorant of Latin, Love should be the only subject the poet ought to present in the vernacular. He learned later and published his new view that there is good precedent for treating in the vulgar tongue not only Love but also Righteousness and War. Other examples of his honesty of mind are furnished in the Paradise where he expresses through the mouths of his disembodied teachers views opposed to those he had already advanced in his other works. Thus his theory of the spots on the moon, his statement as to the respective rank of the angelic orders, his assumption that Hebrew was the language of Adam and Eve--all yield to a maturer conception in contradiction to his original views. He is, it is true, sometimes blinded by partisanship or lacking in the historical perspective necessary for a true judgment of his contemporaries--but Dante is naturally so sincere a man that he is eager to be just to every one. Perhaps there is no better instance of the exercise of this quality than in his assigning to the heaven of Jupiter, Constantine, to whose supposed donation of vast territories, then regarded as genuine, Dante ascribes the corruption of the Church. Many readers, whose acquaintance with our poet does not extend beyond the Inferno, see in him only the incarnation of savagery and scorn. They fail to pay tribute to the wonderful power of his friendship or to recognize that his sufferings of adversity and injustice gave birth to deep passion. To them he seems only to place his few friends in Heaven and in Hell to roast all his enemies. It must be at once confessed that there are instances in the Divina Commedia which, taken by themselves, would lead one to so superficial an estimate of the man. In Canto VIII of the Inferno Dante with his guide, Virgil, enters a bark on the Styx and sails across the broad marsh. During the passage a spirit all covered with mud addresses Dante, who recognizes him as Filippo Argenti, a Florentine notorious for his arrogance and brutal violence. "Master," says Dante to Virgil, "I should be glad to see him dipped in this swill ere we quit the lake." And he to me, 'Before the shore comes to thy view thou shalt be satisfied.' A little while after this I saw the muddy people make such a rending of him that even now I praise and thank God for it. Such gloating over suffering surely seems to say to you: Here we have a man of a cruel vindictive nature. Again, in the ice of Caina, the region where traitors are immersed up to their heads, Dante hits his foot violently against the face of Bocca degli Abati who betrayed the Florentines at the crucial battle of Montaperti. "Weeping it cried out to me: 'Why tramplest thou on me? If thou comest not to increase the vengeance for Montaperti, why dost thou molest me?' I said: 'What art thou who thus reproachest others?' 'Nay who art thou' he answered 'that through the Antenora goest, smiting the cheeks of others, so that if thou wert alive, it were too much.' 'I am alive' was my reply 'and if thou seekest fame, it may be precious to thee, that I put thy name among the other notes.' And he to me. 'The contrary is what I long for, take thyself away!' Then I seized him by the afterscalp and said: 'It will be necessary that thou name thyself or that not a hair remain upon thee here.' Whence he to me: 'Even if thou unhair me I will not tell thee who I am.' I already had his hair coiled on my hand and had plucked off more than one tuft of it, he barking and keeping down his eyes, when another cried, 'What ails thee Bocca?' Having thus learned the sinner's name, the poet releases him, saying: 'accursed traitor I do not want thee to speak, for to thy shame I will bear true tidings'" (Inf., XXXII, 97.) Some may say that it is to Dante's shame that he shows himself so devoid of pity. Another example would seem to confirm this startling view of Dante's character. At the bottom of Hell, eager to learn the identity of a reprobate, a certain Friar Albergo, the poet promises him in return for the desired information to remove the ice from his eyes so that he may have "the poor consolation of grief unchecked." "Remove the hard veils from my face that I may vent the grief which stuffs my heart, a little ere the weeping freeze again! Wherefore I said to him. 'If thou woulds't have me aid thee, tell me who thou art, and if I do not extricate thee, may I have to go to the bottom of the ice.'" The poet of course knows that he must go thither to continue his journey to Purgatory, but the reprobate soul is unaware of such a course, and believes that the visitor has fortified his promise with a true oath. Both his name and the damning story of his life are soon told by the poor wretch, who then asks Dante for the fulfillment of the promise--the removal of the ice so that sight may be restored even for a minute. "'Open my eyes' he said--but I opened them not, to be rude to him was courtesy" (Inf., XXXIII, 148.) Does not Dante by his own words show himself deep-dyed in hatred and cruelty? "The case against him" says Dinsmore, "is not so bad as the first reading would indicate. Part of the explanation of his apparent cruelty undoubtedly lies in the fact that the poet would teach us that character is influenced by environment. In the circle of wrath, he is wrathful, in the pit of traitors he is false. Then we are to recall that Dante undoubtedly laid to heart Virgil's reproof, when he wept at the sad punishment of the soothsayers: 'Who is more wicked than he who feels compassion at the Divine Judgment.' Passionate love of God, Dante holds, implies passionate hatred of God's enemies. That is a thought expressed by the Psalmist. 'Lord, have I not hated them that hate thee and pined away because of thy enemies? I have hated them with a perfect hatred and they are become enemies to me' (CXXXVIII, 21). So it may be said that Dante has the spirit of the psalmist and seeks to love, as God loves, and to hate as God hates." Whether that explanation satisfy my readers or not, there is another side to Dante's character that is most attractive. "Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn," he was a paradox,--gentle and tender. Failure to see this phase of Dante's nature led Frederick Schlegel to declare that Dante's "chief defect is the want of gentle feelings"--a statement that called forth this exclamation from Lord Byron: "Of gentle feelings. And Francesca of Rimini and the father's feelings in Ugolino and Beatrice and the Pia! Why there is a gentleness in Dante above all gentleness when he is tender!" Let us see some examples of this tender quality in our poet. Only one endowed with gentleness and beauty of soul, could have conceived a Purgatory "not hot with sulphurous flames" remarks Dinsmore, "but healing the wounded spirit with the light of shimmering sea, the glories of morning, the perfume of flowers, the touch of angels, the living forms of art and the sweet strains of music." Only a man of warm-heartedness and delicate susceptibility at the sight of a row of souls, temporarily blinded, would have been touched to such an extent that he would be filled with anxiety lest in looking upon them and silently passing them by who could not return his gaze, he would show them some discourtesy. "It were a wrong, methought, to pass and look On others, yet myself, the while unseen, To my sage counsel therefore did I turn." (Purg. XIII,73) Gentleness also reveals itself in lovely lines wherein the poet speaks of the relations of parent and child. He tells us, for instance, how "An infant seeks his mother's breast When fear and anguish vex his troubled heart." (Purg. XXX.) He recalls how he himself with child-like sorrow stood confessing his sins: "As little children, dumb with shame's keen smart, Will listening stand with eyes upon the ground Owning their faults with penitential heart So then stood I." (Purg. XXXI, 66) When overcome by the splendor of the heaven Saturn it is as a child he turns to Beatrice for assurance: "Oppressed with stupor, I unto my guide Turned like a little child who always runs For refuge there where he confideth most, And she, even as a mother who straightway Gives comfort to her pale and breathless boy With voice whose wont is to reassure him, Said to me: 'Knowest thou not thou art in heaven?'" (Par. XXII, I) Again, it is the gentle heart of a fond father who speaks in the following lines: "Awaking late, no little innocent So sudden plunges towards its mother's breast With face intent upon its nourishment As I did bend." (Par. XXX, 85, Grandgent's trans.) Another figure of beautiful imagery makes us appreciate Dante's understanding of infantile emotion. He is eager to tell us how bright souls flame upward towards the Virgin Mother and here is the simile: "And as a babe which stretches either arm To reach its mother, after it is fed Showing a heart with sweet affection warm, Thus every flaming brightness reared its head And higher, higher straining, by its act The love it bore to Mary plainly said." (Par. XXIII, 121 Grandgent's trans.) Perhaps the most appealing example of Dante's kindly love for children springs from the fact that instead of following the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, who holds that in heaven the risen bodies of baby children will appear in the aspect of the prime of life, our poet discloses them with the charm of babyhood carrolling, as it were, the nursery songs of Heaven. Of those blessed infants he speaks: "Their youth, those little faces plainly tell, Their childish treble voices tell it, too, If thou but use thine eyes and listen well." (Par. XXXII, 46. Grandgent's trans.) Seeing so many examples of Dante's love for motherhood and children, one naturally wonders why he makes no mention of his own wife and children. But we have only to remember that a nice sense of delicacy may have restrained him from speaking of the sacredness of his family life. In this matter he exhibited the wisdom of the gentleman-Saint, Francis de Sales, who used to say, "Without necessity never speak of yourself well or ill." It was indeed a principle of propriety with our poet that talking about one's self in public is to be avoided as unbecoming unless there is need of self vindication or edification of others. Only once in the Divine Comedy does he mention his own name and at once he apologizes for the intrusion. It is true that the poem is autobiographical but it is that in so far as it concerns matters of universal interest from which the poet may draw the moral that what God has done for him He will do for all men if they will but let Him. That being so it was not necessary for him to exploit his family affairs. Out of the kindly heart of Dante sprang gratitude, one of the strongest virtues of his being. He never wearies in pouring forth thanks to his Maker for the gift of creation and His fatherly care of all beings in the universe. He is filled with unbounded gratitude to the Saviour for having become man and for having suffered and died for our salvation instead of taking an easier way of satisfying divine justice. In his works he mentions the name or the offices of the Holy Ghost eight times. To the Blessed Virgin, the saints and especially to Beatrice for their virtuous example and loving protection he is heartily grateful. His thankful affection is extended to those who showed him kindness particularly during the years of his homeless poverty. To them he offers the only thing he has to give--an undying tribute of praise. Tenderly he makes known his obligations to all those who taught him, both the teachers of his own day and the masters of past ages. But it is to Virgil, his ideal author, the guide whom he has chosen for his journey through Hell and Purgatory, that he offers his most touching tribute of gratitude. The occasion arises when he discovers his beloved Beatrice in the Garden of Eden and turns to Virgil to tell him of his overwhelming joy. But behold! his guide has vanished, his mission fulfilled. And all the joys of the earthly Paradise, originally forfeited by the sin of Eve, cannot compensate the disciple for the loss of his great master. In loneliness he weeps, staining again his face that had been washed clean with dew by Virgil when they emerged from Hell. Is there not genuine pathos in these lines? "Virgil was gone! and we were all bereft! Virgil my sweetest sire! Virgil who led My soul to safety, when no hope was left. Not all our ancient mother forfeited, All Eden, could prevent my dew cleansed cheek From changing whiteness to a tearful red." (Purg. XXX, 45, Grandgent's trans.) One quality is still necessary to complete the picture which our poet gives of himself. So far we see him as a man of strong faith, of abiding intensity--a man having supreme confidence in himself with resulting pride of life, a man big with splendid sincerity and dowered with deep passion, yet manifesting a gentle, gracious and grateful spirit. So composed, he is a combination of virtues that may inspire and traits that may attract many readers. But this is not the finished picture of the strangely fascinating man who has for six hundred years exercised an irresistible sway over hearts and minds. What feature is lacking? The one which has made him master over willing subjects who love and admire him whether they live in a monarchy or republic, a hovel or a palace, whether they are of his faith or alien to it. Because the world ever loves a lover, and because Dante is The Lover _par excellence_ whose love-story is one "to which heaven and earth have put their hand," he stands forth with a hold on humanity that is both enduring and supreme. Love as a passion and a principle of action never left him to his dying day, from the time when he, a boy of nine years of age, became attracted by the sweet little girl Beatrice. "She appeared to me" he says, "clothed in a most noble color, a modest and becoming crimson, and she was girt and adorned in such wise as befitted her very youthful age." If we add to those few lines the brief statements made later in the _New Life_ that her hair was light and her complexion a pearl-pink and that when he saw her as a maiden she was dressed in white, we have the only description that Dante ever gave of her personal appearance. It was love at sight. "I truly say that at that instant the spirit of life which dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, said these words: 'Behold a god stronger than I, who coming shall rule over me.' From that time forward Love lorded it over my soul which had been so speedily wedded to him and he began to exercise over me such control and such lordship, through the power which my imagination gave him, that it behooved me to do completely all his pleasure." If we are disposed to doubt Dante's capability of deep emotion at so tender an age we have only to remember that Cupid's darts pierced at an early age the hearts of others of precocious sensibilities. The love experience of Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, and Canova the sculptor, when they too were only children is a matter of history. This statement we shall the more readily accept if we recall the dictum of Pascal: "The passions are great in proportion as the intelligence is great. In a great soul everything is great." In the light of that principle we must say that if Dante's love attachment in early life runs counter to the experience of mankind, he is, even as a boy, exceptional in the power of imagination and peculiarly sensitive to heart impressions. His experience as a nine year old boy loving with a depth of increasing emotion a girl with whom there probably had never been any communication except a mere greeting, a love reverential, persisting, even after her marriage to another, continuing through the married life of the poet himself, a love, the story of which is celebrated in matchless verse,--all that is so unique a thing that critics have been led to deny the very existence of Beatrice or to see in the story an allegory which may be interpreted in various ways. Some critics see in Beatrice only the ideal of womanhood; others make her an allegory of conflicting things. Francesco Perez holds that Beatrice is only the figure of Active Intelligence, while Dante Gabriel Rossetti advances the fantastic theory that she is the symbol of the Roman Empire, and love--the anagram of Roma--on Dante's part is only devotion to the imperial cause. According to Scartazzini, Beatrice is the symbol of the Papacy. Gietmann denies the historicity of Beatrice and declares that she typifies the Church. The argument for this theory expressed by a sympathetic reviewer of Gietmann's book, "Beatrice, Geist und Kern der Danteshen Dichtung," follows: "Beatrice is the soul and center of the poet's works, his inspiring genius, the ideal which moulds his life and character. If we consider her as a mere historical personage we must look upon those works as silly and meaningless romances, and on the poet himself as a drivelling day-dreamer. "But if we are able to assign to Dante's beloved an appropriate and consistent allegorical character, in keeping with the views of the poet's time, and with the quality of the varied material which goes to build up his poetic structures, his creations will appear not only intelligible and natural, but unfold a treasure of thought and beauty nowhere else to be found, while the poet himself will be shown to be not only one of the greatest masters of thought and imagination, but one of the noblest and loftiest minds to be met with in the history of letters" (John Conway, Am. Cath. Quar. Review, April, 1892). The editor of the English Quarterly Review (July, 1896, p. 41) while not denying the real existence of Beatrice argues that she represents Faith, and affirms that the story of Dante's love for her, a love wavering at times, represents the conflict of Faith and Science. You will be interested in seeing, as a curiosity of literature, how that author attempts the translation into allegory of Dante's account of his first meeting with Beatrice. This is the translation--Dante speaking in the first person says: "At the close of my ninth year I experienced strong impressions of religion. This was the time of my Confirmation and my First Communion. I was filled with reverence for the wondrous truths instilled into my mind by those whom I loved best: and my whole being glowed with the roseate glow of a first love. My feelings were rapturous yet constant; and from that time I date the beginning of a New Life. From that time forward I was so completely under the influence of this divine principle that my soul was, as it were, espoused to heavenly love, and it was in the precepts and ordinances of the Church that this passion found its proper satisfaction. Often and often did it lead me to the congregation of the faithful, where I had meetings with my youthful angel and these were so gratifying that all through my boyhood I would frequently go in search of a repetition of those pleasures and I perceived her so noble and admirable in all her bearings, that of her might assuredly be said that saying of Homer: 'She seemed no daughter of mortal man but of God.'" We need not be surprised that there is such divergence of opinion among critics as to the interpretation of Dante. He himself in The Banquet (bk. II, ch. 15), written some years after his New Life, tells us that there is a hidden meaning back of the literal interpretation of his words. That is especially true of the Divine Comedy, as he writes to Can Grande in explanation of the purpose of the poem. In the Paradiso he bids this lacking in power of penetration to pierce the symbolism, to accompany him no longer on his journey through the invisible world. "O ye who in some pretty little boat Eager to listen, have been following Behind my ship, that singing sails along, Turn back to look again upon your shores, Do not put out to sea, lest, peradventure, In losing me, you might yourselves be lost." (Par. bk. II, I.) With obscurity thus acknowledged, is it any wonder that Dante is subjected to prolonged controversy by historical criticism which has not hesitated to cast doubt upon the authorship of the Iliad and the Synotic Gospels? In the face of this obscurity it is the opinion of such well known Dantian scholars as D'Ancona, Charles Eliot Norton, John Addington Symonds, Dean Plumtre, Edmund Gardiner, W.W. Vernon, Paget Toynbe, C.H. Grandgent, Jefferson B. Fletcher, James Russell Lowell--that Beatrice is both a real human being and a symbol. The direct testimony, not to urge the subtle arguments furnished by internal evidence of Dante's works, as to the reality of Beatrice Portinari as the beloved of our poet is offered first by Boccaccio who was acquainted with Dante's daughter Beatrice, a nun who lived near enough to the poet to get information from the Portinari family. Certainly Boccaccio did not hesitate when chosen in 1373 by the Florentines to lecture on Dante, to make the very positive statement that the boy Dante, "received the image of Beatrice Portinari into his heart with such affection that from that day forward as long as he lived it never departed from him." That statement was doubtless made within the hearing of many relatives and friends of the families concerned, the Alighieri, the Portinari, the Bardi. "If the statement was false," argues Dr. Edward Moore, England's foremost Dantian scholar, "it must have been so glaring and palpable that its assertion could only have covered Boccaccio with ridicule." The second authority for the statement that Beatrice Portinari had a real existence and was the object of Dante's love is furnished by Dante's own son Pietro, who wrote a commentary on the Divine Comedy nineteen years after his father's demise--a commentary in which he declares "because mention is here first made of Beatrice of whom so much has been said, especially in the third book of the Paradiso, it is to be premised that there really was a lady Beatrice by name, greatly distinguished for her beauty and virtues who, in the time of the author, lived in the city of Florence and who was of the house of certain Florentine citizens called the Portinari, of whom the author Dante was a suitor. During the life of the said lady, he was her lover and he wrote many ballads to her honor. After her death in order that he might make her name famous, he, in this his poem, frequently introduced her under the allegory and style of theology." The third witness quoted by W.W. Vernon, is Benvenuto da Imola who attended the lectures of Boccaccio and succeeded him as incumbent of the chair of Dantian literature, established by the government of Florence. This Florentine professor whose "commentary on Dante was written only fifty years after the death of the poet, expressly states that this Beatrice (he does not mention her family name) was really and truly a Florentine of great beauty and most honorable reputation. When she was eight years old she so entered into Dante's heart that she never went out from it and he loved her passionately for sixteen years, at which time she died. His love increased with his years: he would follow her where-ever she went and always thought that in her eyes he could behold the summit of human happiness. Dante in his works, at one time, takes Beatrice as a real personage and at another in a mysterious sense as Sacred Theology" (Readings on Inf., I, 61.) The question now arises: Did Beatrice know of Dante's love and did she reciprocate his passion? Many critics answer in the negative, believing that an affirmative view must premise a guilty love since Beatrice was married to Simone de Bardi and Dante to Gemma Donati. But an opposite view holds that such a deduction overlooks the unique fact that the love of Dante and Beatrice was purely spiritual and mystical. Doctor Zahm says that Dante's passion was "a species of homage to the beloved which was common during the age of the troubadours but which has long since disappeared--a chivalrous devotion to a woman, neither wife nor mistress, by means of which the spirit of man, were he knight or poet, was rendered capable of self-devotion, and of noble deeds and of rising to a higher ideal of life" (Great Inspirers, p. 245.) In any event we know that it was a most noble, exalting sentiment and if we accept the statement of Bishop de Serravalle, the love was mutual and lasting. This ecclesiastic while attending the council of Florence in 1414 was asked by the Bishops of Bath and Salisbury, England, to make a Latin translation of the Divine Comedy. In the preamble to his translation he not only declares that Dante historically and literally loved Beatrice (_"Dantes delexit hanc puellam historice et literaliter"_) but he affirms that the love was reciprocal and that it lasted during the lifetime of Beatrice, ("_Philocaptus fuit de ipsa et ipsa de ipso, qui se invicem dilexerunt quousque vixit ipsa puella_"). Only by holding such a view can we really appreciate the significance and beauty of that episode in Purgatorio depicting the first meeting of the lovers in the invisible world after ten years' separation--a meeting said to be "one of the most touching and beautiful episodes in all literature." In the Terrestrial Paradise a voice is heard after the sudden departure of Virgil. "Dante" it says "though Virgil leave thee, weep not, weep not yet, for thou must weep for a greater wound. I beheld that Lady who had erst appeared to me under a cloud of flowers cast by angel's hands: and she was gazing at me across the stream ... 'Look at us well. We are, indeed Beatrice. Hast thou then condescended to come to the mountain?' (the mountain of discipline)--Shame weighed down my brow. The ice that had collected about my heart, turned to breath and water and with agony issued from my breast through lips and eyes." Beatrice then proceeds to tell the angels of her love for the poet and of his faithlessness to her. "For some time I sustained him with the sight of my face. Showing to him my youthful eyes I led him toward the right quarter. As soon as I reached the threshold of the second age of man and passed from mortal to eternal life he took himself from me and gave himself to another." Beatrice now turns to Dante and rebukes him: "In order the more to shame thee from thine error and to make thee stronger, never did nature and art present to thee a charm equal to that fair form now scattered in earth with which I was enclosed. And if this greatest of charms so forsook thee at my death, what mortal thing should thereafter have led thee to desire it? Verily at the first hour of disappointment over elusive things, thou shouldst have flown up after me who was no longer of them. Thou shouldst not have allowed thy wings to be weighed down to get more wounds, either by a little maid or by any other so short lived vanity." The effect of her rebuke is the overwhelming of his heart with shame and contrition. "So much remorse gnawed at my heart that I fell vanquished and what I then became she knoweth who gave me the cause" (Purg. XXXI, 49). He arose forgiven, the memory of his sin removed by the waters of Lethe. Then drinking of the waters of Eunoe he was made fit to ascend to Heaven. To understand the allusion to his defection and to see the progressive development of his love of Beatrice as a woman, then as a living ideal and finally as an animated symbol--the various transfigurations in which Beatrice appears to him, we must go back to his New Life--the book of which Charles Eliot Norton says--"so long as there are lovers in the world and so long as lovers are poets this first and tenderest love-story of modern literature will be read with appreciation and responsive sympathy." It is hardly to be supposed that the nine year old lover noted with minute care in his diary, his first meeting of Beatrice Portinari but as he looked back on the event years later he saw that the vision had been the the greatest crisis in his mental, moral and spiritual history. The story begins in the first page of the New Life. A real living child familiarly called Bice, the diminutive for Beatrice, enamoured Dante with a real, genuine love. "After that meeting," says the poet, "I in my boyhood often went seeking her and saw her of such noble and praiseworthy deportment that truly of her might be said the word of the poet Homer: 'She seems not the daughter of mortal man but of God.'" Nine years passed and the child, now a maiden, "blooming in her beauty's spring, saluted me with such virtue that it seemed to me that I saw all the bounds of bliss. Since it was the first time her words came to my ears I took in such sweetness that, as it were intoxicated, I turned away from the folk and betaking myself to the solitude of my own chamber I sat myself down to think of this most courteous lady." A little later the wrapt expression of his loving eyes as he looks at Beatrice attracts the attention of others and to misdirect them, he feigns love for the lady he calls the screen of truth and writes verses in her honor. On the part of Beatrice there is misunderstanding of the amatory verses he writes at this period and she withholds her greeting. Then, more than ever, he realizes what that salutation meant to him. Deprived of it now, he dwells upon the sweet memory of the salutation: "In the hope of her marvelous salutation there no longer remained to me an enemy, nay, a flame of charity possessed me which made me pardon everyone who had done me wrong." Under the influence of her salutation, Dante tells us that he devised this sonnet: "So gentle and so gracious doth appear My lady when she giveth her salute That every tongue becometh, trembling, mute: Nor do the eyes to look upon her dare Although she hears her praises, she doth go Benignly vested with humility: And like a thing come down, she seems to be, From heaven to earth, a miracle to show. So pleaseth she whoever cometh nigh. She gives the heart a sweetness through the eyes, Which none can understand who doth not prove And from her countenance there seems to move A spirit, sweet, and in Love's very guise, Who to the soul, in going sayeth: 'Sigh.'" (Norton's translation.) Because she now denies to him the bliss of salutation he says: "I went into a solitary place to bathe the earth with most bitter tears." But this misunderstanding is not his only torment. Almost from his second meeting he fears that his beloved will soon die. His prophetic vision becomes an agonising reality when in 1290 in her twenty-fourth year, the eyes that radiated bliss are closed in death. So stunned was he by the blow that his life was despaired of. When he recovered it seemed to him that Florence had lost her gaiety and desolate is mourning the loss of his beloved one. Pilgrims passing on their way to Galicia do not appear to share the general grief. To arouse their sympathy in the loss which the city has sustained the heart-broken poet lover devises a sonnet "in which I set forth that which I had said to myself. Pilgrims: If through your will to hear, awhile ye stay, Truly my heart with sighs declare to me That ye shall afterwards depart in tears. Alas her Beatrice now lost hath she. And all the words that one of her way may say Have virtue to make weep whoever hears." (Norton's translation.) In his great affliction his grieving heart is sustained by his belief in immortality. His vision penetrates the skies and he sees his 'lady of virtue' in glory in the regions of the eternal. "The gentle lady to my mind had come Who, for the sake of her exceeding youth, Had by the Lord most High been ta'en from earth To that calm heaven where Mary hath her home." In heaven indeed more than upon earth she enamours the poet. There divested of her mortal veil, to his eyes she "grew perfectly and spiritually fair," leading him to fit himself to put on immortality. The passion of his boyhood has now become the ennobling ideal of his life. Sustaining and stimulating him, saving him from himself, ever leading him upward and onward, his angelicized lady is an abiding presence with him whether he is deep in the contemplation of the study of philosophy and the learning of the ancients, or engaged in the activity of military or political life, or as homeless wayfarer in exile, making his way from place to place. When he falls from grace it is Beatrice who disturbs his peace of mind by "a battle of thoughts." It is the "strong image" of Beatrice who comes to him as he had seen her as a child, raises him from moral obliquity, fills him with the very essence of the spiritual. Then he has a wonderful vision--"a vision in which I saw things which made me resolve to speak no more of this blessed one (Beatrice) until I could more worthily treat of her. And to attain to this I study to the utmost of my power as she truly knows: So that if it shall please Him through whom all things live that my life be prolonged for some years, I hope to say of her what was never said of any woman." That promise, involving years of intense study and increasing devotion to his beloved, Dante kept. The Divine Comedy is his matchless monument to her who is the protagonist and muse of his poem and the love of his heart. "Not only has the poet made her" says Norton, "the loveliest and most womanly woman of the Middle Ages at once absolutely real and truly ideal," but he has done what no poet had ever before conceived, thereby achieving something unique in the whole range of literature--he has "imparadised" among the saints and angels his lovely wonder, Beatrice, "that so she spreads even there a light of love which makes the angels glad and even to their subtle minds can bring a certain awe of profound marvelling." He has given to her such a glorious exaltation that after Rachel and Eve she of all women is enthroned in the glowing Rose of Heaven next to the Virgin Mother, "our tainted nature's solitary boast," and so enthroned, Beatrice is at once his beloved and the symbol of revelation, the heavenly light that discloses to mankind both the true end of our being and the realities of Eternity. Now with tremulous delight in his heart, admiration on his lips, ecstasy in his soul, he is able to render her perhaps the very purest tribute of praise and gratitude that ever came out of a human soul: "O Lady, thou in whom my hope is strong And who, for my salvation, didst endure In Hell to leave the imprint of thy feet, Of whatsoever things I have beheld, As coming from thy power and from thy goodness I recognize the power and the grace. Thou from a slave hast brought me unto freedom, By all those ways, by all the expedients, Whereby thou hast the power of doing it. Preserve towards me thy magnificence So that this soul of mine, which thou hast healed Pleasing to thee be loosened from the body." Norton says: "It is needful to know Dante as a man in order fully to appreciate him as poet." What manner of man then was he? Redeemed by love, he was, to quote John Addington Symonds, "the greatest, truest, sincerest man of modern Europe." DANTE'S INFERNO DANTE'S INFERNO At no period of modern times do we find that literature showed an interest more keen in the Hereafter than at the present day. Religion has always used both pen and voice to direct men's thoughts towards eternity, but now it is literature that goes for subject-matter to religion. This change of attitude is due, no doubt, to the fact that several factors in present-day life--factors that literature cannot ignore, have turned popular thought to religion. The World-war has disciplined the character of men by the unspeakable experiences of contact with shot, shell and shrapnel and the result has been that countless numbers have turned to religion for strength and consolation. Countless thousands whose dear ones made the supreme sacrifice for the ideals of patriotism, also find in religion their only solace. Those who have not this refuge turn to spiritualism and psychical research in a futile effort to find a satisfactory solution of the problem of the Hereafter. Again and again we see the unrest of the ever-questioning soul depicted in the drama and the literature of the day as it seeks enlightenment on the potentiality of the future life. The stage presents plays based on spiritualistic manifestations or upon supernatural healing or miraculous intervention. Many recent novels have either psychical phenomena for their central interest or plots evolved out of the miraculous in religion. As exponents of psychical research, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W.T. Stead and Sir Oliver Lodge make an appeal to readers to accept as scientific truths, the psychical manifestations of the unseen world. A typical answer is given to that appeal by a distinguished writer, Doctor Inge, Dean of St. Paul's, London, who declares: "If this kind of after-life were true, this portrayed in the pitiable revival of necromancy in which many desolate hearts have sought spurious satisfaction, it would, indeed, be a melancholy postponement or negation of all we hope and believe about our dead." Prescinding from any attempt to discuss the occult phenomena evoked, observed and studied in our day or to treat of the matters involved in the supernatural in the books of the day, one may state as a fact that the whole tendency of present day literature is to show a yearning for light on a subject of fundamental importance to human nature. Far back in the history of the race Job gave voice to the spiritual problems that are today engaging the attention of the world. Some fifteen hundred years ago, St. Augustine proposed to himself the question which so generally concerns the twentieth century: "On what matter of all those things of which thou art ignorant, hast thou the greatest desire for enlightenment?" The great Bishop of Hippo becomes the spokesman of humanity when he answers his own question by proposing another: "Am I immortal or not?" (Soliloquia 2d). In the realms of literature no work of man has answered that question with greater vividness of imagery, intensity of concentration, beauty of description--all based in a large measure on the teachings of Christianity--than has Dante in his Divine Comedy. Devised as a love offering to the memory of his beloved Beatrice who in the work is symbolized as Heavenly Light on the things hidden from man, the poem leads the reader through the dark abyss of Hell, the patient abode of Purgatory, the glorious realm of Heaven as if the poet had seen Eternity in reality instead of in imagination. Not only the state and the conditions of the soul after death does he visualize with the precision of Euclid, but as a philosopher and a theologian he proposes for our instruction in the course of the journey many questions of dogmatic and speculative thought affecting the Hereafter. He believes himself called to be not simply a poet to entertain his readers, but a prophet and a preacher with burning fire to deliver a message for man's salvation. So he asks the help of Heaven: "O Supreme Light that so high upliftest Thyself from mortal conceptions, re-lend a little to my mind of what Thou didst appear and make my tongue so powerful that it may be able to leave one single spark of Thy glory, for the future people: for by returning to my memory and by sounding a little in these verses, more of Thy victory shall be conceived" (Par. XXXIII, 67). Comedy is the title which Dante gives to his trilogy and posterity has added the prefix adjective divine. The term comedy however is not used in the modern sense which suggests to us a light laughable drama written in a familiar style. "Comedy" Dante himself explains in his dedication of the poem, "is a certain kind of poetical narrative which differs from all others. It differs from tragedy in its subject matter in this way, that tragedy in the beginning is admirable and quiet, in its ending or catastrophe foul and horrible ... Comedy on the other hand, begins with adverse conditions, but its theme has a happy termination. Likewise they differ in their style of language, for tragedy is lofty and sublime, comedy lowly and humble. "From this it is evident why the present work is called a comedy, for if we consider the theme in its beginning it is horrible and foul because it is Hell; in its ending fortunate, desirable and joyful because it is Paradise: and if we consider the style of language the style is lowly and humble because it is the vulgar tongue in which even housewives hold converse." The theme of the poem Dante himself explains: "The subject of the work literally taken is the state of souls after death; this is the pivotal idea of the poem throughout its entire course. In the allegorical sense the poet treats of the hell of this world through which we are journeying as pilgrims, with the power of meriting and demeriting, and the subject is man, in as much as by his merits and demerits he is subject to divine Justice, remunerative or retributive" (Epis. dedicat. ad Can Grande). One of the earliest commentators amplifies the poet's statement. Benvenuto da Imola writes: "The matter or subject of this book is the state of the human soul both as connected with the human body and as separated from it. As the state of the whole is threefold, so does the author divide his work into three parts. A soul may be in sin; such a one even while it lives with the body, is morally speaking dead, and hence it is in moral Hell; when separated from the body, if it died incurably obstinate, it is in the actual Hell. Again a soul may be receding from vice: such a one while still in the body is in the moral Purgatory, or in the act of penance in which it purges away its sin; if separated, it is in the actual Purgatory. Yet even while living in the body, a soul is already in a manner in Paradise, for it exists in as great felicity as is possible in this life of misery: separated from the body, it is in the heavenly Paradise where there is true and perfect happiness, where it enjoys the vision of God." (Ozanam, Dante, p. 129.) This testimony as to the subject matter of the Divine Comedy is brought forth to offset the statements not infrequently made by expositors who deny or ignore the supernatural that Dante's full thought can be realized even if the reader rejects the poet's spiritual teaching, especially his doctrine of the existence of a real Heaven and a real Hell. It is true that Dante is "such a many-sided genius that he has a message for almost every person." It is likewise true that an allegorical interpretation may be adopted with no belief in the Hereafter and it may open up many fruitful lessons for the reader. That being granted, one may still ask whether one can ignore Dante's doctrine of future rewards and punishment and so get full satisfaction from treating the poet's conception of the Hereafter as a mere allegory. The allegory presupposes that sin inevitably brings its own penalty. But in this life virtue does not always bear its own reward nor is evil always followed by retribution. Dante as the prophet and the preacher of Christianity would have us understand, as Benvenuto da Imola points out, that if the moral law is not vindicated in this life it will be in the Hereafter, for our acts make our eternity. So the poet holds that while this life according as it shows the soul in sin, in repentance or in virtue may be considered allegorically Hell, Purgatory or Heaven, before the Last Judgment a real Hell, a real Purgatory, a real Heaven is the abode of disembodied spirits according to their demerits or merits and after the Last Judgment, Purgatory no longer existing, souls will be in eternal suffering in Hell or in unending joy in Heaven. It is not to be expected that any reader will believe that Dante's Hell is a photograph of reality. It is a Hell largely fashioned by poetic visions and political theories, peopled in a great measure by those who stand in opposition to the poet's theory of government. It is not, as is sometimes asserted, a place to which the poet consigns his personal enemies. As Dinsmore says: "Dante had too much greatness in his soul and too much pride (it may be) to make revenge a personal matter: he had nothing but contempt for his own enemies and never except in the case of Boniface VIII ... did he place a single one of them in the Inferno, not even his judge Cante Gabriella." Though largely colored by his political theories Dante's Hell is also a theological conception based on the teaching of the Catholic Church that Hell exists as a place or state of punishment for the rebel angels and for man dying impenitent, that is, for man in whom sin has become so humanized that death finds him not simply in the act or habit of sin but so transformed that in the striking words of Bossuet, "he is man made sin." Dante fully accepted that doctrine which had been the constant tradition and faith of the Church and had been reaffirmed in the second ecumenical Council of Lyons held when Dante was a boy, nine years of age. It is not unlikely with his precocity for knowledge and sentiment at that age that he was deeply impressed with the history of that council especially as its legislation also dealt with the Crusades, the union of Churches, the reform of the Church, the appointment of a king of the Romans and an emperor--matters of vital importance to him later. He must have recalled that Council also with special interest, for two of his ideal personages, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure met their death, one on his way to the Council, the other while actually attending its sessions. In any event Dante firmly believed the doctrine of the Hereafter "that they that have done good shall go into life everlasting and they that have done evil, into everlasting fire." He held that the punishment of the damned is two-fold. The greater punishment, called the pain of loss, consists in the loss of the Beatific Vision, a suffering so great that the genius of St. Augustine can hardly translate it in human language. "To be separated from God," he says, "is a torment as great as the very greatness of God." The other pain of the reprobate consists in the torment of fire so frequently mentioned in Holy Writ. "According to the greater number of theologians the term fire denotes a material and so a real fire ... (but) there have never been wanting theologians who interpret the scriptural term fire metaphorically as denoting an incorporeal fire and thus far the Church has not censured their opinion" (Cath. Encyclo., VIII, 211.) While the pain of loss and the pain of sense constitute the very essence of the punishment of Hell, theologians teach that there are other sufferings called accidental. The reprobate never experience v.g. the least real pleasure nor are they ever free from the hideous presence of one another. After the Last Judgment the lost souls will also be tormented by union with their bodies, a union bringing about a fresh increase of punishment. On this subject, for our information Dante addresses Virgil his guide through Hell: "Master, will these torments after the great sentence increase or diminish?" Virgil explains that they will become worse because when the soul is united again to the body there will be perfection of being and the resulting sensitiveness will be the more intense. "Return unto thy science," answers Virgil, "which wills that as a thing more perfect is the more it feels of pleasure and of pain." (Inf., VI, 40.) Dante also holds that only by way of exception is there any escape from Hell once a soul is condemned. Following a legend commonly believed in the Middle Ages that in answer to the prayers of Pope Gregory the Great, the soul of the Emperor Trajan was delivered from Hell, Dante assumes that God who could not save Trajan against his will, allowed his soul to "come back to its bones" and while thus united to use its will for salvation. So regenerated Trajan is placed by Dante, in the Heaven of Jupiter (Par. XX 40, 7). Referring to this incident the Catholic Encyclopedia says: "In itself it is no rejection of Catholic dogma to suppose that God might at times by way of exception, liberate a soul from Hell. Thus some argued from a false interpretation of I Peter III, 19 seq. that Christ freed several damned souls on the occasion of His descent into Hell. Others were led by untrustworthy stories into the belief that the prayers of Gregory the Great rescued the Emperor Trajan from Hell but now theologians are unanimous in teaching that such exceptions never take place and never have taken place" (VIII, 209.) As to the location of Hell it is the poet Dante and not Dante the theologian, as we shall see later, who gives definite place and boundaries to Hell. He knows that on this subject the Church has decided nothing, holding to the statement of St. Augustine: "It is my opinion that the nature of hell-fire and the location of Hell are known to no man unless the Holy Ghost made it known to him by a special revelation." Dante makes his Hell big enough to hold the majority of mankind. He thinks that the elect will be comparatively few--just numerous enough to fill those places in heaven forfeited by the rebel angels who formed according to his conjecture, about a tenth of the angelical host. That their places in Heaven are already nearly filled leaving little room for future generations Dante makes known in the words of Beatrice: "Behold our City's circuit, oh how vast Behold our benches now so full that few Are they who are henceforth lacking here." (Par. XXX, 130.) His theory of restrictive salvation, it may be noted, is not in accord with the teaching of the Church which holds that to every man God gives grace sufficient for salvation. That is true even as affecting the heathen and those living in place or in time far removed from the Cross. St. Thomas Aquinas expresses this doctrine of the Church when he writes: "If anyone who is born in a barbaric nation does what lieth in him, God will reveal what is necessary for salvation, either by internal inspiration or by a teacher." The farcical element is not wanting in the Inferno, a fact proving that our poet, in furnishing the episodes, not superior to his age which demanded especially in the religious plays presented in the public square the sight of the discomfiture of the devil in scenes provoking the audience to laughter. The best example of such farcicality occurs in the eighth circle, fifth bolgia, where officials, traffickers in public offices, or unjust stewards are immersed in boiling pitch. From time to time when the fiends are not alert the reprobate here come to the surface for a breathing or cooling spell, like dolphins on the approach of a storm darting in the air and diving back again or like frogs with their muzzles alone exposed and their bodies covered by the water, resting on the banks of a stream into which they drop at the first approach of danger. Getting in this way momentary relief from suffering a grafter named Ciampolo, a former retainer of King Thibaut II of Navarre, lingered too long and was deftly hooked by Graffiacane amid the savage exultations of the other fiends, who proceed to maltreat the unfortunate wretch. The hideous confusion of attacks by the demons is stopped long enough for the poet to learn his history, and also what is more interesting to Dante, the names of two Italians, Friar Gomita and Michel Zanche who are likewise suffering in the boiling pitch. Ciampolo, to save himself from further maltreatment and to escape from his captors, now has recourse to stratagem. He promises that if they consent to withdraw out of sight he will whistle a signal that will be recognized only by his hapless comrades; the two Italians and five others will then come to the surface for cool air. The fiends may then have not one, but seven to rend! The crafty plan succeeds. The demons withdraw behind the crags and then Ciampolo plunges deeply into the boiling pitch. Two devils, endeavoring to swoop down upon him now beyond their reach, fall upon each other in brutal fury, while the rest of the troop hurry to the opposite shore to rescue the belimed pair. Here is Dante's description of the farce: "As dolphins, when with the arch of the back; they make sign to mariners that they may prepare to save their ship: so now and then, to ease the punishment, some sinner showed his back and hid in less time than it lightens. And as at the edge of the water of a ditch, the frogs stand only with their muzzles out, so that they hide their feet and other bulk: thus stood on every hand the sinners; but as Barbariccia approached, they instantly retired beneath the seething. I saw, and my heart still shudders thereat, one linger so, as it will happen that one frog remains while the other spouts away; and Graffiancane, who was nearest to him, hooked his pitchy locks and haled him up, so that to me he seemed an otter. "I already knew the name of every one, so well I noted them as they were chosen, and when they called each other, listened how. 'O Rubicante, see thou plant thy clutches on him, and flay him!' shouted together all the accursed _crew_. And I: 'Master, learn if thou canst, who is that piteous _wight_, fallen into the hands of his adversaries.' My Guide drew close to (his side) and asked him whence he came; and he replied: 'I was born in the kingdom of Navarre. My mother placed me as servant of a lord; for she had borne me to a ribald master of himself and of his substance. Then I was domestic with the good King Thibault; here I set myself to doing barratry, of which I render reckoning in this heat.' And Ciriatto, from whose mouth on either side came forth a tusk as from a hog, made him feel how one of them did rip. Amongst evil cats the mouse had come; but Barbariccia locked him in his arms, and said: 'Stand off whilst I enforke him!' And turning his face to my Master: 'Ask on,' he said, 'if thou wouldst learn more from him, before some other undo him.' "The Guide therefore: 'Now say, of the other sinners knowest thou any that is a Latian, beneath the pitch?' And he: 'I parted just now from one who was a neighbour of theirs (on the other side); would I still were covered with him, for I should not fear claw nor hook!' And Libicocco cried: 'Too much have we endured,' and with the hook seized his arm and mangling carried off a part of brawn. Draghignazzo, he too, wished to have a catch at the legs below; whereat their decurion wheeled around around with evil aspect. When they were somewhat pacified, my Guide, without delay, asked him that still kept gazing on his wound: 'Who was he, from whom thou sayest that thou madest an ill departure to come ashore?' And he answered: 'It was Friar Gomita, he of Gallura, vessel of every fraud, who had his master's enemies in hand, and did so to them that they all praise him for it: money took he for himself, and dismissed them smoothly, as he says; and in his other offices besides, he was no petty but a sovereign barrator. With him keeps company Don Michel Zanche of Logodoros; and in speaking of Sardinia the tongues of them do not feel weary. Oh me! see that other grinning; I would say more; but fear he is preparing to claw my scurf.' And their great Marshal, turning to Farfarello, who rolled his eyes to strike, said: 'Off with thee, villainous bird!' 'If you wish to see or hear Tuscans or Lombards,' the frightened sinner then resumed, 'I will make them come. But let the (evil claws hold back) a little, that they may not fear their vengeance; and I, sitting in this same place, for one that I am, will make seven come, on whistling, as is our wont to do, when any of us gets out.' "O Reader, thou shalt hear new sport! All turned their eyes toward the other side, he first who had been most unripe for doing it. The Navarrese chose well his time; planted his soles upon the ground, and in an instant leapt and from their purpose freed himself. Thereat each was stung (with guilt); but he most who had been the cause of the mistake; he therefore started forth, and shouted: 'Thou'rt caught!' But little it availed (him); for wings could not outspeed the terror; the _sinner_ went under; and he, flying, raised up his breast: not otherwise the duck suddenly dives down, when the falcon approaches, and he returns up angry and defeated. "Calcabrina, furious at the trick, kept flying after him, desirous that the sinner might escape, to have a quarrel. And, when the barrator had disappeared, he turned his talons on his fellow, and was clutched with him above the ditch. But the other was indeed a sparrowhawk to claw him well; and both dropt down into the middle of the boiling pond. The heat at once unclutched them; but rise they could not, their wings were so beglued. Barbariccia with the rest lamenting, made four of them fly over to the other coast with all their drags; and most rapidly on this side, on that, they descended to the stand; they stretched their hooks towards the limed pair, who were already scalded within the crust; and we left them thus embroiled." (XXII, 19.) The grotesque, also, plays a part in the Inferno appearing not only in the demons taken from classical legend and deformed into caricatures, but also in the punishment of crimes, v.g. simony and malfeasance in public office, regarded by our poet as malicious in themselves and grotesque in their perversity. Readers who regard the grotesque as a repelling element in the Inferno may be surprised to learn that Ruskin considers this feature of Dante's writings an expression of the highest human genius. The great English critic writes: "I believe that there is no test of greatness in nations, periods, nor men more sure than the development, among them or in them of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention or incapability of understanding it. I think that the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance and imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties, all at their highest is Dante; and in him the grotesque reaches at once the most distinct and the most noble development to which it was ever brought in the human mind. Of the grotesqueness of our own Shakespeare I need hardly speak, nor of its intolerableness to his French critics; nor of that of �schylus and Homer, as opposed to the lower Greek writers; and so I believe it will be found, at all periods, in all minds of the first order." Dante's doctrine of punishment presupposes certain primary truths which the Church proclaims today as she did in Dante's day. According to the Florentine's creed, man must answer to God for his moral life because he has free will. He cannot excuse his evil deed on the ground of necessity. Even in the face of planetary influence and of temptation from within, by his evil inclinations, and from without by solicitation of other agents man has still such discernment between good and evil and such power to make choice freely, that moral judgment with him is free. "Who hath been tried thereby and made perfect," says Holy Writ, "he shall have glory everlasting. He that could have transgressed, and hath not transgressed and could do evil things, and hath not done them." (Eccli., XXXI, 10.) Against this doctrine of free will the sociology, the philosophy and the medical science of the present day contend with a theory which minimizes man's accountability for sin if it does not wholly excuse him as the victim of heredity, environment or society. Literature also, as reflected not only in the Greek tragedies but in the writings of authors from Shakespeare to Shaw portray the evil doer as the victim of fate or determinism. Against all such theories and views Dante appears as the fearless, uncompromising champion of the doctrine of the greatness of man in the exercise of the divine gift of Free Will. His own life, showing how he had won victory over the forces of poverty and persecution, is symbolic of the glorious truth he would teach; viz., that man, endowed with free will and animated with the grace of God, is master of his destiny and cannot be defeated even by principalities and powers. So he tells us, "And free will which if it endure fatigue in the first battles with the heavens, afterwards if it be well nurtured, conquers everything." (Purg., XVI, 76.) He makes Beatrice testify to the supremacy of the will: "The greatest gift which God in His bounty bestowed in creating and that which He prizes most, was the freedom of will with which the creatures that have intelligence--they all and they alone--were endowed." (Cf. Purg., XVIII, 66-73.) But such a distinctive endowment may be the the curse of man if he fails to use it rightly. Like Job, Dante insists that life is a warfare. Victory is possible only by the right exercise of the will enlightened by God. Defeat is sure if the will embraces sin. To Dante sin is not a mere vulgarity or the violation of a social convention or "a soft infirmity of the blood." "Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind," says James Russell Lowell, "would have been the modern theory which deals with sin as involuntary error." To Dante sin is the greatest evil of the world--not only because it is the source of all other evils, but because it is at once the denaturing of man--the damned are characterized as "the woeful people who have lost the good of the understanding" (Inf., III, 18), and it is also a defiance of God. Sin, then, is Atheism--a rejection of God, with a conviction that pleasure or happiness can be attained outside of God, independent of God and in opposition to God. Apart from the inspired writers of Holy Writ it is doubtful whether any other writer ever had such an awful sense of sin and such a vivid vision of sin and its consequences as Dante has given to the world in a picture which has burned terror into the thought of man. To show us that life is a warfare against sin, Dante gives us several striking pictures of temptation and heavenly deliverance from evil. At the very beginning of the Divine Comedy, we see his ascent to the mountain of the Lord barred by Lust, Pride and Avarice represented by a leopard, a lion, and a wolf. He is victorious over those enemies of his salvation because Reason (Virgil) and Beatrice (Revelation) come to his aid. Temptation is also exhibited in Ante-Purgatorio and that is the more remarkable because both as a theologian and a poet Dante holds that the present life is the end of man's probation and that as a consequence, temptation is not to be encountered in the next life. Why it is put forth in Ante-Purgatorio is explained by the theory that our poet here nods, that he means, not the actual Purgatory of disembodied spirits, but moral Purgatory, _i.e._, the present life wherein man, striving upward, is attacked by temptation to keep him from the end for which God created him. Showing temptation in Ante-Purgatorio, the poet gives us a picture of souls protected by two angels against the serpent. Here is the scene: "Now was the hour that wakens fond desire In men at sea, and melts their thoughtful heart Who in the morn have bid sweet friends farewell, And pilgrim newly on his road with love Thrills, if he hear the vesper bell from far, That seems to mourn for the expiring day": A band of souls approach: "I saw that gentle band silently next Look up, as if in expectation held, Pale and in lowly guise; and, from on high, I saw, forth issuing descend beneath, Two angels, with two flame-illumined swords, Broken and mutilated of their points. Green as the tender leaves but newly born, Their vesture was, the which, by wings as green Beaten, they drew behind them, fann'd in air. A little over us one took his stand; The other lighted on the opposing hill; So that the troop were in the midst contain'd. But in their visages the dazzled eye Was lost, as faculty that by too much Is overpower'd. 'From Mary's bosom both Are come,' exclaimed Sordello, 'as a guard Over the vale, 'gainst him, who hither tends, The serpent.' Whence, not knowing by which path He came, I turn'd me round; and closely press'd, All frozen, to my leader's trusted side." After describing an interview with one of the souls, the poet continues his narrative: "While yet he spoke, Sordello to himself Drew him, and cried: 'Lo there our enemy!' And with his hand pointed that way to look Along the side, where barrier none arose Around the little vale, a serpent lay, Such haply as gave Eve the bitter food. Between the grass and flowers, the evil snake Came on, reverting oft his lifted head; And, as a beast that smooths its polish'd coat. Licking his back. I saw not, nor can tell, How those celestial falcons from their seat Moved, but in motion each one well described. Hearing the air cut by their verdant plumes, The serpent fled; and, to their stations, back The angels up return'd with equal flight." (Purg., VIII.) A third picture of temptation is furnished by the episode of one of the Sirens who appears first repulsive and then seems to the poet sweet and alluring. Only when Virgil discloses her hideous nature does Dante see how easily he might have fallen a victim to her wiles. He tells us that in his sleep there appeared to him a woman with stammering utterance, squinting eyes, deformed hands. "I gazed at her, and as the sun restores the cold limbs made heavy by night, thus my look loosened her tongue, then straightened her all out in a little while and colored her wan face as love demands. When her speech was thus unbound she began to sing so that I could hardly have turned my attention from her. 'I am,' she sang, 'I am sweet Siren who bewitch sailors by mid-sea, so full am I of charm to hear. By my song I turned Ulysses from his wandering way. And whosoever abides with me seldom departs, so wholly do I satisfy him.' Her lips were not yet closed when a lady, swift and holy, appeared at my side to confound the other. 'O Virgil, Virgil, who is this?' she said proudly; and he advanced with his eyes fixed only on this modest woman." Virgil (Reason called by Conscience) comes to the rescue of the entranced poet and reveals the Siren in all her foul ugliness. At that Dante awakes from his dream more than ever convinced of the evil of sin and its hideousness. (Purg., XIX, 9.) Our poet, as we said, is firmly convinced that sin will be punished in Hell. But where is Hell? Popular tradition attributing an infernal connection with volcanic phenomena and moved by those passages in Holy Scripture which describe Hell as a place to which the reprobate descend, locates Hell in the interior of the earth. Dante not only follows this tradition for his Hell, but he does what no other writer before or after him ever did--he constructs a Hell with such rare architectural skill that the awful structure stands forth in startling reality, visualized easily as to form an atmosphere, and with a finish of detail that is amazing. Covered by a crust of earth it is situated under Jerusalem and extends in funnel shape to the very center of the earth. How it got this shape is told by the poet. When Lucifer was hurled from Heaven by the justice of God, he kept falling until he reached the center of earth, whence further motion downward was impossible. At the approach of Lucifer the earth is represented as recoiling and so making the cavity of Hell. The earth dislodged by the cataclysm was forced through an opening, a kind of nozzle of the funnel of Hell, to the antipodes and it there emerged, forming a mountain, which became the site of the Garden of Eden and Purgatory. The phenomenon made land in the northern and water in the southern hemisphere. Here is the description: "Upon this side he fell down out of heaven And all the land, that whilom here emerged For fear of him made of the sea a veil And came to our hemisphere; and peradventure To flee from him, what on this side Left the place vacant here and back recoiled." (Inf., XXXIV, 121.) The material structure of the Inferno is a series of nine concentric circles--darkness brooding over the whole region,--with ledges, chasms, pits, swamps and rivers. The rivers, though different in name and aspect, appear to be one and the same stream winding its way through the various circles. We see it first as the boundary of Hell proper and it is known as the Acheron. It comes again to view in the fourth circle and is called the Styx. In the seventh circle, second round, it emerges as the red blood stream of Phlegethon. In the very depths of Hell it forms the frozen lake of Cocytus. The circles of Hell, distant from one another, decrease in circumference as descent is made--the top circle being the widest. Galileo estimates that Dante's Hell is about 4,000 miles in depth and as many in breadth at its widest diameter. Its opening is near the forest at the Fauces Averni, near Cuma, Italy, where Virgil places the site of the entrance of his Inferno. Dante's Hell in its moral aspect is Aristotelian. Sins are divided into three great classes, incontinence, bestiality and malice. Incontinence is punished in the five upper circles; bestiality and malice in the City of Dis, lower Hell. More particularly stated, Dante's scheme of punishment in the underworld, not considering the vestibule of Hell, where neutrals are confined, is as follows: 1, Limbo; 2, The Circle of Lust; 3, Gluttony; 4, Avarice and Prodigality; 5, Anger, Rage and Fury; 6, Unbelief and Heresy; 7, Violence; 8, Fraud; 9, Treason. In regard to this plan of punishment three things are to be noted: (a) Though generally following the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, here Dante, in his conception of Limbo, differs from his master. Our poet's Limbo, wherein are the souls of unbaptized children and others who died stained with original sin, but without personal grievous guilt, is a much more severe abode than that of the Angelic Doctor. The latter teaches that Limbo is a place or a state, not merely of exemption from suffering and sorrow, but of perfect natural happiness unbroken even by a knowledge of a higher, a supernatural destiny that has never been given. Dante's Limbo, on the other hand, represents the souls in sadness brought about by their constant desire and hope never realizable, of seeing God. They suffer no pain of sense, but they are baffled in their endless yearning for the Beatific Vision. To quote Dante: "There, in so far as I had power to hear, Were lamentations none, but only sighs That tremulous made the everlasting air. And this arose from sorrow without torment, Which the crowds had, that many were and great, Of infants and of women and of men. To me the Master good: 'Thou dost not ask What spirits these may be, which thou beholdest? Now will I have thee know, ere thou go farther, That they sinned not; and if they merit had, 'T is not enough, because they had not baptism, Which is the portal of the Faith thou holdest; And if they were before Christianity, In the right manner they adored not God; And among such as these am I myself. For such defects, and not for other guilt, Lost are we, and are only so far punished, That without hope we live on in desire.'" (IV, 25.) (b) Our poet represents a soul as punished but for one sin, though it may be guilt-dyed by its having broken all the commandments. Even so, it is placed in one particular circle wherein a certain sin is punished and we are not told that it passes to other circles. In explanation of this we have only to remember that Dante, for our instruction, is showing us object lessons of evil, types of certain sins. Judas, for example, whose name is synonymous with traitor, is exhibited as suffering in the ninth circle, the circle of treason, the poet taking no notice of other sins, v.g., sacrilege, avarice, suicide, of which the fallen apostle may have been guilty. Furthermore, Dante as a master psychologist and moralist would teach us the lesson that the evil doer may come to damnation through one sin if that acquires such an ascendency over his will as to become a capital sin or predominant passion of his life. Then the besetting passion is the father of an innumerable progeny of evil. This is seen (Purg., XX, 103) in the case of Pygmalion, whose predominant passion, avarice, made him a traitor, a thief and a parricide. (c) Let us not be surprised that Dante is so lenient in the punishment of carnal sinners. He assigns a lighter punishment to the unchaste than to the unjust. Back of his plan is a sound theological doctrine. Guilt is to be estimated not simply from the gravity of the matter prohibited to conscience and the knowledge that one has of the evil, but more especially from the malice displayed by the will in its voluntary choosing and embracing the evil. Now impurity, it is held, is often a sin of impulse. It springs from concupiscence, a common human inclination, wrong only when there is inordinateness. Then though a man freely consents to the temptation and thereby commits a grievous sin, his will generally is not overcast with perversion or affected with malice. That being so, Dante in assigning punishment for sins against the virtue of purity is moved by the thought that such sins deserve a milder punishment in Hell, because they may be oftener surprises than infidelities. To make known the nature of the particular sin he depicts Dante shows us the evil in various phases. First of all it is personified in repulsive demons, the guardians of the circles of Hell. At the very entrance, sits, symbolizing the evil conscience, the sinners' judge "Minos horrific and grins. The ill-born spirit comes before him, confesses all and that sin-discerner (Minos) sees what place in Hell is for it, and with his tail makes as many circles round himself as the degrees he will have it descend." (Inf., V, 2.) In the circle of Gluttony, the sin is symbolized by the three-headed monster Cerberus, "who clutches the spirits, flays and piecemeal rends them." Plutus, the ancient god of riches--"a cursed wolf"--commands the circle of Avarice. Phlegyas, who in fury set fire to Apollo's temple, is head of the circle of Anger. Symbolizing remorse, the three Furies, in the semblance of women girt with green water snakes, with snakes for hair, and the Gorgon Medusa, representing the heart-hardening effect of sensual pleasures, are found on the fire-glowing towers of the City of Dis, Inner Hell. In the seventh circle presides Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, the symbol of bloodthirsty violence and brutal lust. Fraud is typified by Geryon, having the face of an honest man and the body of a dragon. Further down giants are seen, emblematic of the enormity of crime. At the very lowest point of Hell is Lucifer, "emperor of the Realm of Sorrow." A gigantic monster, he is imprisoned in ice formed from rivers which freeze by the movements of his bat-like wings flapping in vain efforts to raise himself. To him, as to the source of all evil, flow back all the streams of guilt. As he sinned against the Tri-une God, he is represented with three faces, one crimson, another between white and yellow, and the third black. (XXXIV, 55.) Not only by such terrible monsters, but by the environment of the condemned sinner, does our poet reveal the hideousness of sin. To mention only the three great divisions of Hell, the abodes of incontinence, bestiality and malice, we find in murky gloom the incontinent whose sin had darkened their understanding. In the City of Dis, red with fire, are the violent and the bestial, who in this life had burned either with consuming rage or unnatural passion; in the frozen circle of malice are those whose sins had congealed human sympathy and love into cold, calculating destruction of trust reposed in them. But it is principally by depicting the intellectual, the moral and the physical sufferings of the damned that Dante would teach us the nature of sin. To depict physical sufferings the poet was under the necessity of creating provisional bodies for his damned. Without such a poetic device the souls of the reprobate before the resurrection of their bodies cannot be conceived to suffer physically, since they lack the senses and organs of pain. So Dante pictures the damned united to forms shadowy yet real, palpable and visible. They sometimes lose the human semblance and assume more sinister shapes, grovelling as hideous serpents, bleeding and wailing from shrubs and trees, or bubbling in a slushing stream. In such forms the souls are seen in punishment fitting their sin, on the principle that "by what things a man sinneth by the same he is tormented." (Wisdom XI, 17.) The unchaste because they allowed their reason to be subjected to the hot blasts of passion are now driven by "a hellish storm which never rests; whirling and smiting, it vexes them." (Inf., V, 31.) The gluttonous howl like dogs as hail and rain and snow beat down upon them and Cerberus attacks and rends them. The misers and spendthrifts to whom money was king, now are occupied in rolling huge stones in opposite directions. The wrathful, all muddy and naked, assail and tear one another. The sullen are fixed in slime and gurgle a dismal chant. The materialist and the heretic, whose existence, Dante holds, was only a living death, are confined in blazing tombs. Murderers and tyrants are immersed in boiling blood. With poetic justice, suicides are represented as stunted trees lacerated by the beaks of foul harpies. The violent lie supine on a plain of dry and dense sand, upon which descend flakes of fire like "snow in the Alps, without a wind." Usurers--should we call them profiteers?--suffer also from a rain of fire and carry about their necks money bags stamped with armorial designs. Thieves, to remind them of their sneaking trade, are repeatedly transformed from men into snakes, hissing and creeping. Hypocrites march in slow procession with faces painted and with leaden cloaks all glittering with gold on the outside. With such realism does Dante declare the nature of sin and its inevitable consequences. Let us now accompany Dante through the Underworld. The scene opens at dawn in a dark and tangled wood. Dante, the type of humanity, is unable to ascend the Hill of the Lord, as we said before, because his way is barred successively by a leopard, a lion and a wolf, representing the passions of life. Virgil (Reason), sent by Beatrice (Revelation), offers to conduct the poet by another road. It is a way which leads through Hell and Purgatory. Through the heavens Beatrice herself will be the guide. Descending through the earth the two poets come to the Vestibule of Hell. On the gate appears this inscription: "Through me you pass into the city of woe Through me you pass into eternal pain Through me among the people lost for aye Justice, the founder of my fabric, moved To rear me was the task of Power divine, Supremest wisdom and primeval Love Before me things create were none, save things Eternal, and eternal I endure. All hope abandon, ye who enter here." It may be said in passing that in these nine lines Dante attains an effect for which Milton, with all his heavy description of the gateway of Hell, labors in vain. Contrast with the Florentine's the words of the author of Paradise Lost: "Hell bounds high reaching to the horrid roof And thrice three fold the gates: three folds were brass, Three iron, three of adamantine rock. Impenetrable, impaled with circling fire, Yet unconsumed. Before the gate there sat On either side a formidable shape," etc. Not by gigantic images which only astonish the reader, but by words which burn into the brain and leave him dismayed, does our poet drive home his thought. Passing through a crowd of neutrals the poets come to the river Acheron, where assemble those who die in mortal sin, to be ferried over by the demon Charon. He refuses passage to Dante: "By other ways, by other ferries, shalt thou pass over, a lighter boat must carry thee." (Inf., III, 91.) An earthquake occurs, accompanied with wind and lightning, and Dante falls into a state of insensibility. Upon coming to consciousness he finds himself on the brink of the Abyss, whence the poets enter Limbo. Here Christ descended, Virgil says, and "drew from us the shade of our first parent, of Abel, his son; that of Noah, of Moses, the lawgiver, the obedient; patriarch Abraham and King David; Israel, with his father, and with his sons and with Rachel, for whom he wrought much, and many others and made them blessed." (Inf., IV, 55.) In the second circle, where carnal sinners are punished, Dante sees, among others, Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Achilles, Paris. The poet's attention is suddenly attracted by two spirits, who prove to be Francesca da Rimini and her lover, Paolo, murdered by her husband when Dante was twenty-four years old. The scandal of their illicit love and the penalty they paid by their lives must have been so generally known that Dante, though attached to her family by the memory of hospitality received from her nephew, Guido Novello da Polenta, the lord of Ravenna, is dominated by the necessity of declaring in Francesca and Paolo the operation of the unalterable law which rules the terrible consequences of crime unforgiven by Heaven. Was it gratitude for kindness extended to him, an exile, by the Lord of Ravenna, or was it the memory of association with the brother of Francesca, at the battle of Campaldino, that led our poet to treat the whole episode of the fatal liaison with such tender sympathy for the unfortunate lady that he hoped to rehabilitate her memory? In any event, the poet represents himself as gracious and benign when addressing Francesca, and she, moved by his friendly attitude, tells the story of her intrigue, in lines justly regarded as the most beautiful ever written in verse. The reader will not fail to observe that the fatal denouement is only hinted, not told--the line, "that day we read no more," making what is admitted to be the finest ellipsis in all the literature of the world. "Then turning, I to them, my speech address'd And thus began: 'Francesca! Your sad fate Even to tears my grief and pity moves. But tell me, in the time of your sweet sighs, By what and how Love granted that ye knew Your yet uncertain wishes.' She replied: 'No greater grief than to remember days Of joy, when misery is at hand. Yet so eagerly If thou art bent to know the primal root From whence our love gat being, I will do As one who weeps and tells his tale. One day For our delight, we read of Lancelot, How him love thrall'd. Alone we were, and no Suspicion near us. Oft times by that reading Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue Fled from our alter'd cheek. But at one point Alone we fell. When of that smile, we read, The wish'd smile so rapturously kiss'd By one so deep in love, then he who ne'er From me shall separate, at once my lips All trembling kiss'd. The book and writer both Were love's purveyors. In its leaves that day We read no more.' While thus one spirit spake, The other wail'd so sorely, that heart-struck I through compassion fainting, seem'd not far From death, and like a corse fell to the ground." In the next circle where, with faces to the ground, the gluttons suffer in a ceaseles storm, the shade of Ciacco, the Florentine, sits up as he recognizes a fellow-citizen: "He said to me: 'Thy City which is filled With envy, like a sack that overflows, Once held me in its tranquil life, well skilled In dainties, and a glutton, and by those Who dwelt there Ciacco called, but now the blows Of this fierce rain avenge my wasteful sin. Sad as I am, full many another knows For a like crime like penalty within This circle', and more word he spake not." (VI, 49.) In the fourth circle the poet sees the souls of the prodigal and avaricious rolling heavy stones, against each other with mutual recriminations: "Almighty Justice! in what store thou heap'st New pains, new troubles, as I here beheld, Wherefore doth fault of ours bring us to this? E'en as a billow, on Charybdis rising Against encountered billow dashing breaks; Such is the dance this wretched race must lead Whom more than elsewhere numerous here I found." (VII, 19.) The next is the circle of the wrathful and the sullen. Following is the circle of the materialists and heretics, all covered with burning sepulchres: "Soon as I was within, I cast around My eyes and saw extend on either hand A spacious plain, that echoed to the sound Of grief and torment sore; as o'er the land At Aries where Rhone's vast waters stagnant stand Or Pola, near Quarnero Bay, that bounds And bathes the line of Italy, expand Plains rough and heaving with supulchral mounds, 'Tis thus the plain, wherein I stood, with tombs abounds, Save that the buried were more grimly treated. For twixt the graves were scattered tongues of fire By which to such a pitch the place was heated That iron could no fiercer flame require For art to mould it: lamentation dire Issued from each unlidded vault, and seemed The voice of those in torment." From one of these fiery tombs, the Florentine freethinker, the haughty Farinata, rises "with breast and brow erect, as holding Hell in great contempt," and tells Dante that the souls of the lost have no knowledge concerning things that are actually passing on earth, though they know the past and see the future. He foretells the duration of the poet's exile and boasts that he himself saved Florence from being razed to the ground. "When all decreed that Florence should be laid in ruin I alone with fearless face defended her." (X, 91.) In the seventh circle Virgil leads Dante to the river of blood, "in which boils every one who by violence injures others." Centaurs, half horses and half men, are there. "Around the fosse they go by thousands, piercing with their arrows whatever spirit wrenches itself out of the blood farther than its guilt has allotted for it." (XII, 73.) With characteristic realism the poet describes Chiron, one of the leaders of the Centaurs, pushing back with an arrow his beard as he prepares to speak: "Chiron took an arrow, and with the notch put back his beard upon his jaws. When he had uncovered his great mouth, he said to his companions: 'Have ye perceived that the one behind (Dante) moves what he touches? The feet of the dead are not wont to do so.'" (XII, 76.) In the third round of Circle VII Dante meets his friend Brunetto Latini, punished for unnatural offences. "I remembered him and toward his face My hand inclining, answered: Ser Brunetto! And are ye here? He thus to me: 'My son! Oh let it not displease thee, if Brunetto Latini but a little space with thee Turn back, and leave his fellows to proceed.' I thus to him replied: 'Much as I can, I thereto pray thee: and if thou be willing That I here seat me with thee, I consent: His leave with whom I journey, first obtain'd.' 'O Son,' said he, 'whoever of this throng One instant stops, lies then a hundred years, No fan to ventilate him, when the fire Smitest sorest. Pass thou therefore on. I close Will at thy garments walk and then rejoin My troup, who go mourning their endless doom.'" * * * * * "Were all my wish fulfill'd," I straight replied, Thou from the confines of man's nature yet Hadst not been driven forth; for in my mind Is fix'd, and now strikes full upon my heart, The dear, benign, paternal image, such As thine was, when so lately thou didst teach me The way for man to win eternity: And how I prized the lesson, it behoves, That, long as life endures, my tongue should speak. (XV, 28.) The eighth circle is known as Malebolge, Evil Pouches, of which there are ten. Here are punished differently panders, seducers, flatterers, simonists, magicians, cheats, hypocrites, thieves, evil-counsellors, forgers. In the ninth circle, the abode of traitors, which comprises four divisions, named respectively after Cain (Caina), Antenor of Troy (Antenora), Ptolemy of Jericho (Tolomea), and Judas Iscariot (Giudecca), Dante sees in the second division, Antenora, the shade of the traitor Ugolino imprisoned in ice with his enemy, Archbishop Ruggieri, by whom he was betrayed. Ugolino, with his two sons and two grandsons, were locked in the Tower of Famine at Pisa, the key of the prison was thrown into the river and the prisoners began their term of starvation ending in death. The story of the imprisonment and the death of the five prisoners is one of the most tragic recitals in the domain of literature. In the passage I quote, Ugolino is relating his feelings when he finds himself imprisoned with his sons and grandsons in the Tower of Famine. "When I awoke before the morn, that day, I heard my little sons, who shared my cell, For bread, even in their slumber, moaning pray; Hard art thou, if unmoved thou hearest me tell The message that my heart had guessed too well! If this thou feel not, what can make thee feel? And when we all were risen, the hour befell At which was brought to us the morning meal, Yet each one doubted sore what might their dreams reveal. And as the locking of the gate I heard Beneath that terrible tower, I gazed alone Into my children's faces, without a word. I wept not, for within I turned to stone; But saw that they were weeping every one; 'Twas then my darling little Anselm cried: 'You look so, father! Say, what have they done?' Still not a tear I shed, nor word replied That day, nor till that night in next day's dawning died. And as there shot into this prison drear A little sunbeam, by whose light I caught My look upon four faces mirrored clear; Both of my hands I bit, by grief o'erwrought. Then suddenly they rose as if they thought I did it hungering; 'Less our misery,' They cried, 'Should'st thou on us feed, who are nought But creatures vested in our flesh by thee: Then strip away the weeds that still thine own must be.' It calmed me to make them feel less their fate; Two days we spent in silence all forlorn; Earth, Earth, oh wherefore wert thou obdurate, And would'st not open! On the following morn Gaddo, before my face, from life was torn! 'Can you not help me, father?' first he cried, And perished; then, I saw the younger born, Three, one by one, fall ere the sixth day sped-- Plainly as you see me, and this accursed head. 'Already blind, I fondly grope my way To them, and for three days their names I call After their death; then famine found its prey And did what sorrow could not.' This was all He said." (XXXIII, 35.) And now we come with the poets to the lowest depths of Hell, where we see imprisoned in ice Lucifer, huge and hideous. As we gaze on mankind's enemy, an archangel fallen and punished for sin, the words of Isaias come to mind: "How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, who did'st rise in the morning! How art thou fallen to the earth, that did'st wound the nations. And thou saidst within thy heart, 'I will ascend into Heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God--I will be like the most High. But yet thou shalt be brought down to Hell, into the very depth of the pit." (Is., XIV, 12.) Let us see how Dante puts Lucifer "into the very depth of the pit." "The lamentable kingdom's emperor Issued from out the ice with half his breast; And with a giant more do I compare Than with his arms do giants; therefore see How great must be that whole which corresponds Unto a part so fashioned. If he was As beautiful as he is ugly now, And raised his brows against his Maker, sure All sorrowfulness must proceed from him. Ah! how great marvel unto me it seemed When I beheld three faces to his head! The one before, and that was vermeil-hue; Two were the others which adjoined to this, Over the midst of either shoulder, and They made the joining where the crown is placed. And between white and yellow seemed the right; The left was such an one to be beheld As come from there wherein the Nile is sunk. There issued under each two mighty wings, Such as 'twas fitting for so great a bird: I never saw the sails of shipping such. They had not feathers, but the mode thereof Was like a bat's; and these he fluttered so That from him there was moved a threefold wind: Cocytus all was frozen over hence. With six eyes wept he, and three chins along The weeping trickled, and a bloody foam. At every mouth he shattered with his teeth A sinner, in the manner of a brake, So that he thus made woful three of them. The biting for the foremost one was nought Unto the scratching, for at times the spine Remained of all the skin completely stripped. 'That soul above which has most punishment Is,' said my lord, 'Judas Iscariot, Who has his head within, and outside plies His legs. O' the other two, whose head is down, Brutus is he who from the black head hangs; See how he writhes, and does not speak a word: The other's Cassius, who appears, so gaunt,'" (XXXIV, 28-67) Now that the lesson is learned that the wages of sin is death, that sin will find a man out and bring him to the judgment of God, the gracious guide can release his companion from his awful contemplation. "Now it is time for us to go," says Virgil, "for we have seen all." By a secret path leading to Purgatory the pilgrims make their way through the darkness, guided by the encouraging murmur of running water. It is a streamlet of discarded sin, flowing constantly from Purgatory, whence wickedness is washed down to its original Satanic source. "By that hidden way My guide and I did enter, to return To the fair world; and heedless of repose We climb'd, he first, I following his steps, Till on our view the beautiful lights of Heaven Dawn'd through a circular opening in the cave Thence issuing we again beheld the stars." DANTE'S PURGATORIO DANTE'S PURGATORIO Purgatory, as a doctrine, is peculiar to the Catholic Church; Purgatory, as a discipline from sin to virtue, is a practice followed by a large portion of humanity. The latter fact explains why so many who reject the dogma, still love and admire Dante's Purgatorio, which, while it teaches the doctrine of the intermediate state, also serves as an allegory, the most helpful and beautiful allegory, perhaps, in the literature of the world. In the opinion of Dean Stanley, it is the most religious book he ever read. It makes a peculiar appeal to the modern mind because, as Grandgent says: "It's theme is betterment, release from sin and preparation for Heaven" ... (and) "its atmosphere is rightly one of hope and progress." Dinsmore declares: "Purgatory as a place may not exist in our system of thought, but life is a cleansing process if we take its hardships in a proper spirit." In another place he asserts: "In pondering the way of life by which this high priest of the Middle Ages (Dante) proclaims that men attain perfect liberty, we cannot but remark the stress he lays upon a principle which has well-nigh faded from the Protestant mind. It is that of expiation--(and) expiation is no musty dogma of the schoolmen, but a living truth.... Dante placed more emphasis on the human side of the problem than we, and for this reason he deserves attentive study, having portrayed most powerfully some truths which our age, so eager to break from the narrowness of the past, has overlooked." In agreement with this statement of the learned Congregational divine is William T. Harris, former United States Commissioner of Education, who observes in his "Spiritual Sense of the Divina Commedia," that if Purgatory is absent from the Protestant creed, the thought of which Purgatory in this life is the symbol, is not uncommon in non-Catholic literature. His exact words are: "If Protestantism has omitted Purgatory from its religion, certainly Protestant literature has taken it up and absorbed it entire," and for proof he points to the moral, among other books, of The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun, Adam Bede and Romola, all showing "That men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things." Dante, the theologian, makes his allegory grow out of the doctrine of Purgatory. According to the teaching of the Catholic Church, temporal punishment is connected with sin. Even when the guilt of sin is forgiven, the justice of God in most cases calls for amends by means of the temporal punishment of the sinner. Holy Writ gives us instances of the operation of this law. Adam, though brought out of his disobedience (Wisdom X, 2) was condemned "to eat bread in the sweat of his face" (Gen. III, 19) to his dying day. Moses and Aaron were forgiven for their sin of incredulity, but they were punished by being deprived of the glory of entering "the Land of Promise." (Num., XX, 12.) To King David, perfectly contrite, the prophet Nathan announces in the name of God, the forgiveness of the guilt of adultery and murder, yet he must suffer for his sin. "Nathan said to David: 'The Lord also hath taken away thy sin. Thou shalt not die. Nevertheless, because thou hast given occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme for this thing, the child shall die,' and it came to pass on the seventh day that the child died" (II Kings XII, 13.) From these instances it is evident that when God forgives the guilt of sins and the eternal punishment due to such of them as are mortal, He does not remove the temporal punishment which must be satisfied in this life or in the life to come. That is true, the Church teaches, even of unrepented venial sin with its debt of temporal punishment. While venial sin does not destroy the supernatural life of the soul and while, therefore, it is not said to be punishable in Hell, still it is sin in the sight of Him "whose eyes are too pure to behold evil." (Hab., I, 13.) Now the Church has ever held that into Heaven "there shall not enter anything defiled." (Apoc., XXI, 27.) Likewise, she has taught that Hell is the eternal punishment of souls whose grievous guilt has not been forgiven. It follows, therefore, according to her teachings, that there must be a middle state for the cleansing of unrepented venial sins and for the satisfaction of sins already forgiven but not wholly expiated. This state or place is called Purgatory, the belief in the existence of which is confirmed by the practice of praying for the dead, a practice based on the teachings of the Old and of the New Testament. In the second book of Maccabees (XII, 43, 46) we read that Judas, the general of the Hebrew army, "sent twelve thousand drachms of silver to Jerusalem for sacrifice to be offered for the sins of the dead, thinking well and religiously concerning the resurrection. (For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should rise again, it would have seemed superfluous and vain to pray for the dead.) And because he considered that they who had fallen asleep with godliness had great grace laid up for them. It is, therefore, a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from sins." This doctrine presupposes that the dead for whom prayer is profitable are neither in Heaven, the abode of the elect, nor in Hell, from which release is not possible, but in a state of purification, lasting for a time. The New Testament alludes to that state. Christ declares: "And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but he that shall speak against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world nor in the world to come." (Matt., XII, 32.) These words imply that there is a future state in which some sins are purged away, while there is another state (Hell) in which the punishment is eternal. The words of St. Paul: "If any man's work burn, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire" (1 Cor., III, 15), are interpreted to mean the existence of a middle state in which unforgiven venial sins and the temporal punishment due to sin will be burnt away and the soul thus purified will attain eternal life. To state the doctrine of the Church briefly, let it be said that the Church has defined that there is a Purgatory and that the souls in Purgatory are helped by the suffrages of the faithful. Out of facts so general, Dante the poet, has created a Purgatory wholly unique in the realms of literature, and amazingly definite as to place, form, atmosphere, inhabitants and their activities. In the southern hemisphere, at the very antipodes of Jerusalem, out of an ocean on which there is no other land (according to Dante's system of cosmography) springs the island of Purgatory, redolent with flowers, lovely with music, peace keeping pace with penance over all the region. Not a flat, unbroken plain is this island, but a mountain whose shores are washed by the ocean, from which the earth forced from the interior by Lucifer's fall, rises in a truncated conical structure. While its coast and the land below the terraces are within the zone of air, its heights extend into the sphere of fire and its crown is the Garden of Eden. The lowest part of the mountain called Ante-Purgatorio is the abode of the procrastinators and the excommunicated who put off their repentance to the end and now must suffer a proportionate delay before they are permitted to begin their ascent, their work of purification. Purification begins only after the soul passes into Purgatory proper. At the entrance is St. Peter's gate, guarded by an angel, who, with his sword inscribes on the brow of the penitent seven times the letter P, the first letter of the word Peccatum, signifying sin. These seven P's, outward signs of inward evil, represent the seven capital sins, the P's of which are removed in succession by an angel as penance is done for each sin on its corresponding terrace. The seven terraces which run around the mountain, rise in succession with lessening circuit as ascent is made, their width being about seventeen or eighteen feet. Connecting each terrace and cut out of solid rock is a narrow stairway, guarded by an angel. The steps of each successive stairway become less steep as each terrace is attained. Crowning the mountain is the Garden of Eden, lonely and deserted since Adam and Eve, after six hours of occupancy, were forced from its confines. Its herbage is still luxuriant, its flowers endless and fragrant, its trees, melodious with birds, rustle with the balmy wind, its waters serve to irrigate the garden as well as to help the soul. These waters, the rivers Lethe and Eunoe, are produced from heavenly sources and have miraculous powers. The former removes the memory of sin; the latter restores the recollection of virtuous deeds, a poetical way of expressing the Catholic dogma, that with the revival of grace in the heart of the converted sinner comes back the merit that had been acquired by moral acts. The problem which Dante sets out to solve in his Purgatory is this: Assuming that the sinner has been baptized, how can he break his shackles and attain to the liberty of the children of God? The literal narrative of Dante's Purgatory presupposing that the soul at the hour of death is in the state of grace, now shows us that soul working towards perfection by way of expiation for unforgiven venial sin and for the temporal punishment due to sin. It is the only way by which it can again attain its pristine dignity. "And to his dignity he never returns," says Dante, "unless where sin makes void, he fill up for evil pleasures just penalties." The rule holds good, also, for salvation in this world. The thin veil of allegory enables us to penetrate Dante's teaching that this life also is a Purgatory, and here, too, we may cast off the defilement of sin by means of repentance and expiation. But first the soul must be girt with the rush of humility, and have perfect contrition represented by its being washed with the dew, the moisture that descends from Heaven. To Virgil (Reason guided by Heaven) says Cato (the symbol of Liberty), "Go, then, and see that thou gird this man with a smooth rush and that thou wash his face (with dew) so that thou efface from it all foulness, for it would not be fitting to go into the presence of the first Minister, who is of those of Paradise, with eyes dimmed by any mist." (1, 95.) But even if the soul, by perfect contrition, is freed from its guilt of mortal sin, it must according to the mind of Christ, who instituted the sacrament of Penance for the remission of sin, submit to the power of the keys committed to the priesthood and that will be the more necessary if its contrition is imperfect. While perfect contrition without the sacrament of Penance may remit sin, if the supernatural motive of sorrow is not the love of God, but a motive less worthy, _e.g._, fear of punishment, forgiveness is to be obtained only by the worthy reception of Penance. In other words, the penitent must confess his sin to a duly authorized priest, express his contrition, accept the penance enjoined by the confessor for the satisfaction of sin and be absolved by virtue of the words of Christ: "Whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained." All this is most beautifully expressed by Dante in his description of the Gate of St. Peter and its angelic keeper: "The lowest stair was marble white, so smooth And polish'd that therein my mirror'd form Distinct I saw. The next of hue more dark Than sablest grain, a rough and singed block, Cracked lengthwise and across. The third, that lay Massy above, seemed prophyry, that flam'd Red as the life-blood spouting from a vein. On this God's angel either foot sustain'd, Upon the threshold seated, which appear'd A rock of diamond. Up the trinal steps My leader cheerly drew me. 'Ask,' said he, 'With humble heart, that he unbar the bolt.' Piously at his holy feet devolv'd I cast me, praying him for pity's sake That he would open to me: but first fell Thrice on my bosom prostrate. Seven times The letter, that denotes the inward stain, He on my forehead with the blunted point Of the drawn sword inscrib'd. And 'Look,' he cried, 'When enter'd, that thou wash these scars away.' Ashes, or earth ta'en dry out of the ground, Were of one colour with the robe he wore. From underneath that vestment forth he drew Two keys of metal twain: the one was gold, Its fellow silver. With the pallid first, And next the burnish'd, he so ply'd the gate, As to content me well. 'Whenever one Faileth of these, that in the keyhole straight It turn not, to this alley then expect Access in vain.' Such were the words he spake, 'One is more precious; but the other needs Skill and sagacity, large share of each, Ere its good task to disengage the knot Be worthily perform'd. From Peter these I hold, of him instructed, that I err Rather in opening than in keeping fast, So but the suppliant at my feet implore.' Then of that hallow'd gate he thrust the door, Exclaiming, 'Enter, but this warning hear: He forth again departs who looks behind.'" (IX, 75.) The allegory back of these words is put forth in clear language by Maria F. Rossetti. "We need hardly to be told" she writes in her Shadow of Dante (pp. 112-13) "that the Gate of St. Peter is the Tribunal of Penance. The triple stair stands revealed as candid Confession mirroring the whole man, mournful Contrition breaking the hard heart of the gazer on the Cross, Love all aflame offering up in Satisfaction the lifeblood of body, soul, and spirit:--the adamantine threshold-seat as the priceless merits of Christ the Door, Christ the Rock, Christ the sure Foundation and the precious Corner-Stone. In the Angel of the Gate, as in the Gospel Angel of Bethesda, is discerned the Confessor; in the dazzling radiance of his countenance, the exceeding glory of the ministration of righteousness; in the penitential robe, the sympathetic meekness whereby, restoring one overtaken in a fault, he considers himself lest he also be tempted; in the sword, the wholesome severity of his discipline; in the golden key, his divine authority; in the silver, the discernment of spirits whereby he denies absolution to the impenitent, the learning and discretion whereby he directs the penitent." Dante's plan of Purgatorial punishment makes no distinction between the punishment put forth for unforgiven venial sin and that due in satisfaction for the violation of the moral order by one whose guilt has been remitted. Both partake of the same penalty. Is that because the poet thinks that if forgiveness is finally won by sorrow and suffering, expiation for the offence is still to be made? Or does he hold that the seven capital sins entailing temporal punishment either operate effectively in every soul, or exist at least radically according to the principle voiced by Hamilton Wright Mabie: "The man who slowly builds Heaven with him, has constantly the terrible knowledge that he has only to put his hand forth in another direction in order to build Hell?" In any event Dante, who shows in Hell how men are made sin eternally, in Purgatory exhibits the sinful disposition more or less under the control of the will, yet of such a nature that only the grace of God held the soul back from the Abyss. It must be purged of all tendency to evil so as to be made "pure and ready to mount to the stars." (XXXIII, 140.) The purgation is seen in process in a threefold manner according to Dante. A material punishment is inflicted to mortify the evil passion and to incite the soul to virtue; the soul meditates upon the capital sin and its opposite virtue, moved to abhorrence of the evil and to admiration of the good by examples drawn from sacred and profane history; vocal prayer is addressed to God and it brings forth grace to purify and strengthen the soul. Hard in the beginning is this work of repentance, but it becomes easy as the habit of virtue is formed. "The mountain is such, that ever At the beginning down below, 'tis tiresome And aye the more one climbs, the less it hurts." (IV, 90.) As purification from each capital sin is effected, the soul experiences the removal of a heavy burden and the consequent enjoyment of new liberty, Dante, purified from pride, asks Virgil: "Master, say what heavy thing has been lifted from me, that scarce any toil is perceived by me in journeying." He answered "When the P's which have remained still nearly extinguished on thy face, shall like the one be wholly rased out, thy feet shall be so vanquished by goodwill, that not only will they feel it no toil, but it shall be a delight to them to be urged upward." (XII, 118). Mention was made of the material punishment of the souls in Purgatory. Unlike the retributive penalties inflicted in Hell, this punishment is reformative, confirming the penitent in good habits of thought and deed. The proud here realize the irrevocable sentence "everyone who exalteth himself shall be humbled." They creep round with huge burdens of stone bowing them down to the very dust and so abased their hearts are turned to humility. The envious sing the praises of generosity while their eyes, the seat of their sins, are tortured by sutures of wire shutting out the light. The slothful cannot be restrained in their hurry forward, the leaders, shouting with tears, examples of diligence, a pair in the rear crying out instances of sloth. Penitents expiating the sins of avarice and prodigality lie prostrate and motionless bound hand and foot, with their faces to the ground, murmuring the words of the psalmist: "My soul hath cleaved to the pavement" (Ps., 118, 25.) During the day they eulogize the liberal; during the night they denounce instances of avarice. The gluttonous suffer so much from hunger and thirst that they are reduced to a state of pitiable emaciation. All the while hungering for righteousness, they glory in crucifying the old Adam in them. The unchaste purify their passion in hot flames while other penitents sing the loveliness of chastity and proclaim many examples of that virtue. Through this purification by suffering, the spirits not only submit willingly but they exhibit real contentment if not actual love of the chastisement imposed upon them. The unchaste not only heedfully keep within the flames but gladly endure the fire because they are convinced "with such treatment and with such diet must the last wound be healed" (XXV, 136). And most beautiful and enlightening of all, one of the souls tells Dante that the same impulse which brought Christ gladly to the agony of the Cross throws them upon their sufferings. Forese, speaking for the gluttonous, says that the mood in which they accept the penitential pains is one of submission as well as of solace. "And not only once, while circling this road, is our pain renewed. I say pain and ought to say solace, for that desire leads us to the tree which led glad Christ to say, 'Eli,' when He made us free with his blood." (XXIII, 71). The avaricious confess "so long as it shall be the pleasure of the just Lord, so long shall we lie here motionless and outstretched" (XIX, 125). Among the envious, Guida del Duca prays Dante to continue his journey instead of stopping to interrogate him, for he himself "delights far more to weep than to talk" (XIV, 125). The slothful in their eagerness not to interrupt their diligence in penance, by their conversing with Virgil, entreat him not to ascribe this attitude to discourtesy, "We are so filled with desire to speed on" they tell the poets "that stay we cannot, therefore forgive if thou hold our penance for rudeness." (XVIII, 115). By such instances and by many others does our poet show the contented spirit prevailing in Purgatory. He makes it, indeed, a realm whose very atmosphere is one of peace, because the will of God is done there even in the midst of suffering. The greeting there is "My brothers, may God give us peace" (XXI, 13). The penitents pray for a far greater measure of peace: "Voices I heard and every one appeared to supplicate for peace and misericord the Lamb of God who takes away our sins" (XVI, 15). When the wrathful finish their penance an angel says to them, "Blessed are the peacemakers who are without ill anger" (XVII, 68). The waters of Purgatory are called "the waters of peace which are the souls diffused from the eternal fountain" (XVI, 133). Dante addresses the souls as certain of gaining the unending peace of Paradise. "O Souls, sure in the possession whenever it may be of a state of peace" (XXVI, 54). And when the day of release comes on which a soul attains perfect peace, the whole mountain of Purgatory literally thrills with joy and every voice is raised to join the harmonious concert of the angelic hymn first sung at Bethlehem, _Gloria in Excelsis Deo_. In this way does the poet teach us the lesson that both Purgatory proper and the penitential discipline of life give us a peace wholly in contrast with the uproar of sin whether heard in the halls of conscience or in the eternal Hereafter. "How different are those openings from those in Hell," he says, "for here we enter through songs and down there through fierce wailings" (XII, 112). Although our poet, imbued with the Catholic doctrine, teaches that intercessory prayer helps the soul to shorten its term in Purgatory--a doctrine bound up with the doctrine of the Communion of Saints--it must never be forgotten that Dante is a Catholic preacher when he insists that personal effort aided by God's grace, is the thing of supreme importance in the matter of salvation and purification. Neither lip-sorrow nor the sacraments themselves unless accompanied by true sorrow and repentance, can profit the soul. "He cannot be absolved who doth not first repent, nor can he repent the sin and will it at the same time, for this were contradiction to which reason cannot assent" (Inf., XXVII, 118.) Prayer can help the soul struggling in life or in Purgatory proper, but the assistance derived from prayer can never do away with the necessity of personal penance. "Conquer thy panting with the soul that conquers every battle if with its heavy body it sinks not down." Let us now hear how Dante sings "of that second realm in which the human soul is purified and becomes worthy to ascend to Heaven" (I, 5). Coming out of the blackness of Hell just before dawn on Easter Sunday, Virgil and Dante are entranced at the beautiful scene before them. Through a cloudless sky of that deep blue for which the sapphire is noted, shines Venus, the morning star; in the south appear four wonderful stars of still greater brilliancy, seen before only by our first parents. "Sweet sheen of oriental sapphire hue That, mantling in the aspect calm and bright Of the pure air, to the primal circle grew, Began afresh to give my eyes delight Soon as I issued from the deathful air That had cast sadness o'er my mind and sight, The beauteous planet that for love takes care Was making the East laugh through all its span, Veiling the Fish, that in its escort were Turned to the right, I set my mind to scan The other pole; and four stars met my gaze Ne'er seen before, except by primal man Heaven seemed rejoicing in their flaming rays." The two poets looking to the north see Cato the Warder of Purgatory, his face illuminated by the four stars, typical of the cardinal virtues, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance. Is Dante's selection of Cato, the pagan suicide, as the guardian of Christian Purgatory, to be taken as an example of the broadmindedness of the poet who believes "so wide arms hath goodness infinite, that it receives all who turn to it?" Or is it an instance showing how the leaven of the old Roman spirit in the poet--a spirit which justifies suicide, prevails with his profession of Christianity which condemns the taking of one's life? Whatever be the answer "Cato's taking his own life rather than renounce liberty is symbolical of the soul, destroying all selfishness that it may attain the light and freedom of spiritual life." In the poem Cato is represented as challenging the poets as if they were fugitives from Hell. When he is told that it is by divine decree that the pilgrims are making the journey, he bids Virgil cleanse Dante with dew and gird him with a rush and he concludes by saying: "then be not this way your return, the sun which now is rising, will show you how to take the mount at an easier ascent"--words whose spiritual sense would seem to be that once the soul has turned to virtue, it must never go back to sin and in its upward path to perfection it will be guided by the rays of divine grace (the sun) whose enlightenment will make the ascent easier. While lingering on the shore, undecided which way to turn, the poets see a great marvel. Over the water dancing with sunlight comes a white boat propelled by the white wings of an angel called the Divine Bird, red with flame and bringing from the banks of the Tiber, the bosom of the Church, over a hundred souls to begin their term in Purgatory. In Charon's bark the reprobate souls fill the air with their imprecations; in the angel-steered boat the spirits coming to Purgatory devoutly chant: "When Israel went out of Egypt," the psalm so fittingly descriptive of their own liberation from guilt and their coming into peace. Here is the description of the scene: "And lo! as when, upon the approach of morning, Through the gross vapours Mars grown fiery red Down in the West upon the ocean floor, Appeared to me--may I again behold it!-- A light along the sea so swiftly coming, Its motion by no flight of wing is equalled; From which when I a little had withdrawn Mine eyes, that I might question my Conductor, Again I saw it brighter grown and larger. Then on each side of it appeared to me I knew not what of white, and underneath it Little by little there came forth another. My Master yet had uttered not a word While the first whiteness into wings unfolded; But when he clearly recognized the pilot, He cried: 'Make haste, make haste to bow the knee! Behold the Angel of God! fold thou thy hands! Henceforward shalt thou see such officers! See how he scorneth human arguments, So that nor oar he wants, nor other sail Than his own wings, between so distant shores. See how he holds them pointed up to heaven, Fanning the air with the eternal pinions, That do not mount themselves like mortal hair!' Then as still nearer and more near us came The Bird Divine, more radiant he appeared, So that near by the eye could not endure him, But down I cast it; and he came to shore With a small vessel, very swift and light, So that the water swallowed naught thereof. Upon the stern stood the Celestial Pilot; Beatitude seemed written in his face, And more than a hundred spirits sat within." (II, 13.) And now occurs a touching episode which shows how deep and rich is friendship in Dante's heart. One of the shades recognizing him, steps forward with a look so full of affection to embrace him that the poet is moved to do likewise. Amazement ensues on both sides. The spirit finds Dante alive in the flesh and he in turn on account of the impalpability of the shade clasps only empty air. But there is mutual recognition. Dante asks his newly-found friend Casella, the musician, to sing as he used to do when his sweet voice soothed the troubled heart of the poet and banished his cares. "May it please thee therewith to solace awhile my soul that with its mortal form, journeying here, is sore distressed." Casella's answer is as loving as it is surprising. He sings one of Dante's canzoni and the whole party listen with intent delight finally broken by the chiding words of Cato: "What is this ye laggard spirits? What negligence, what standing still is this? Run to the mountain to strip off the slough That lets not God be manifest to you." (II, 117.) At the foot of the mountain the poets meet a troop of spirits who, though excommunicated, died contrite. For their delay in submitting to the Church for absolution they must wait thirty times as long as the period of their excommunication. One of them, King Manfred, Chief of the Ghibellines, son of Emperor Frederick II, tells of his last moment conversion and also how the Bishop of Cosenza at the word of Pope Clement IV, enforcing the penalty of excommunication against the corpse of the king, had it removed from the Papal realm and thrown into the river Verde. In narrating how a Christian may be saved even if he died under the ban of the Church, Dante is only expressing what every Catholic knows as to the effect of excommunication. This ecclesiastical censure incurred by a contumacious member of the Church, a censure entailing forfeiture of all rights and privileges common to a Christian, such as the right to the sacraments,--a right restored through the confessor, however, whenever there is danger of death--the right to public service and prayers, the right to jurisdiction, and to benefices, the right to the canonical forum, to social intercourse and to Christian burial, this censure of excommunication does not in the mind of the Church carry with it exclusion from Purgatory or Heaven. According to a principle of canon law applied to censures, _Ecclesia de internis non judicat_, the Church in the matter of crime does not concern itself with interior dispositions, excommunication far from being a sentence of damnation in the next world, is a penalty pertaining to the external forum of the Church in this life. Even if the penalty follows the corpse so far as to exclude it from Christian burial, even here the purpose of the Church is not to pronounce a verdict of the loss of the contumacious soul in the Hereafter, but to stigmatize among the living, the memory of the person and so to inspire in them a hatred of the evil condemned and a respect for law. The story of Manfred now follows: "And one of them began: 'Whoe'er thou art, Thus going turn thine eyes, consider well If e'er thou saw me in the other world' I turned me tow'rds him, and looked at him closely; Blond was he, beautiful, and of noble aspect, But one of his eyebrows had a blow divided. When with humility I had disclaimed E'er having seen him, 'Now behold,' he said. And showed me high upon his breast a wound. Then said he with a smile: 'I am Manfredi, The grandson of the Empress Costanza; Therefore, when thou returnest, I beseech thee Go to my daughter beautiful, the mother Of Sicily's honor and of Aragon's, And the truth tell her, if aught else be told. After I had my body lacerated By these two mortal stabs, I gave myself Weeping to Him, who willingly doth pardon. Horrible my iniquities had been; But Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms, That it receives whatever turns to it, Had but Cosenza's pastor, who in chase Of me was sent by Clement at that time, In God read understandingly this page, The bones of my dead body still would be At the bridge-head, near unto Benevento, Under the safeguard of the heavy cairn. Now the rain bathes and moveth them the wind, Beyond the realm, almost beside the Verde, Where he transported them with tapers quenched. By malison of theirs is not so lost Eternal Love, that it cannot return, So long as hope has anything of green.'" (III, 105.) Following the directions given by Manfred and his companions our travelers continue their way upward until they reach a broad ledge cut out in the side of the mountain. While resting here Dante sees a spirit whom he recognizes as Balaqua, a maker of musical instruments, whose laziness was a byword in Florence. Our poet who knew the man intimately had often upbraided him for his indolence. It is said that to excuse himself in the days of his mortal life, Balaqua quoted a line of Aristotle: "By sitting down and resting the soul is rendered wise," to which Dante retorted: "Certainly if one becomes wise by sitting down none was ever so wise as thou." Now in Purgatory there is amused indulgence upon Dante's part as he addresses his former fellow citizen "sitting and clasping his knees, holding his face down between them, lazier than if sloth were his very sister" (IV, 10). "His sluggish attitude and his curt words A little unto laughter moved my lips Then I began: 'Balaqua I grieve not For thee henceforth; but tell me wherefore seated In this place art thou? Waitest thou an escort? Or has thy usual habit seized upon thee?' And he: 'O brother, what's the use of climbing? Since to my torment would not let me go The angel of the Lord who sitteth at the gate. First heaven must needs so long revolve me round Outside thereof, as in my life it did, Since the good sighs I to the end postponed, Unless e'er that some prayer may bring me aid Which rises from a heart that lives in grace." (IV, 120.) Unless assisted by the prayer of the sinless faithful upon earth, Balaqua and his class must stay in Outer-Purgatory, each for a term equal to the period of his natural life. The third and the fourth classes in Outer-Purgatory, viz., those who died of violence, deferring their repentance to the last hour, and kings and princes who because of temporal concerns of state put off their conversion to the last--all those also must remain in Outer-Purgatory for a period equal to that of their lives upon earth, unless the time be shortened by intercessory prayer. It is to be noted that the souls of the violently slain press so closely and so insistently about Dante in their eagerness to obtain his good offices in favor of prayerful intercession for them by their friends upon earth that he has great difficulty in getting away from these souls. He succeeds by making promises to execute their desires--comparing his difficulty of advancing to the trouble a winner at dice experiences when bystanders crowd about him in obstructive congratulations and make his way impracticable until he gives some of his winnings to this one, and some to that one. "When from their game of dice men separate He who hath lost remains in sadness fix'd, Revolving in his mind what luckless throws He cast; but meanwhile all the company Go with the other; one before him runs, And one behind his mantle twitches, one Fast by his side bids him remember him, He stops not, and each one to whom his hand Is stretch'd, well knows he bids him stand aside, And thus he from the crowd defends himself. E'en such was I in that close-crowding throng; And turning so my face around to all, And promising, I 'scaped from it with pains." (VI, 1.) Higher up the mountain occurs a touching instance of love of country. Virgil draws near a spirit "praying that it would show us the best ascent"; and that spirit answered not his demand but of our country and of our life did ask us. And the sweet Leader (Virgil) began "Mantua ..." And the shade all rapt in self leaped toward him saying, "O Mantuan, I am Sordello of thy city. And one embraced the other" (VI, 67). This episode gives to Dante the opportunity to contrast on the one hand the love of those two fellow citizens drawn together by no other bond than affection for their native place and on the other hand hatred with which living contemporaries rend one another. "Ah Italy, thou slave, that gentle spirit was thus quick, merely at the sweet name of his city, to give greeting there to his fellow citizen and now in thee thy living abide not without war and one doth rend the other of those that one wall and one foss shuts in" (VI, 79). As night approaches Sordello leads the poets to the angelically protected Flowery Valley wherein are found the souls of those rulers who were negligent of the spiritual life. Many of them were once old enemies but now they not only sing together but live in harmony, united also in paying tributes to the worth of some reigning monarchs or in expressing denunciation at the degeneracy of others. Here in the Valley of the Princes, while sleeping on the grass and among the flowers, Dante has a strange dream indicative of a near episode in his journey. He sees an eagle in the sky with wings wide open and intent upon swooping "Then wheeling somewhat more, it seemed to me Terrible as the lightning he descended And snatched me upward even to the (sphere of) fire Therein it seemed that he and I were burning, And the imagined fire did scorch me so That of necessity my sleep was broken." (IX, 28.) He awakes to find himself actually transported up the perpendicular wall to the entrance Gate of Purgatory. Virgil interprets the dream, pointing out that the eagle represents Lucia (Illuminating Grace) who has carried the poet to St. Peter's Gate. "Thou hast at length arrived at Purgatory; See there the cliff that closeth it around; See there the entrance, where it seems disjoined. While at dawn, which doth precede the day, When inwardly thy spirit was asleep Upon the flowers that deck the land below, There came a Lady and said: 'I am Lucia; Let me take this one up, who is asleep; So will I make his journey easier for him.' Sordello and the other noble shapes Remained; she took thee, and, as day grew bright, Upward she came, and I upon her footprints. She laid thee here; and first her beauteous eyes That open entrance pointed out to me; Then she and sleep together went away." (IX, 49.) The poet, as we said before, cannot enter Purgatory until he mounts the three steps of confession, contrition and satisfaction. Moreover, he must receive absolution from the angel-keeper, typical of the priestly confessor, and he must have seven P's branded upon his forehead. When this is done the angel opens the gate and Dante enters to the sound of a thunder-peal from the organ of Heaven, and of voices expressing the joy of Heaven upon the sinner's doing penance. Dante's description, which now follows, of the lovely art displayed on the terrace of Pride leads to the reflection that he must have been a matchless master of visual instruction or at least the representative of his times, which, before the age of printing, taught the people by means of pictures painted upon canvas, burnt in glass or chiseled in stone. Certain it is that the people of Dante's day from seeing the productions of art knew the Bible and sacred and profane history so well as to amaze subsequent generations taught from the printed page. Be that as it may, the power and beauty of Dante's pictures on the terraces of Purgatory show his consummate knowledge of a principle of psychology very much operative in our day, a principle which makes character by educating the will far better than any other pedagogical method. _Verba movent, exampla trahunt_, is a principle which Dante illustrates on every terrace of Purgatory. On the terrace of Pride the penitent sees examples of humility carved of white marble out of the mountain side like Thorwaldsen's Lion, at Lucerne, Switzerland. Their reality is so compelling that, "not only Polycletus (the great Greek sculptor) but Nature there would be put to shame." First to meet the penitent's eyes is the scene of the Annunciation--the angel Gabriel saluting the Blessed Virgin and unfolding to her God's plan of making her the Mother of His Son for the salvation of mankind. In humility she gives her consent in the words: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to thy word." That is the attitude in which she is represented in sculpture, says Dante, an attitude "imprinting those words as expressly as a figure is stamped in wax" (X, 44). Near that work of art David stands forth in marble, dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. Trajan, the Roman emperor, is also seen, interrupting affairs of state to grant a poor woman a favor. Not only of humility but also of pride are examples given. Looking down on the pavement over which they slowly walk with their heavy burdens, the proud have before their eyes the sculptured punishment of pride as committed by Satan, Briareus, the Giants, Nimrod, Niobe, Saul and others. Meditating on the loveliness of humility and the hatefulness of pride, as suggested by those examples and bearing with prayer the heavy weights imposed upon them for their humiliation and penance, the proud experience a transformation of disposition wholly alien to them in the days of their mortality. Among the souls in this first terrace is Oderisi, who attained such renown as an illuminator of manuscripts and a painter of miniatures that he boasted that no one could surpass him. Now he not only is conscious of his former blatant pride, but in proof of his change of heart he gives full credit for superiority to his former pupil and subsequent rival, Franco Bolognese; "O," asked I him, "art thou not Oderisi, Agobbio's honor and honor of that art Which is in Paris called illuminating? 'Brother,' said he, 'more laughing are the leaves Touched by the brush of Franco Bolognese. All his the honor now, and mine in part, In sooth I had not been so courteous While I was living, for the great desire Of excellence on which my heart was bent.'" (XI, 79.) Dante sees here another spirit, Provenzano Salvani. His rapid advance from Outer Purgatory to Purgatory was due to the merit of a self-humiliating act performed in favor of a friend. This friend had been taken prisoner by King Charles of Anjou and was held for ransom of a thousand florins of gold, the threat being made that if the amount was not raised within a month he would be put to death. It speaks well for the tender friendship of Salvani that he put aside all his pride and arrogance while he took his place in the market square to beg alms with which to liberate his friend. Dante relates the incident in the following words; "When he was living in highest glory, in the market place of Sienna he stationed himself of his own free will and put away all shame and there to deliver his friend from the pains he was suffering in Charles' prison, he brought himself to tremble in every vein" (XI, 133). As the poets enter the terrace of Envy aerial voices proclaim examples of Brotherly Love. First are heard the words of the Blessed Virgin:--"They have no wine," words in favor of those who were in need at the marriage feast, which led Christ to perform his first miracle. Then as an example of exposing one's self to death for the sake of another, the incident is recalled of the pagan Pylades feigning himself to be Orestes to save the latter from death. The voice saying, "Love those from whom ye have had evil," is an exhortation to the heroic act of charity of returning good for evil. In contrast with those counsels of charity, other voices call out direct warnings against envy. On this terrace is neither beauty nor art but envy's own color. A livid hue is the whole landscape. Of this color also are the garments of the suffering souls. They are depicted one leaning against the other in mutual love and for mutual support, like beggars sitting at the entrance of a church to which crowds go for the gaining of an Indulgence. Pitiable is the scene, for the envious in expiation for their sin, which entered their soul through its windows, the eyes, are deprived of sight, their lids being fastened by a wire suture such as is used for the taming of a hawk. Dante says of them: "I saw, Shadows with garments dark as was the rock; And when we pass'd a little forth, I heard A crying, 'Blessed Mary! pray for us, Michael and Peter! all ye saintly host!' I do not think there walks on earth this day Man so remorseless, that he had not yearn'd With pity at the sight that next I saw. Mine eyes a load of sorrow teem'd, when now I stood so near them, that their semblance Came clearly to my view. Of sackcloth vile Their covering seem'd; and, on his shoulder, one Did stay another, leaning; and all lean'd Against the cliff. E'en thus the blind and poor, Near the confessionals, to crave an alms, Stand, each his head upon his fellow's sunk; So most to stir compassion, not by sound Of words alone, but that which moves not less, The sight of misery. And as never beam Of noonday visiteth the eyeless man, E'en so was heaven a niggard unto these Of this fair light: for, through the orbs of all, A thread of wire, impiercing, knits them up, As for the taming of a haggard hawk." (Canto, XIII, 42.) As the poets continue their way over the second terrace Virgil explains an obscure phrase uttered by Guido del Duca, a soul punished for the sin of envy. That spirit speaking to Dante reproached mankind for setting its heart upon material things; "The heavens are calling to you and wheel around you, displaying unto you their eternal beauties and your eye gazes only on earth." Envy is consequently engendered because as the spirit says: "Mankind sets its heart there where exclusion of partnership is necessary." (XV, 43). "What meant the spirit from Romagna by mentioning exclusion and partnership?" asks Dante. Virgil proceeds to tell him that companionship in earthly possessions is not possible, for the more of any material thing a person has, the less of it remains for others. Hence envy arises from the very nature of the object which excludes partnership. On the other hand the more of the spiritual life one has, the more others participate in knowledge, peace and love, and this is especially true of the angels and the elect. The greater their number, the greater is the sum total of grace bestowed by God and the more each spirit shares his love with others. "The more spirits there on high yonder who love, the more there are to love perfectly and the more do they love each other and as a mirror one reflects back to the other" (XV, 75). This doctrine is expounded until the poets reach the third terrace, where wrath is punished. Here Dante represents himself as having a vision wherein he beholds examples of meekness and patience. First he sees the Finding of the Boy Christ in the temple and hears Mary's gentle complaint. Then follows the scene of Pisistratus refusing to condemn a youth for insulting his daughter. The third picture is that of the stoning of St. Stephen. "Then suddenly I seem'd By an ecstatic vision wrapt away: And in a temple saw, methought, a crowd Of many persons; and at the entrance stood A dame, whose sweet demeanor did express Another's love, who said, 'Child! why hast thou Dealt with us thus? Behold thy sire and I Sorrowing have sought thee;' and so held her peace; And straight the vision fled. A female next Appear'd before me, down whose visage coursed Those waters, that grief forces out from one By deep resentment stung who seem'd to say: 'If thou, Pisistratus, be lord indeed Over this city, named with such debate Of adverse gods, and whence each science sparkles, Avenge thee of those arms, whose bold embrace Hath clasp'd our daughter;' and to her, me seem'd, Benigh and meek, with visage undisturb'd, Her sovereign spake: 'How shall we those requite Who wish us evil, if we thus condemn The man that loves us?' After that I saw A multitude, in fury burning, slay With stones a stripling youth, and shout amain 'Destroy, destroy'; and him I saw, who bow'd Heavy with death unto the ground, yet made His eyes, unfolded upward, gates to heaven, Praying forgiveness of the Almighty Sire, Amidst that cruel conflict, on his foes, With looks that win compassion to their aim." (Canto, XV, 84.) The wrathful are punished by being enveloped in a dense pungent smoke, emblematic of the stifling caused by angry passions. "Darkness of hell, and of a night deprived Of every planet under a poor sky, As much as may be tenebrous with cloud, Ne'er made unto my sight so thick a veil, As did that smoke which there enveloped us, Nor to the feeling of so rough a texture; For not an eye it suffered to stay open; Whereat mine escort, faithful and sagacious, Drew near to me and offered me his shoulder. E'en as a blind man goes behind his guide, Lest he should wander, or should strike against Aught that may harm or peradventure kill him, So went I through the bitter and foul air, Listening unto my Leader, who said only, 'Look that from me thou be not separated.' Voices I heard, and every one appeared To supplicate for peace and misericord The Lamb of God who takes away our sins. Still _Agnus Dei_ their exordium was; One word there was in all, and metre one, So that all harmony appeared among them. 'Master,' I said, 'are spirits those I hear?' And he to me: 'Thou apprehendest truly, And they the knot of anger go unloosing.'" (Canto, XVI, 1.) Soon after this our poet hears one of the spirits of the wrathful, discoursing on the degeneracy of human life and sees in a second series of visions, historic instances of wrath and its punishment. He is awakened from his trance by the shining light and the glad summons of the Angel of meekness, who is at the stair leading to the next terrace. "This is a spirit divine who in the way Of going up directs us without asking And who with his own light himself conceals. * * * * * Accord we our feet, to such inviting Let us make haste to mount ere it grow dark; For then we could not till the day return." (XVII, 55.) Lightened of the third P the poet passes from the circle of the wrathful up the fourth stairway. Here he takes the opportunity to engage Virgil in conversation regarding love as the seed of the capital sins. These sins, it may be remarked in passing, are not always mortal sins, though many Dantian editors make the mistake of so classifying them. It is to be observed that on all the stairways of Purgatory there is a conference between the two poets on things likely to be of interest to Dante, in the matter of his salvation. At the end of the present conference Dante falls into slumber, from which he is aroused by the racing activity of the souls of the slothful, shouting instances of zeal and energy. Sloth is defined by St. Thomas Aquinas as sadness and torpor in the face of some spiritual good which one has to achieve, and a preacher of our day modernizes that definition to mean, the "don't-care-feeling" in the presence of duty. The sin is unlisted in modern treatises on Ethics, the writers of which see in its symptoms only indications of melancholia, neurasthenia or pellagra. But according to the scholastic classification still followed in this matter by the Catholic Church, sloth is to be considered as a specific vice opposed to the great commandment to love God with our whole heart. So Dante estimates it in his scheme of punishment, representing the souls crying out in their diligence, "Haste, haste, let no time be lost through little love." These souls are condemned to rush round and round at the topmost speed, those in front proclaiming instances of alacrity, viz., how the Blessed Virgin hastened to the hill country to visit Elizabeth and how Julius Caesar hurried to subdue Lerida. Those in the rear recall examples of sloth, viz., how the Israelites through wandering in the desert lost the Promised Land, and how the Trojans who dallied in Sicily gave themselves up to a life inglorious. Dante's slothful souls are startlingly swift in their action. One of them, the Abbot Zeno giving directions for ascent to Virgil and reprobating the sins of his successors in the monastery is out of hearing as soon as he speaks: "If more be said or if he was silent I know not, so far already had he raced beyond us" (XVIII, 127). The reader will not fail to note that the terrace of the slothful is the only circle of Purgatory where there is no request for intercessory prayer and that Dante here never speaks to any of those souls. Is that because the poet wishes us to understand that his own sentiment is that they do not deserve to be prayed for who neglected through sloth to pray for themselves and that his own silence in their presence is indicative of his disregard for souls so stained? To foreshow the sins to be treated on the three upper terraces, where are punished those who yielded to the sins of the body, Dante represents himself as tempted by a Siren. She is described as ugly and repulsive and then becoming, under the gaze of the beholder, fair and alluringly attractive--a description, perhaps, unconsciously reproduced by Pope when he wrote: "Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be seen. Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face We first endure, then pity, then embrace." Saved from the Siren by a noble lady (perhaps Lucia, Illuminating Grace) and Virgil, the poet is brooding upon the dream which has brought to his senses the pleasures of the world, when his guide admonishes him how salvation from sin's seduction is to be had--viz., by using worldly things as things to be trodden under foot, while the mind is raised to Heaven, God's lure to draw it upward. "Didst thou behold, that old enchantress Who sole above us henceforth is lamented? Didst thou behold how man is free from her? Suffice it thee, and smite earth with thy heels, Thine eyes lift upward to the lure, that whirls The Eternal King with revolutions vast." (XIX, 58.) On the fifth terrace our poets find the shades of the avaricious and the prodigals. They lie face to the ground, bound hand and foot, recalling during the night instances of avarice and during the day proclaiming the praise of liberality, as manifested in the Blessed Virgin, the pagan Fabricius and St. Nicholas. The latter is identified in the United States and some other countries, with the popular Santa Claus. Dante says of St. Nicholas that "the spirit went on to speak of the bounty which Nicholas gave to the maidens, to lead their youth to honor" (XX, 32). The allusion is to the legend that this Bishop of Myra secretly threw at different times into the windows of the home of three destitute maidens, bags of gold sufficient to provide them with dowries without which they would have been forced by poverty to a life of shame. In the realm of the avaricious and the prodigals, Dante addresses one of the repentent souls: "Spirit, who thou wast and why ye have your backs turned upward, tell me" (XX, 94). The answer of the shade of Pope Adrian IV, who died thirty-nine days after his election to the supreme pontificate without having been crowned, is one of the fine passages of the poem. "And he to me: 'Why Heaven makes us turn our backs to it, thou shalt learn: but first know that I was the successor of Peter. Between Siestri and Chiaveri there rushes down a fair river and from its name the title of my race takes its proudest distinction. For one month and a little more I experienced how heavily the great mantle weighs on him who keeps it out of the mire, so much so that all the other burdens seem but feathers. My conversion alas! was tardy; but when I had become the Roman pastor then I discovered how false life is. In it I found that the heart had no repose nor was it possible to rise higher in that life; wherefore the desire for this (immortal life) was kindled in me. Up to that time, I was a wretched soul and severed from God, wholly given up to Avarice. Now as thou seest I am punished for it here. What is the effect of Avarice is here made manifest in the purgation of the converted souls, and the mountain has no more bitter penalty, as our eyes fixed on earthly things, were not lifted up on high, even so has justice sunk them to the ground in this place. Even as Avarice quenched our love for every good, wherefore our works were lost, so justice doth hold us fast, bound and seized by feet and hands; and so long as it shall be the pleasure of the just Lord, so long shall we lie here motionless and outstretched.'" (XIX, 97.) At this point occurs one of those delightful surprises full of realism, that Dante uses from time to time to heighten the reader's interest. The poet has just learned that the spirit before him is Pope Adrian IV. At once Dante falls on his knees to pay homage to the high office of the Roman Pontiff, and he is about to say according to the conjecture of Benvenuto "Holy Father, I entreat your holiness to excuse my natural ignorance, for I was not aware of your being Pope." But the spirit bids the poet arise, telling him that in the spirit world the dignities and relations of this life are abolished. "I on my knees had fallen and wished to speak; But even as I began and he was aware, Only by listening, of my reverence, 'What cause,' he said, 'has downward bent thee thus?' And I told him: 'For your dignity, Standing, my conscience stung me with remorse.' 'Straighten thy legs, and upward raise thee, brother,' He answered, 'Err not, fellow servant am I With thee and with the others to one power If e'er that holy, evangelic sound Which sayeth _neque nubent_, thou hast heard Well canst thou see why in this wise I speak.'" (XIX, 127.) In this part of Purgatory Dante treats his readers to two other instances of surprise. The first case which also makes use of the dramatic quality of suspense, postponing the explanation to the following canto in order to prolong the eager expectation of the reader, narrates the occurrence of a wonderful phenomenon, the shaking of the mountain of Purgatory, accompanied by a harmonious outburst of joyful thanksgiving. * * * * * "We were striving to surmount the way so far as was permitted to our power when I felt the mountain quake like a thing which is falling; whereupon a chill gripped me, as is wont to grip him who is given to death. Of a surety Delos was not shaken so violently ere Latona made her nest therein to give birth to heaven's two eyes. Then began on all sides a shout, such that the Master drew toward me saying: 'Fear not while I do guide thee.' _Gloria in Excelsis Deo_ all were saying, by what I understood from those near by, whose cry could be heard. Motionless we stood and in suspense, like the shepherds who first heard that hymn, until the quaking ceased and it was ended. Then we took up again our holy way, looking at the shades, that lay on the ground already returned to their wonted plaint. No ignorance, if my memory err not in this, did ever with so great assault give me yearning for knowledge, I then seemed to have while pondering: nor by reason of our haste was I bold to ask; nor of myself could I see aught there; thus I went on timid and pensive." His curiosity is satisfied in an unexpected way. "The natural thirst which never is sated, save with the water whereof the poor Samaritan woman asked the grace, was burning within me--and lo, even as Luke writes to us that Christ appeared to the two who were on the way, already risen from the mouth of the tomb, a shade appeared to us saying: 'My brothers God give you peace.' Quickly we turned us and Virgil gave back to him the sign that is fitting thereto. Then began, 'May the true court that binds me in eternal exile, bring thee peace to the council of the blest.' 'How,' said he, and meantime we met sturdily, 'If ye are shades that God deigns not above, who hath escorted you so far by his stairs'? And my Teacher: 'If thou lookest at the marks which this man bears and which the angel outlines clearly wilt thou see 'tis meet he reign with the good.... Wherefore I was brought from Hell's wide jaws to guide him and I will guide him onward, so far as my school can lead him. But tell us, if thou knowest, why the mount gave before such quakings and wherefore all seemed to shout with one voice down to its soft base.'" It was the very question Dante had been yearning to utter. "Thus, by asking did he thread the very needle of my desire and with the pope alone my thirst was made less fasting." * * * * * The spirit, Statius by name, who has just obtained his release from Purgatorial confinement to ascend to Heaven, states that the earthquake was not due to natural causes, such as strong dry vapors producing wind, but was caused by spiritual elements operative upon a soul's completing the penance and term assigned. * * * * * "It quakes here when some soul feeleth herself cleansed, so that she may rise up or set forth, to mount on high, and such a shout follows her. Of the cleansing the will alone gives proof, which fills the soul, all free to change her cloister, and avails her to will.... And I who have lain under this torment five hundred years and more, only now felt free will for a better threshold. Therefore didst thou feel the earthquake and hear the pious spirits about the mount give praises to the Lord." * * * * * This Statius was a Roman poet who died in the year 96. His term in Purgatory therefore has lasted a little more than eleven centuries. The next longest period mentioned by Dante is that of Duke Hugh Capet who has been in Purgatory over 350 years with his purification still incomplete. Statius by Dante's poetic invention is represented first as saved through the influence of Virgil's poems and then is shown to be a Christian, having been led to embrace Christianity both from the heroic example of the martyrs and from his meditation on Virgil's prophecy of the Cumæan Sibyl interpreted in the Middle Ages to refer to Christ. In the Divina Commedia Statius pays a glowing tribute to the �neid and its author, wholly ignorant that he is addressing Virgil himself. "Of the �neid I speak which was a mother to me and was to me a nurse in poesy ... and to have lived yonder when Virgil was alive, I would consent to one sun more than I need perform." Dante is all aquiver to surprise Statius with the information that Virgil is at hand, "but Virgil turned to me with a look that silently said, 'be silent.'" "But the power which wills Bears not supreme control: laughter and tears Follow so closely on the passion prompts them, They wait not for the motions of the will In nature most sincere. I did but smile, As one who winks; and thereupon the shade Broke off, and peer'd into mine eyes, where best Our looks interpret. 'So to good event Mayst thou conduct such great emprize,' he cried, 'Say, why across thy visage beam'd, but now, The lightning of a smile.' On either part Now am I straiten'd; one conjures me speak, The other to silence binds me; whence a sigh I utter, and the sigh is heard. 'Speak on,' The teacher cried 'and do not fear to speak: But tell him what so earnestly he asks.' Whereon I thus: 'Perchance, O ancient spirit Thou marvel'st at my smiling. There is room For yet more wonder. He, who guides my ken On high, he is that Mantuan, led by whom Thou didst presume of men and gods to sing. If other cause thou deem'dst for which I smiled, Leave it as not the true one: and believe Those words, thou spakest of him, indeed the cause.' Now down he bent to embrace my teacher's feet; But he forbade him: 'Brother! do it not: Thou art a shadow, and behold'st a shade.' He, rising, answer'd thus: 'Now hast thou proved The force and ardor of the love I bear thee, When I forget we are but things of air, And, as a substance, treat an empty shade.'" (XXI, 106.) On the sixth terrace Dante with five P's removed, accompanied by Virgil sees the souls of those who sinned by gluttony. They are an emaciated crowd obliged to pass and repass before a fruit-laden tree bedewed with clear water from a fountain, without being able to satisfy their hunger or quench their thirst. Voices from this tree proclaim examples of temperance; voices from another tree equally tantalizing, declare examples of gluttony. "People I saw beneath it (the tree) lift their hands And cry I know not what towards the leaves, Like little children eager and deluded, Who pray, and he they pray to doth not answer But, to make very keen their appetite Holds their desire aloft and hides it not. Then they departed as if undeceived." (XXIV, 106.) Here Dante recognizes among the gaunt attenuated figures of the penitents, Forese Donati, his intimate friend and kinsman of his wife Gemma. Our poet was surprised to find him so soon after his death on one of the terraces of Purgatory, the assumption being that because of his delay of conversion to the end of his life Forese would be in Outer Purgatory for a term equal in duration to the length of his life on earth. But the reason he had come so quickly to Purgatory is to be found in the efficacy of the prayers of his widow for the repose of his soul. "Then answered he: 'That now I wander reaping The bitter sweat of all this punishment My Nella gained for me, her vigil keeping In prayer devout and infinite lament. Thus, here, beyond that shore of waiting sent, I landed, from the lower circles freed. And that more dear to God omnipotent Lives on my little widow, is the meed Of the lone life she spends in many a saintly deed.'" (XXXIII, 85.) Before ascending to the seventh and last terrace Dante describes how the angel of abstinence removed the sixth P. "And as the harbinger of early dawn, The air of May doth move and breathe out fragrance Impregnate all with herbage and with flowers, So did I feel a breeze strike in the midst My front, and felt the moving of the plumes That breathed around an odor of ambrosia; And heard it said; Blessed are they whom grace So much illumines that the love of taste Excites not in their breasts too great desire, Hungering at all times so far as is just." (XXIV, 145.) And now our penitent as he reaches the seventh terrace, where sins against the virtue of purity are expiated, enters upon the last stage of his purification. Here the spirits pass and repass through the midst of intensely hot flames, proclaiming examples of chastity. It is worthy of note that this terrace is the only place in Dante's Purgatory where fire is the punitive agent--a conception of our poet all the more remarkable because it runs counter to the view commonly held by the churchmen in the West, including St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, who teach that fire is the cleansing element of all Purgatory. That indeed is only a theological opinion. The Church itself, as the Greeks were assured at the Council of Florence, has never put forth any dogmatic decree on the subject. Bidden by the angel to enter the fire, Dante draws back paralysed with fear. Scenes of burning at the stake come with horror to his mind. He probably recalls also that Florence had condemned him to be burned alive. So, for the first time in Purgatory he recoils at the penance he must perform. Impassionately Virgil exhorts him. The stubborn pupil yields only at the utterance of Beatrice's name. For love of her he will endure the flame. "The Mantuan spake: 'My son, Here torment thou mayst feel, but canst not death. Remember thee, remember thee, if I Safe e'en on Geryon brought thee; now I come More near to God, wilt thou not trust me now? Of this be sure; though in its womb that flame A thousand years contain'd thee, from thy head No hair should perish. If thou doubt my truth, Approach; and with thy hands thy vesture's hem Stretch forth, and for thyself confirm belief. Lay now all fear, oh! lay all fear aside. Turn hither, and come onward undismay'd.' I still, though conscience urged, no step advanced. When still he saw me fix'd and obstinate, Somewhat disturb'd he cried: 'Mark now, my son, From Beatrice thou art by this wall Divided.' As at Thisbe's name the eye Of Pyramus was open'd (when life ebb'd Fast from his veins) and took one parting glance, While vermeil dyed the mulberry; thus I turned To my sage guide, relenting, when I heard The name that springs for ever in my breast. He shook his forehead; and, 'How long,' he said, 'Linger we now'? then smiled, as one would smile Upon a child that eyes the fruit and yields. Into the fire before me then he walk'd; And Statius, who erewhile no little space Had parted us, he pray'd to come behind, I would have cast me into molten glass To cool me, when I entered; so intense Raged the conflagrant mass. The sire beloved, To comfort me, as he proceeded, still Of Beatrice talk'd. 'Her eyes,' saith he, 'E'en now I seem to view.' From the other side A voice, that sang did guide us; and the voice Following, with heedful ear, we issued forth, There where the path led upward. 'Come,' we heard, 'Come blessed of my Father.'" (Canto, XXVII, 20.) On emerging from the fire and on the very threshold of the Garden of Eden, Dante is addressed by Virgil, no longer competent to guide him higher. The Mantuan in touching words tells his disciple that having passed through Purgatory he needs no other guide than his own will, upright and sound, until he passes under the tutelage of Beatrice. "The temporal fire and the eternal Son, thou hast seen, and to a place art come Where of myself no farther I discern. By intellect and art I here have brought thee; Take thine own pleasure for thy guide henceforth; Beyond the steep ways and the narrow art thou. Expect no more or word or sign from me; Free and upright and sound is thy free will, And error were it not to do its bidding Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre." (XXVII, 127.) Brother Azarias gives us the mystical sense of this passage. "The soul has conquered; therefore Virgil leaves the poet free from the dominion of his passions; more than free, a king crowned triumphant over himself; more than a king, a mitred priest, ruling the cloister of his heart, his thoughts and his affections and mediator and intercessor before Divine Mercy for himself and those commending themselves to his prayers." So crowned and mitred over himself Dante now enters the Garden of Eden. "Here did the parents of mankind dwell in innocence; here is there perpetual spring and every fruit." In the forest of Eden is a pure stream with two currents, Lethe and Eunoe, "the first has the power of all past sins the memory to erase, the other can restore remembrance of good deeds and pious days." On the banks of this stream the poet sees Matilda, who represents the Active Life. "There appeared to me a lady all alone who went along singing and selecting from among the flowers wherewith all her path was enamelled" ... suddenly "the lady turned completely round towards me, saying, 'My Brother, look and listen'" (XXIX, 15). A solemn chant is heard, a wonderful light is seen. It is a pageant representing the return of mankind to Eden through membership in the Church. First come, shedding heavenly light, the seven mystical candlesticks, symbolic of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost or the seven sacraments of the Church. Next follow twenty-four ancients representating the books of the Old Testament. Then are seen the four prophetic animals symbolizing the four Evangelists. Christ drawing a chariot representing the Church, the central figure of the pageant, advances under the form of the fabulous griffin, half eagle and half lion, typifying the two-fold nature of our Lord. On the right side of the chariot, dancing are three nymphs, the theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity. On the left side are four other nymphs--the cardinal virtues, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance. Next come two old men, dignified and grave, St. Paul and St. Luke, who are followed by four others representing other books of the New Testament viz., the Epistles of St. James, St. Peter, St. John and St. Jude. The rear guard is an aged Solitary symbolic of the Apocalypse. "And when the chariot was opposite to me" writes Dante, "a clap of thunder was heard; and those worthy folk seemed to have their further march forbidden, and halted there with the first ensign" (XXIX, 153). What is the meaning of this symbolic procession so common to Dante's day, so alien to ours? We have already said that it is a dramatic representation of the human race finding happiness, finding its Eden in its membership in the Church. But it, also, is a symbolic lesson for the individual. Dante, the type of humanity having done penance for his sins, is about to be received through the sacrament of penance into the soul of the Church i.e. into the full communion of grace. It is fitting, therefore, that the Church should advance to meet him, the repentant sinner, and should reveal itself to him before receiving him into its bosom. If objection be made that Dante already has been absolved from sin and in Purgatory has made expiation for his offences, the answer is given by Ozanam; "At the term of the expiatory course, as at its beginning, to quit it as well as to enter upon it, we must render submission to a religious authority and fulfill the conditions without which God does not treat with us--confession for oblivion, fears for consolation and shame for definitive rehabilitation." When the pageant comes to a halt the participants group themselves about the Griffin and the Chariot, by that act declaring that the goal and object of their desires are centered in Christ and His Church. Then one of the company by divine command calls aloud three times to a heavenly being, the spouse of the Church, to appear and the cry is repeated by the whole company. From the Chariot arise, as will arise the dead from their graves, a hundred angels scattering flowers over and around the Chariot and also raising their voices in the call for the Heavenly Bride. They first sing the words of the Canticle of Palm Sunday. _Benedictus qui venis_ (Blessed art thou who comest) and then the beautiful line from the Aeneid: _Manibus o date lilia plenis_ (Oh! give lilies with full hands). Then comes from the clouds through the midst of the flowers showering down again within and without the Chariot, arrayed in the colors of the three theological virtues, the object of the invocation. "Crowned with olive over a white veil a Lady appeared to me, vestured in hue of living flame under a green mantle." It is Beatrice, Dante's beloved, now apotheosized in the personification of Revelation. What other poet ever dreamed of so glorifying his beloved that for her coming the natural virtues prepare the way, the supernatural virtues, as handmaids accompany her to assist us to the understanding of her doctrine, the angels sing her laudation and she herself in the role both of unveiler of the Scriptures of the Prophets and the Apostles and the mystical Bride of the Canticles is worthy to be called "O Light, O Glory of the human race?" Dante before seeing her face, recognizes her by some mysterious instinct of love, recognizes her after a lapse according to fiction of ten years, but in reality of twenty-four years since her death. To Virgil, Dante turns to tell the joyous news but Virgil has gone and tears course down the face of his disciple. "Dante," says Beatrice, "weep not that Virgil leaves thee, nay weep thou not yet, for thou wilt have to weep for another wound." Awed by her appearance, he is taken back by her greeting. The mere thought of her loveliness uplifted him in the world. The hope of seeing her carried him through the horrors of Hell and the penance of Purgatory. Crowned and mitred over himself he came to Eden to meet her. And she has only reproaches for him. Particularly to the angels does she tell the story of his defection from the high ideals which she inspired in him. "This man was such in his new life potentially that every good talent would have made wondrous increase in him--(but) so low sank he that all means for his salvation were already short save showing him the lost people. For this I visited the portal of the dead and to him who has guided him up hither, weeping my prayers were borne. God's high decree would be broken if Lethe were passed and such viands were tasted, without some sort of penitence that may shed tears." To her lover she turns for confirmation of the truth of her words: "Say, say if this is true; to such accusation thy confession must be joined." "Confusion and fear together mingled, drove forth from my mouth a 'Yea,'" a monosyllable of confession which showed the depth of his shame. But it is the sight of the superhuman beauty of Beatrice which completes his contrition and resuscitates his love so as to fit him to pass through the waters of the Lethe. "My eyes beheld Beatrice, turned toward the animal (the Griffin) that is One Person only (Christ) in twofold nature (i.e. God and man). Under her veil and on the far side of the stream she seemed to me to surpass more her ancient self, than she surpassed the others here when she was with us. So much remorse gnawed at my heart that I fell vanquished and what I then became she knoweth who gave me the cause." (XXXI, 82.) When he recovers consciousness he finds his immersion in the Lethe in progress by Matilda. Then he is led to Beatrice by the four nymphs (the cardinal virtues) and at the request of the three nymphs who typify the theological virtues she smiles upon him. "The fair lady (Matilda) dipped me where I must needs swallow of the water, then drew me forth and led me, bathed, within the dance of the four fair ones, and each did cover me with her arm. 'Here we are nymphs and in heaven are stars. Ere Beatrice descended to the world, we were ordained for her handmaids: we will lead thee to her eyes: but the three on the other side who deeper gaze will sharpen thine eyes to the joyous light that is within." Beholding the glorified beauty of Beatrice wholly inexpressible, Dante is in such rapture that he is oblivious of everything else. "Mine eyes with such an eager coveting Were bent to rid them of their ten years' thirst No other sense was waking; and e'en they Were fenced on either side from heed of aught: So tangled, in its custom'd toils, that smile Of saintly brightness drew it to itself." When our poet comes out of his rapture, the Chariot and the mystical company are moving to a tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which according to a beautiful tradition has become the Cross of Christ, the tree of salvation. To that tree is attached the Chariot which Christ (the Griffin) now leaves to enter Heaven again with the ancients and the angels. Beatrice remains with the seven nymphs to guard the Chariot (the Church). Up to this point the picture of the Church has been one of peace and happiness. Now with prophetic eye the poet beholds the tribulations which the Church will suffer from without and within. The description of the vision and the explanation of the symbolism are so well set forth by Ozanam that I quote his words unable to improve upon them, as I also share his view as to the unwarranted severity here of Dante's censures of the Church. "An eagle falls like lightning upon the tree, from which he tears the bark, and upon the car, which bends beneath his weight. Then comes a fox which finds its way within, and then a portion is torn off by a dragon that issues from the gaping earth. Thus far it is easy to recognize the persecutions of the Roman emperors which so harried the Church, the heresies by which it was desolated, and the schisms by which it was torn. Soon, the eagle reappeared, less menacing but not less dangerous; he shook his plumes above the sacred car, which speedily underwent a monstrous transformation. From divers parts of it arose seven heads armed with ten horns; a courtesan was seated in the midst; a giant stood at her side, exchanging with her impure caresses which he interrupted to scourge her cruelly. Then, cutting loose the metamorphosed car, he bears it away, and is lost with it in the depths of the forest. "Is not this again the Church, enriched, by the gifts of princes who have become her protectors, sadly marred in appearance, sundry of her members defiled by the taint of the seven capital sins, and herself ruled over by unworthy pontiffs? Is not this the court of Rome, exchanging criminal flatteries with the temporal power, which flatteries are to be followed by cruel injuries, when the Holy See, torn from the foot of the cross of the Vatican, is transferred to a distant land, on the banks of a foreign river? But these ills will not be without end nor without retribution. The tree that lost and that saved the world cannot be touched with impunity, and if the Church has been made militant here below, it is with the liability of suffering from passing reverses, but also with the assurance of final victory." Dante's own eternal victory is now assured, Beatrice directs Matilda to lead him to the Eunoe, whose waters will regenerate him and fit him to ascend to Paradise. "Behold, Eunoe which gushes forth yonder, lead him thereto and as thou art wont, revive in him again his fainting powers." The poem closes with an address to the reader: "If, Reader, I possessed a longer space For writing it, I yet would sing in part Of the sweet draught that ne'er would satiate me; But inasmuch as full are all the leaves Made ready for this second canticle, The curb of art no farther lets me go. From the most holy water I returned Regenerate, in the manner of new trees That are renewed with a new foliage, Pure and disposed to mount unto the stars." (Purg., XXXIII, 136.) DANTE'S PARADISO DANTE'S PARADISO Of Dante's trilogy the Paradiso is truly his "medieval miracle of song," the supreme achievement of his genius. Here the poetry of the sublime reaches its highest point--the summit on which Dante is a lonely and unchallenged figure. "No uninspired hand," says Cardinal Manning, "has ever written thoughts so high in words, so resplendent, as the last stanza of the Divina Commedia." It was said of St. Thomas: "_Post Summam Thomæ nihil restat nisi lumen gloriæ_." It may be said of Dante: "_Post Dantis Paradisum nihil restat nisi visio Dei._" ("After Dante's Paradiso nothing remains but the vision of God.") Shelley's tribute to the supremacy of Dante's Heaven is no less beautiful: "Dante's apotheosis of Beatrice and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness by which, as by steps, he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination of modern poetry." Ruskin says: "Every line of the Paradiso is full of the most exquisite and spiritual expressions of Christian truths and the poem is only less read than the Inferno because it requires far greater attention and perhaps, for its full enjoyment, a holier heart." That Dante's Inferno is more popular reading than his Paradiso is due to the fact that evil and its consequences offer to the artist richer material for dramatic fascination and to the reader more lively interest in characters intensely human, than does the less sensational story of the Elects finding peace and happiness in a realm transcending the experiences of human nature. Dante's Purgatorio also finds a wider circle of readers because his penitents, suffering, struggling and aspiring, like people upon earth, have more human traits and exhibit more human interest than the saints confirmed in grace against human weakness. Another reason for lesser interest manifested in this part of the Divina Commedia is the difficulty and obscurity of the Paradiso. It is not easy reading, because it requires study, repetition, concentration, meditation, qualities absent from the art of reading as it prevails today. If we ever have time to look at a book, the habit of skimming with inattentive rapidity so urges us onward that we find ourselves flitting from page to page, from chapter to chapter, panting and uninstructed. And if we belong to the bookless majority who have no time to read, we rush to the moving picture theatre to get our mental pabulum--often a season's best seller--boiled down, served in rapid-fire order and bolted in the twinkling of an eye. For all such Dante's Paradiso is an intellectual as well as a spiritual impossibility and the poet begs such not to follow him on his voyage to the eternal kingdom. "Oh ye who in some pretty little boat Eager to listen, have been following Behind my ship, that singing sails along, Turn back to look again upon your shores; In losing me, you might yourselves be lost. The sea I sail has never yet been passed. Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo, And Muses nine point out to me the Bears. Ye other few, who have the neck uplifted Betimes to th' bread of Angels upon which One liveth here and grows not sated by it, Well may you launch upon the deep salt-sea Your vessel, keeping still my wake before you Upon the water that grows smooth again. Those glorious ones who unto Colchos passed Were not so wonder-struck as you shall be, When Jason they beheld a ploughman made." (II, 1.) The song which Dante sings in the Paradiso is the eternal happiness of man in vision, love and enjoyment united to his Creator. In preparation for this final consummation the poet, as he ascends to the Empyrean, gives a most beautiful epitome of the principal mysteries of religion and of some of the tenets of scholastic philosophy, treating especially the Fall of Man, Predestination, Free Will, the Redemption, the Immortality of the Soul and the theory of Human Knowledge. Allegorically considered, the poem is a veil, under which we see the ideal life of man upon earth, exercising virtue and gaining virtue's rewards. To exhibit man's supreme, happiness in the next life, the Christian poet, insisting that his purpose is the inculcation of truth, both to save and to adorn the soul, must base his theme upon the doctrines of the Church. The definition of some of those dogmas Dante anticipated. All may be summed up in the following statement: "It is of Catholic faith that the souls of the blessed see God directly and face to face and this vision is Supernatural; that there are degrees of this vision, corresponding to the merits of the elect; that to see God in His Essence, the intellect is supernaturally perfected; that the Beatific Vision is not deferred to the Day of Judgment, but is possessed at once after death but the Just, in whom there is no stain of sin or who have no temporal punishment to be expiated; and, furthermore, that all human beings at the end of the world will arise with their own bodies." How will the poet bring home those incomprehensible truths to his readers? He has to treat a subject wholly transcendent and supernatural. Though his vision be celestial, his langauge must be terrestrial. He must visualize states of the soul which are alien to the eyes of the body and translate into terms of the senses things which are wholly non-sensuous. Dante is aware that no poet ever essayed that feat before: "The sea I sail has never yet been passed." (1, 8.) He knows, also, that shoals and rocks, seemingly impassable and a sea which may engulf his genius, are before him. "It is no coastwise voyage for a little barque, this sea through which the intrepid prow goes cleaving nor for a pilot who would spare himself." (XXIII, 67.) And yet he will attempt the impossible, he will endeavor to sing not of the scenes but of the states of suprasensible spiritual joys--joys which Bishop Norris says "are without example, above experience and beyond imagination, for which the whole creation wants a comparison, we an apprehension and even the word of God, a revelation." Conscious of all that, Dante confesses the impotency of speech, the inadequacy of memory, the helplessness of imagination for the task to which he sets himself. He tells us that the sublime songs of the elect "have lapsed and fallen out of my memory"--"that to represent and transhumanize in words impossible were." (I, 71.) "And what was the sun wherein I entered, Apparent, not by color, but by light I, though I call on genius, art and practice Cannot so tell that it could be imagined." (X, 41.) So by the very nature of the subject visualization can be only partial--only "the shadow of the blessed realm," can be shown. But what human nature can do, even if its feat seems solitary and unique, Dante has accomplished in a failure which constitutes the most wonderful achievement in the domain of the sublime in literature, an achievement leaving us with a sense of his own ineffable bliss and of the inexpressible joys of the Elect--an achievement which came to pass, say some readers, because his poem is an account of a supernatural vision--and Dante hints that he thinks he was so favored, or because it is a work to which both heaven and earth have set their hand, showing him, as Emerson observes, "all imagination," or, as James Russell Lowell says, "The highest spiritual nature which has expressed itself in rhythmical form." There are two methods of representing man's supreme happiness, relative and absolute: one is to depict nature at her best, untouched by sin, and to show man free from every defect and blemish, in the full perfection of his being. Naturally the imagery in this case is the imagery born of finite human experiences. The other method describes, as we said, not scenes of happiness but transcendent conditions of the soul as it is brought into ultimate communion with Supreme Goodness--the finite possessing and enjoying the Infinite. Here the human mind, let us repeat it, finds earthly images powerless to translate its thought, for it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive the glory of the spiritual world. These two methods Dante follows successively. His Eden on the summit of Purgatory is literally the earthly Paradise of Adam and Eve. It is pictured in moving imagery as man's "native country of delights," a "lofty garden" of ineffable loveliness, high above all the physical and moral disturbances of earth, its waters, its winds, its flowers and its music all coming from supernatural sources, its bliss springing from the perfect harmony of man's animal, intellectual and spiritual powers in full and perfect accord with reason. It is Paradise Regained by man's climbing the mountain of Purgatory, and its significance is understood if we remember that Dante would teach us that the present life can be made dual, a life worth while in itself, full of service and godliness as well as a preparation for the unending life of Heaven. For Dante there must be, also, the Celestial Paradise where man's supernatural destiny will be realized in joys which the eye has not seen and in music which the ear has not heard. His Paradiso has been called the Ten Heavens, but in reality there is in his plan only one Heaven, the Empyrean, the abode of the angels, of the blessed spirits and of God. It is high above the planets and the stars, beyond time and space. The Church has never answered the question: Where is Heaven? Theologians, however, have put forth various opinions. "Some say," writes Father Honthein, that "Heaven is everywhere, as God is everywhere, the blessed being free to move freely in every part of the universe while still remaining with God and seeing Him everywhere." Others hold that Heaven is "a special place with definite limits. Naturally this place is held to exist, not within the earth, but in accordance with the expressions of Scripture, 'without and beyond its limits.'" (Cath. Encycl., VII, 170.) According to Dante's conception, Heaven, being non-spatial and non-temporal, is not a place but a state of spiritual life. As an aid in depicting that state he makes use of a unique literary device. He poetically creates nine Heavens, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Fixed Stars, the Primum Mobile or First Movement. These, according to the Ptolemaic system which our poet follows, are concentric with the earth, around which as their center they revolve, while the earth remains fixed and motionless. The motion of each of these nine spheres, originally coming from the Primum Mobile, is communicated to it by the love of the angelic guardians, a literal application of the common saying that "love makes the world go around." As a poetic fiction necessary for him to enter finally the true Heaven Dante is required to pass through these nine spheres, the fiction being used by him as an artist to declare the glories of the heavens and as a teacher to inculcate doctrines for the instruction and edification of mankind. In each of the nine Heavens groups of the blessed are represented as coming to meet him "as he returns to God as to the port whence (he) set out when (he) first entered upon the sea of this life." This peerless rhetorical figure is explained in the Banquet, where he says: "As his fellow-citizens come forth to meet him who returns from a long journey even before he enters the gates of his city; so to the noble soul come forth the citizens of the eternal Life." This apparition of the blessed spirits to greet the mystic traveller as he mounts from sphere to sphere has several advantages: "it peoples with hosts of spirits, the immense lonely spaces through which the journey lies"; it affords the poet the opportunity of asking them "many things which have great utility and delight"; it finally gives him a sensible sign of the degree of beatitude which they possess in that realm of many mansions where each is rewarded according to his merit and capacity, the capacity of each spirit being in proportion to its degree of knowledge and love. This is stressed by the poet's representing the apparitions first as faint yet beautiful outlines of human features, then as ascent is made to the other Heavens, the spirits make themselves known by increasing manifestations of light so dazzling finally that the splendor would blind Dante if his vision were not divinely adapted to its supernatural needs. The inequalities of bliss are also symbolized by the sphere in which the spirits appear to him; those in the sphere of the moon, e.g., are less favored than those in the Heaven of Mercury. The inequality of merit, and therefore of reward, is also declared by the difference in both the quickness of the spirits' movement and their clearness of vision into the essence of God. The Empyrean, it is worth while repeating, is the only true Paradise, the nine Heavens being only myths or poetic devices. If spirits are seen there, they have come forth only from the Empyrean and will quickly return there after preparing the poet for the eternal Light of Light. The materials out of which Dante constructs his Paradiso are not, as we are already aware, fantastic images such as he employed for the first two parts of the Divina Commedia, but are things of the spirit, viz., knowledge, beauty, faith, love, joy; and he is aided in making visible those invisible entities of the spiritual life by such intangible things as sound, motion and light. Light, indeed, is one of the leading elements in the Paradiso. The poem begins with a reference to the light of God's glory, and its last line speaks of "the Love which moves the Sun and the other stars." And between this beginning and this end in thirty-three cantiche light is represented not only by degrees of increasing intensity and variety of unlocked for movements but as surrounding the spirits, living flames, and constituting, symbolically, the beatitude of Heaven. Dean Church, in his classic essay on Dante, has a beautiful paragraph that here calls for quotation: "Light in general is his special and chosen source of poetic beauty. No poet that we know has shown such singular sensibility to its varied appearances.... Light everywhere--in the sky and earth and sea--in the stars, the flames, the lamp, the gems--broken in the water, reflected from the mirror, transmitted through the glass, or colored through the edge of the fractured emerald--dimmed in the mist. The halo, the deep water--streaming through the rent cloud, glowing in the coal, quivering in the lightning, flashing in the topaz and the ruby, veiled behind the pure alabaster, mellowed and clouding itself in the pearl-light contrasted with shadow, shading off and copying itself in the double rainbow like voice and echo--light seen within light--light from every source and in all its shapes illuminates, irradiates, gives glory to the Commedia.... And when he (Dante) rises beyond the regions of earthly day, light, simple and unalloyed, unshadowed and eternal, lifts the creations of his thought above all affinity to time and matter; light never fails him, as the expression of the gradations of bliss; never reappears the same, never refuses the new shapes of his invention, never becomes confused or dim, though it is seldom thrown into distinct figure and still more seldom colored." In making light such a central feature of Heaven and symbolically in identifying light with God and the angels and the blessed, Dante is only expressing--but expressing beautifully and supremely--the thought which pagan oracles proclaimed and Holy Writ and the Church made known. From the earliest ages the sun which vivifies and illuminates the world was regarded by many nations as the symbol of the Deity--and by still other nations it was adored. The psalmist, addressing God, says: "Thou art clothed with light as with a garment." (Ps., CIII, 2.) St. Paul declares that the Lord of Lords "inhabiteth light inaccessible." (1 Tim., VI, 16.) The Seer of Patmos tells us that the heavenly Jerusalem has no need of the light of the sun and the moon to shine upon it, "for the glory of God hath enlightened it and the Lamb is the lamp thereof." (Apoc., XX, 23.) "I am the light of the world," declares Christ, and with that revelation ringing in his ears the Beloved Disciple does not hesitate to say: "and this is the declaration which we have heard--that God is light." (I John, I, 5.) In narrating his vision of Heaven, Ezechial compares the light emanating from and enveloping the Deity, to fire. "I saw the likeness as of the appearance of fire, as the appearance of brightness." (XXIV, 17.) Moses on the mountain saw the Lord in the midst of fire, and on another mountain Christ, "the brightness of his Father's glory was transfigured before his apostles and his face did shine as the Sun and his garments became shining or glittering." (Matt., XVII, 2.) Small wonder then that the Nicaean creed declares that Christ is "God of God, Light of light." Not only with God, but with His saints is the idea of visible light intimately associated. The prophet Daniel tells us that "They that are learned shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that instruct many unto justice, as stars to all eternity." (XII, 3.) And it is Christ Himself who says: "Then shall the just shine as the sun, in the kingdom of their Father." (Matt., XIII, 43.) In using such a subtle, dazzling element as light so generally and in such countless varieties throughout his Paradiso, Dante is exposed to the danger of palling his readers with brightness and making them lose interest in things glorious and supernal. But the genius of the man saves the artist. By a conception of matchless beauty he binds the light of heaven to the human, making the smile in the eye of his beloved guide, Beatrice, express his own personal heaven, in the light that enters his mind and the ardor which quickens his heart. As he mounts with her the stairway of the heavens leading to the Eternal Palace and his motion is brought about simply by his gazing into her eyes, she makes known to him by her increasing brightness both his own mounting knowledge and his ascent nearer the Empyrean. As Dante represents the increase of light and love deepening and expanding in him as he rises empyreanward all by the loved smile of his beloved Beatrice, it is well that we bear in mind the significance of the symbolism as expounded by the poet in his Banquet. (III, 15.) Beatrice being Revelation or Wisdom made known to the world, "in her face appear things that tell of the pleasures of Paradise and ... the place wherein this appears is in her eyes and her smile. And here it should be known that the eyes of Wisdom are the two demonstrations by which is seen the truth most certainly; and her smile is her persuasion by which is shown forth the interior light of Wisdom under some veil; and in these two things is felt the highest pleasure of beatitude, which is the greatest good of Paradise." Beatrice--Revealed Truth--remains the poet's guide until he comes to behold the Beatific Vision. Then, no longer needed, she withdraws in favor of the contemplative St. Bernard as guide, just as Virgil had withdrawn when he was powerless and when Beatrice was needed. The question here presents itself: In what does Dante place the happiness of Heaven? Does he paint such a Heaven that it shows principally the rectifications of the inequalities of this life--a Heaven of such happiness, e.g., that the poor will love poverty or be resigned to it in the hope of possessing the riches of this Eternity? Is Dante's Heaven one in which happiness is so alluring that innocence will gladly submit to calumny and faith will lovingly welcome the sword or stake, in the certain confidence of gaining unending glory or bliss? The Paradiso does reward poverty, crown innocence, glorify martyrdom, but it was never intended to be an account of what takes place in the real Heaven, or to be a description of the particular acts of goodness which win Heaven for the soul, or a rapturous picture appealing to the emotions of the believer and alluring him from earth. Does Dante place the happiness of Heaven in the bliss and glorification of family reunion? He is too good a theologian to place the essential happiness of Heaven merely in the joy of family reunion. He does not ignore that feature of eternity, but he does not stress it, because temperamentally he is moved less by sentiment of family and ties of friendship than by his curiosity for knowledge, by his yearnings to behold Eternal Wisdom. Only once does he mention Heaven as the state of reunion of families and friends, and that is when he comments upon the action of the twenty-three spirits in the Heaven of the Sun, in expressing their agreement with Soloman's discourse as to the participation which the human body will have, after the Resurrection in the glories of Paradise: "So ready and so cordial an Amen Follow'd from either choir, as plainly spoke Desire of their dead bodies; yet perchance Not for themselves, but for their kindred dear, Mothers and sires and those whom best they loved, Ere they were made imperishable flames." (XIV, 65.) For Dante, Heaven must be the beatitude of the intellect and that primarily by the intellect's having an intuition full of joy in the Divine Essence, and secondly by its possessing full light on all those vexatious problems and mysteries which baffle us in this life. "Well I perceive that never sated is Our intellect unless Truth illumines it, Beyond which nothing true expands itself. It rests therein, as wild beast in his lair When it attains it and it can attain it." (IV, 125.) In insisting upon the power of the mind to know the truth and to find perfect happiness in the supernatural act of beholding God face to face, Dante is not in agreement with Pragmatism, Hegelianism and the "new Realist" theory--all which make truth elusive to the mind; but he is in full accord with the teaching of the Catholic Church, which defends the rights of reason holding, e.g., that "by the natural light of reason God can be known with certainty, by means of created things" (Vatican Council), and proclaiming that "all the saints in Heaven have seen and do see the Divine Essence by direct intuition and face to face in such wise that nothing created intervenes as an object of vision; ... that the Divine Essence presents itself to their immediate gaze, unveiled, clearly and openly; that in this vision they enjoy the Divine Essence, and in virtue of this vision and this enjoyment they are truly blessed and possess eternal life and eternal rest." (Benedict XII, Cath. Encycl., VII, 171.) It is interesting to see how Dante's Master, St. Thomas Aquinas, demonstrates the proposition that the beatitude of man consists in the vision of the Divine Essence. With his usual lucidity of thought he writes: "The last and perfect happiness of man cannot be otherwise than in the vision of the Divine Essence. In evidence of this statement two points are to be considered: first, that man is not perfectly happy so long as there remains anything for him to desire and seek; secondly, that the perfection of every power is determined by the nature of its object. Now the object of the intellect is the essence of a thing; hence the intellect attains to perfection so far as it knows the Essence of what is before it. And therefore, when a man knows an effect and knows that it has a cause, there is in him an outstanding natural desire of knowing the essence of the cause. If, therefore, a human intellect knows the essence of a created effect without knowing aught of God beyond the fact of His existence, the perfection of that intellect does not yet adequately reach the First Cause, but the intellect has an outstanding natural desire of searching into the said Cause; hence it is not yet perfectly happy. For perfect happiness, therefore, it is necesary that the intellect shall reach as far as the very essence of the First Cause." (Rickaby, Aquinas Ethicus I, 2 q., 3 a, 8.) This masterly exposition is after all only the philosophical development of what every Catholic child learns from one of the first questions of the little Catechism: "Why did God make you? God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him forever in the next." With the satisfaction of the intellect's boundless yearning for knowledge attained by intuition of the Essence of God, a consummation that will somewhat deify us--"Who shall be made like to him, because we shall see him as he is" (I John, III, 2.), the happiness of man will be primarily intellectual, being as Dante beautifully says: "Light intellectual full of love, love of the true good, full of joy, joy that transcendeth all sweetness." (XXX, 40.) His Heaven, then, is no Nirvana, for each spirit will for eternity have its individuality, and its activity will be unremitting in seeing God face to face--a vision that will cause the spirit increasing wonder in an act that will have no flagging nor satiety. "What, after all, is Heaven," says Bulwer Lytton, "but a transition from dim guesses to the fullness of wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, but knowledge of what order?" To that exclamation of the nineteenth century writer the medieval seer answers with conviction that the _summum bonum_ is to be found only in the intellect's attaining Truth. Let us now join Dante in his mystic journey to the Heavenly Kingdom. We left him after three days and three nights in Purgatory, standing with Beatrice on the summit of the mountain in the Earthly Paradise, where he remained six hours. At noon he begins his ascent through space, a feat accomplished by Beatrice's looking up to the Heavens and by Dante's fixing his eyes upon her. At once his human nature is supposed to take on agility, the supernatural quality which makes the body independent of space, and he begins to rise with incomprehensible velocity. Though they are travelling without conscious movement at the rate of 84,000 miles a second, there is time for Dante's mind to operate in desire to know how he can ascend counter to gravitation and for Beatrice to discourse upon the law--Dante's invention--of universal (material and spiritual) gravitation. "The newness of the sound and the great light Kindled in me a longing for their cause Never before with such acuteness felt. And she began: 'Thou makest thyself so dull With false imagining, that thou sees not What thou wouldst see if thou hadst shaken it off. Thou are not upon earth as thou believest; But lightning, fleeing its appropriate site, Ne'er ran as thou, who thitherward returnest.'" (I, 88.) She explains the order established by Providence by force of which created beings seek their natural habitat, earthly things being attracted downward, spiritual entities being drawn upward irresistibly if they do not oppose this innate inclination to good. "It is as natural for a man purged of all evil to ascend to God," she declares, "as it is for a stream from a mountain height to fall into a valley." Very shortly after this, the first stage of the celestial journey is reached. "Direct thy mind to God in gratitude," she said, "who hath united us with the first star." "Me seemed a cloud enveloped us, shining dense, firm and polished like a diamond smitten by the sun. Within itself the eternal pearl received us, as water doth receive a ray of light, though still itself uncleft." This is the Heaven of the Moon, the planet farthest removed from the Empyrean and therefore the sphere where not only motion but also beatitude are least in the heavenly bodies. The sphere of the Moon, indeed with those of Mercury and of Venus, is held by Dante's cosmography to be within the shadow cast by the earth. Consequently, the spirits in those three lowest Heavens are represented as less perfect than those in the higher spheres, because in the moral sense the shadow of earth fell upon their lives making them imperfect through inconstancy, vain glory or unlawful love. In the Heaven of the Moon a long disquisition is carried on by Beatrice in explanation of Dante's question as to why there are spots on the moon. It is very likely that this matter of apparent irrelevance in the heavenly realms is introduced here at the very first stage of the ascent to give the poet the opportunity of proclaiming that the first thing one must learn in his passage heavenward--even if this is to be understood in an allegorical sense--is that the laws of the laboratory are not the _rationale_ of the heavenly world and that to employ them to explain the supernal is to violate the very science of these laws, in an application of scope to which in their very nature they protest. This point of seeing natural causes for the unexplainable phenomenon of Heaven and especially of relying upon the testimony of the senses is soon brought out by Beatrice reproving Dante for thinking that the spirits whom he now sees are only reflections of the human face: "Marvel thou not," she said to me, "because I smile at this thy puerile conceit, Since on the truth it trusts not yet its foot, But turns thee, as 'tis wont, on emptiness. True substances are these which thou beholdest, Here relegate for breaking of some vow. Therefore speak with them, listen and believe." (III, 25.) So directed, the poet gazes again upon the faint forms appearing like reflections seen in a plate of glass or in a dark, shallow pool. These, the first spirits he meets, are apparitions in human form. In the other spheres all that he will see of the souls will be the light which envelopes them and which seemingly is identified with them, but here he sees beautiful women divinely glorious even in their dim outline, who as nuns had violated their vow of perpetual chastity. In the Inferno the poet, to lead the reprobate soul to speak to him, promised earthly fame; in Purgatorio there was the offer of intercessory prayer, here in the first Heaven there is only an appeal to the charity which inflames the spirit. All eagerness, Dante now addresses the spirit, who appears most desirous to converse with him. This is Piccarda, kinswoman of his wife and sister of his friend Forese (Purg. XXIII, 40), a Poor Clare nun, who was compelled by her brother, Corse, to leave her convent and marry Rossellino della Tosa in the expectation that the marriage would promote a political alliance. So sacrificed, the young virgin sister of lofty ideals and delicate spiritual sensibility, experienced unhappiness, the intensity of which is revealed by the ellipsis contained in the magic line: "And God doth know what my life became." Dante addresses Piccarda: "'O well-created spirit, who in the rays Of life eternal dost the sweetness taste Which being untasted ne'er is comprehended, Grateful 'twill be to me, if thou content me Both with thy name and with your destiny.' Whereat, she promptly and with laughing eyes: 'Our charity doth never shut the doors Against a just desire, except as she Who wills that all her court be like herself. I was a virgin sister in the world; And if thy mind doth contemplate me well, The being more fair will not conceal me from thee, But thou shalt recognize I am Piccarda, Who, stationed here among these other blessed, Myself am blessed in the lowest sphere. All our affections, that alone inflamed Are in the pleasure of the Holy Ghost, Rejoice at being of his order formed; And this allotment, which appears so low, Therefore is given us, because our vows Have been neglected and in some part void.' Whence I to her: 'In your miraculous aspects There shines I know not what of the divine, Which doth transform you from our first conceptions. Therefore I was not swift in my remembrance; But what thou tellest me now aids me so, That the refiguring is easier to me.'" (III, 37.) Dante, you recall, had found the souls in Purgatory contented with their lot, though they were enduring great suffering; in Heaven he is eager to learn in the very beginning whether the Elect are satisfied with the decree which awards to them happiness in unequal measure. So he asks Piccarda whether she and the other spirits in this lowest sphere are not eager for a higher place. The answer is one of the most touching and beautiful passages in the poem, summing up in language of radiant gladness the law of Heaven that in "God's will is our peace," words which Gladstone says "appear to have an unexpressible majesty of truth about them, to be almost as if they were spoken from the very mouth of God." "'But tell me, ye who in this place are happy, Are you desirous of a higher place, To see more or to make yourselves more friends?' First, with those other shades, she smiled a little; Thereafter answered me so full of gladness, She seemed to burn in the first fire of love: 'Brother, our will is quieted by virtue Of charity, that makes us wish alone For what we have, nor gives us thirst for more. If to be more exalted we aspired, Discordant would our aspirations be Unto the will of Him who here secludes us; Which thou-shalt see finds no place in these circles, If being in charity is needful here, And if thou lookest well into its nature; Nay 'tis essential to this blest existence To keep itself within the will divine, Whereby our very wishes are made one; So that, as we are station above station Throughout this realm, to all the realm 'tis pleasing, As to the King, who makes His will our will. And His will is our peace; this is the sea To which is moving onward whatsoever It doth create, and all that nature makes.' Then it was clear to me how everywhere In Heaven is Paradise, although the grace Of good supreme there rain not in one measure." (III, 64.) Piccarda then tells the moving story of her life, how as a girl she entered the order of St. Clare, only to be torn from the nunnery and given into marriage. "A perfect life and merit high in Heaven A lady o'er us," said she, "by whose rule Down in your world they vest and veil themselves, That until death they may both watch and sleep Beside that Spouse who every vow accepts Which charity conformeth to his pleasure. To follow her, in girlhood from the world I fled, and in her habit shut myself, And pledged me to the pathway of her sect. Then men accustomed unto evil more Than unto good, from the sweet cloister tore me; God knows what afterward my life became." (III, 97.) Certain questions interesting to a seeker of truth grow out of Piccarda's statement and these Beatrice proceeds to solve for the edification of Dante. The first question asks whether in the assignment to the lowest sphere of souls who violated their vows, there is divine Justice; the second concerns Plato's teaching that souls really come from the stars and return thither; the third is about the loss of merit through coercion of the will, as exemplified in the case of Piccarda. The solution of these difficulties need not detain us if only we remember Dante's view that "the theories maintained by him in the Heaven of the Moon are intended to manifest," as Gardner and Scartazzini point out, "the moral freedom of man and to show that no external thing can interfere with the soul that is bent upon attaining the end for which God has destined it." To the next Heaven, the sphere of Mercury, Beatrice and Dante soar more swiftly than an arrow attains its mark while the bow is still vibrating. Increasing in loveliness as she ascends, Beatrice, in the second realm, radiates such splendor that Mercury itself, apart from its own light, gains such glory from her that it seems to glitter or smile from very gladness. "My lady there so joyful I beheld As unto the brightness of that heaven she entered More luminous thereat the planet grew, And if the star itself was changed and smiled What became I who by my nature am Exceeding mutable in every guise?" (V, 97.) Greeting the travellers, more than a thousand spirits joyfully exclaim: "Lo, one who shall increase our loves!" The Saints in Mercury thus testify to their delight that one (Dante) has come to be the fresh object of their love, just as it is said that "there shall be joy before the angels of God upon one sinner doing penance." (Luke XV, 10.) These splendors in Mercury are the souls of those in whose virtue there was the alloy of ambition and vainglory--a combination, according to Dante, which makes "the rays of true love less vividly mount upwards." The poet is addressed by a spirit who bids him ask any question he will and Beatrice confirms the invitation. "Speak, speak with confidence and trust them even as gods." All eagerness for knowledge, Dante inquires of the friendly splendor who he is and why he is in this particular Heaven. The story told by the spirit of Emperor Justinian is a brief sketch of his own life, with reference to his conversion from heresy by Pope Agapetus, to the victories of his general, Belisarius, and to his own great work of the codification of the Roman law. He then traces the history of Rome from the time of �neas to the thirteenth century, bent upon showing that the Roman Empire, as a world-power over governments and peoples, is divine in its institution and providentially protected in its course. Two facts are adduced in crowning proof of this audacious statement, viz., Christ's choosing to be born and to be registered as a subject of Cæsar and His crucifixion under Tiberius, acting through Pontius Pilate as the divinely constituted instrument of eternal justice exercised by the Heavenly Father against His Son, at once the victim of sin and its atonement. Dante enlarges on this point in his Monarchia. "If the Roman Empire did not exist by right, the sin of Adam was not punished in Christ.... If, therefore, Christ had not suffered by the sentence of a regular judge, the penalty would not have been properly punished; and none could be a regular judge who had not jurisdiction over all mankind, for all mankind was punished in the flesh of Christ, who 'hath borne our infirmities and carried our sorrows,' as said the prophet Isaias. And if the Roman Empire had not existed by right, Tiberius Cæsar, whose vicar was Pontius Pilate, would not have had jurisdiction over all mankind." To us both the argument and its conclusion are wholly indefensible. It seems indeed a mockery and a blasphemy to attribute to such a monster as Tiberius Cæsar glory because Christ was crucified in his reign. Dante's words, however, as spoken by Justinian, leave no room for doubt that the poet was convinced that all the ancient celebrity of Rome was insignificant as compared to the glory that would come to it because it would carry out the crucifixion of Christ. "But what the standard that has made me speak Achieved before, and after should achieve Throughout the mortal realm that lies beneath, Becometh in appearance mean and dim If in the hand of the third Cæsar seen With an eye unclouded and affection pure Because the living Justice that inspires me Granted it, in the hand of him I speak of The glory of doing vengence for its wrath." (VI, 82.) Shining among the splendors of Mercury is a spirit who, though he was not a lawmaker like Justinian, attained earthly renown by arranging the marriages of four Kings. Known by the name of Romeo, a word meaning a pilgrim of Rome, this man came a stranger to the Court of Raymond Berenger, Court of Provence, multiplied the income without lessening the grandeur of his master and brought about the marriages to royalty of the four daughters of the household--Margaret to St. Louis of France, Eleanor to Henry III of England, Sanzia to Richard, Earl of Cornwall (brother of Henry III), elected King of the Romans, Beatrice to Charles of Anjou, later by Papal investiture, King of Naples. Charged by jealous barons with having wasted his master's goods, Romeo established his innocence and then departed as he came, on a mule and with a pilgrim's staff. From affluence he goes a-begging and this is so much like Dante's own case that the poet's sympathy goes out to the calumniated man, and he says with touching simplicity: "If the world could know the heart he had In begging bit by bit his livelihood, Though much it laud him, it would laud him more." (VI, 140.) Justinian's words as to the crucifixion of Christ suggest to Dante this question: Why was man's redemption effected by the death of Christ upon the Cross rather than by some other mode? Investing the argumentative propositions of St. Thomas with poetic beauty, Dante shows that while God might have freely pardoned man without exacting any satisfaction, on the hypothesis that He had chosen to restore mankind to His favor and at the same time to require full satisfaction as a condition of pardon and deliverance, there was only one way for the accomplishment of this reconciliation and that was by the atonement of One who was both God and Man. For sin, inasmuch as it is an act against the Infinite Being, requires a satisfaction of infinite value. Man being finite is incapable of adequately making such satisfaction. But the Word was made flesh that by His atonement on the Cross Mercy would be declared and Justice would be satisfied. "Your nature, when it sinned in its totality in its first seed, from these dignities, even as from Paradise, was parted; nor might they be recovered, if thou look right keenly, by any way save passing one or the other of these fords: either that God, of his sole courtesy, should have remitted; or that man should of himself have given satisfaction for his folly. Man had not power, within his own boundaries, even to render satisfaction, since he might not go in humbleness by after-obedience so deep down as in disobedience he had framed to exalt himself on high; and this is the cause why from the power to render satisfaction by himself man was shut off. Wherefore needs must God with his own ways reinstate man in his unmaimed life, I mean with one way or with both the two. But because the doer's deed is the more gracious the more it doth present us of the heart's goodness whence it issued, the divine Goodness which doth stamp the world, deigned to proceed on all his ways to lift you up again; nor between the last night and the first day was, nor shall be, so lofty and august a progress made on one or on the other, for more generous was God in giving of himself to make man able to uplift himself again, than had he only of himself granted remission; and all other modes fell short of justice, except the Son of God had humbled him to become flesh." (VII, 85.) From Mercury to Venus the ascent has been so rapid that Dante is unaware that he has reached the third Heaven until he sees the greater loveliness of Beatrice represented by her greater radiance. As ascent is made heavenward it will also be found that the spirits are seen not as human faces, as was the case in the Heaven of the Moon, but as lights increasing in intensity and manifesting a movement of greater speed to the accompaniment of diverse music. It is necessary to keep in mind this plan of the poet lest thinking the lovely lights, and lovely sounds and lovely movements are only terms descriptive of physical, though impalpable phenomena, we lose the deep and beautiful symbolism that is the magic secret of the seraphic poesy of the Paradiso. Of the brilliancy and movement of the spirits of the Sphere of Venus--spirits who in this life failed in Christian ideals because of their amours, Dante says, and his description is that of an expert musician distinguishing between the singing of one who sustains the main-theme and that of other voices rising and falling in subordination to the principal melody: "And as within a flame a spark is seen, And as within a voice discerned, When one is steadfast, and one comes and goes, Within that light beheld I other lamps Move in a circle, speeding more and less, Methinks in a measure of their inward vision. From a cold cloud descended never winds, Or visible or not, so rapidly They would not laggard and impeded seem To any one who had those lights divine Seen come towards us, leaving the gyration Begun at first in the high Seraphim. And behind those that most in front appeared Sounded 'Osanna!' so that never since To hear again was I without desire. Then unto us more nearly one approached, And it alone began: 'We all are ready Unto thy pleasure, that thou joy in us. We turn around with the celestial Princes, One gyre and one gyration and one thirst, To whom thou in the world didst say, "Ye who, intelligent, the third heaven are moving;" And are so full of love, to pleasure thee A little quiet will not be less sweet.'" (VIII, 16.) The speaker discloses himself to be Charles Martel, once titular King of Hungary, who on the occasion of a nineteen days' visit to Florence, formed an intimate friendship with the poet. For the latter's edification the spirit expounds the problem: Why from the same parents, children grow up different in disposition, talent and career, a problem just as interesting to the twentieth as the thirteenth century. We account for the difference according to the principles of variation, heredity and environment, but to stellar influence intent upon securing the fulfillment of the law of individuality, was the difference attributed by the medieval mind, which regarded the stars and planets not as soulless spheres, but as orbs palpitating with the life of angelic intelligences and radiating their influence upon the people of the earth. Hence it was held that the Heavens affected the diversity of the characters of children who otherwise would be cut out the exact pattern of their parents. "The begotten nature would ever take a course like its begetters, did not divine provision overrule." (VIII, 136.) The necessity for diversity in man's life is deduced from the fact that in society men are providentially destined for different vocations. "Wherefore is one born Solon (a legislator), another Xerxes (a soldier), another Melchisedech (a priest), and the man who soaring through the welkin lost his son." (Daedalus, the typical mechanician.) But stellar influence always controlled by man's free will is often ignored, especially when we put into the sanctuary one who should be on the battle field and when we gave a throne to him whose right place is in the pulpit. "And if the world below would fix its mind On the foundation which is laid by nature, Pursuing that, 't would have the people good. But you into religion wrench aside Him who was born to gird him with the sword, And make a king of him who is for sermons; Therefore your footsteps wander from the road." (VIII, 142.) The next four spheres being beyond the earth's shadow are for spirits whose virtue was undimmed by human infirmity and whose place in eternal life is consequently one of greater vision and bliss. In the first of these higher spheres, the Sphere of the Sun, the fourth Heaven, Dante sees the spirits of great theologians and others who loved wisdom--great teachers of men. Around him and Beatrice, as their center, twelve of them appear in one circle and twelve in another, while behind those dazzling splendors of spirits are other vivid lights probably representing authors whom the poet had not read or comprehended or symbolizing the men of science, the lovers of wisdom, who in the future by their discoveries would add to our knowledge of truth. As one of the basic truths of Revelation is the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, here in the Heaven of the Doctors the dogma is made prominent by special frequency of reference and symbolism. The Creation, as an act of the Three Divine Persons, is mentioned in lines of exquisite grace: "Looking into His Son with all the Love Which each of them eternally breathes forth The primal and unutterable Power Whate'er before the mind or eye revolves With so much order made, there can be none Who thus beholds, without enjoying it." (X, 1.) Not only by thought, but by dancing, is the same truth expressed: "those burning suns round about us whirled themselves three times." (X, 76.) Again in song they proclaim the mystery of the Holy Trinity: "The One and Two and Three who ever liveth And reigneth ever in Three and Two and One Not circumscribed and all circumscribing Three several times was chanted by each one Among those spirits, with such melody That for all merit it were just reward." (XIV, 27.) In this Heaven we hear the eulogy of St. Francis of Assisi pronounced by a Dominican and the praises of St. Dominic sung by a Franciscan--consummate art that is an indirect invitation to the two orders of monks upon earth to avoid jealousy and to practice mutual respect. It has been said that these narratives give us the essence of what constitutes true biography, viz., a picture of the spiritual element in man drawn in such words as ever to command the understanding and elicit the respect of the reader of every period. The first speaker is St. Thomas Aquinas, and his reference to the mystical marriage of St. Francis and Lady Poverty will be the better understood if we have before the mind's eye Giotto's painting which hangs over the tomb of the founder of the Franciscans. The figures in the pictures are described by Gardiner (Ten Heavens, p. 113): Christ, standing upon a rock, unites St. Francis to his chosen bride, who is haggard and careworn, clothed in ragged and patched garments, barefooted and girded with a cord. Roses and lilies spring up behind her and encircle her head; she wears the aureole and has wings, though weak; but thorns and briars are around her feet. Hope and Love are her bridesmaids; Hope clothed in green with uplifted hand and Love with flame-colored flowers and holding a burning heart. A dog is barking at the Bride and boys are assaulting her with sticks and stones, but all around are bands of angelic witnesses, their flowing raiment and mighty wings glowing with rainbow hues. In these days when money seems the ideal of thousands, Poverty, whose mystical appeal is so glowingly painted, still speaks to great numbers of men and women who give up material comforts and ease to embrace as monks and nuns the state of voluntary poverty. Let us now hear how St. Thomas recounts the life and work of St. Francis of Assisi: "He was not yet much distant from his rising, When his good influence 'gan to bless the earth. A dame, to whom one openeth pleasure's gate More than to death, was 'gainst his father's will, His stripling choice; and he did make her his, Before the spiritual court, by nuptial bonds, And in his father's sight: from day to day, Then loved her more devoutly. She, bereaved Of her first husband, slighted and obscure, Thousand and hundred years and more, remain'd Without a single suitor, till he came. There concord and glad looks, wonder and love, And sweet regard gave birth to holy thoughts, So much that venerable Bernard first Did bare his feet, and, in pursuit of peace So heavenly, ran, yet deem'd his footing slow. O hidden riches! O prolific good! Egidius bares him next, and next Sylvester, And follow, both, the bridegroom: so the bride Can please them. Thenceforth goes he on his way The father and the master, with his spouse, And with that family, whom now the cord Girt humbly: nor did abjectness of heart Weigh down his eyelids, for that he was son Of Pietro Bernardone, and by men In wondrous sort despised. But royally His hard intention he to Innocent Set forth; and, from him, first received the seal On his religion. Then, when numerous flock'd The tribe of lowly ones, that traced _his_ steps, Whose marvelous life deservedly were sung In heights empyreal; through Honorius' hand A second crown, to deck their Guardian's virtues, Was by the eternal Spirit inwreathed: and when He had, through thirst of martyrdom, stood up In the proud Soldan's presence, and there preach'd Christ and his followers, but found the race Unripen'd for conversion; back once more He hasted (not to intermit his toil), And reap'd Ausonian lands. On the hard rock, 'Twixt Arno and the Tiber, he from Christ Took the last signet, which his limbs two years Did carry. Then, the season come that he, Who to such good had destined him, was pleased To advance him to the meed, which he had earn'd By his self-humbling; to his brotherhood, As their just heritage, he gave in charge His dearest lady: and enjoin'd their love And faith to her; and, from her bosom, will'd His goodly spirit should move forth, returning To its appointed kingdom; nor would have His body laid upon another bier." (XI, 55.) At the conclusion of this discourse the spirits in both circles, arranged like the concentric circles of a double rainbow, express their joy by a gyrating dance and song. If St. Francis was "a sun upon the world," St. Dominic is shown by the next speaker, St. Bonaventure, to be "a splendor of cherubic delight." "In happy Callaroga was born the passionate lover of the Christian faith, the holy champion, gentle to his own, and without mercy to his enemies. As soon as his soul had been created it was so replete with energy that, within his mother's womb, it made her a prophetess. When the pledges for his baptism had been given at the sacred font, and he and Faith had become one, dowering each other with salvation, the lady who had given assent for him, beheld in her sleep the wonderful fruit which would one day come of him, and of his heirs. He was named Dominic. I speak of him as the husbandman whom Christ chose to assist Him with His garden. Of a truth did he seem Christ's messenger and friend, for the very first inclination which he manifested was to follow the first percept which Christ gave. Not for the world, love of which at present makes men toil, but for love of the true manna, did he, in short while, become a mighty teacher, such that he set about pruning the vineyard of the church, which soon runs wild if the vinedresser be negligent. "From the Papal chair which, in former days, was more generous to the righteous poor, not because it has grown degenerate in itself, but because of the degeneracy of him who sits upon it, Dominic begged not to be allowed to dispense to the poor only two or three where six was due, nor sought the first vacant benefice, the tithes of which belong to God's poor. He begged rather for leave to fight against the erring world in behalf of the seed of true faith, four and twenty plants of which encircle you. Then, armed with doctrine and firm determination, together with the sanction of the Papacy, he issued forth like a torrent from on high, and on heretics his onslaught smote with greatest force where was most resistance. Afterward, from him there burst forth various streams by which the Catholic garden is watered so that the plants in it are becoming vigorous." (XII, 48.) Transported into the Heaven of Mars Dante is made aware of his ascent thither only by the glow of the ruddy planet, so different from the white sheen of the sun. At once he beholds a spectacle far more marvelous than the circles of dancing lights he has just seen. It fills him with such wonder and bliss that he falls into an ecstasy and only after that does he look into the eyes of Beatrice, now more lovely than ever. What is the new marvel? A starry cross traversing the sphere--a cross, the arms and body of which, each like a Milky Way, are made up of dazzling lights of the souls of those who laid down their lives for the Faith. On the Cross is flashed the blood red image of the Crucified, likewise formed by glowing stars, the souls of Christian warriors. Not stationary do the splendors remain, but through the glittering mass they dart to and fro like motes in a sunbeam that finds its way through a shutter or screen. With eyes amazed the poet now hears such a wondrous melody that he says: "I was so much enamoured therewith that up to this point there had not been anything which bound me with fetters of such delight." (XIV, 128.) The names of some of the spirits forming the Stellar Cross are made known to the poet--Joshua and Judas Maccabaeus, the intrepid heroes of the Old Testament, the Christian Knights, Charlemagne and Orlando the Paladin, William of Aquitaine and Rainouart, Godfrey de Bouillon, conqueror of Jerusalem, Robert Guiscard, military executor of Pope Hildebrande. Darting along the arm of the Stellar Cross and coming to its foot is a splendor who greets Dante with warm affection. This is the spirit of his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, who sings the glory of ancient Florence the better to describe the deterioration of the city in Dante's day and to censure its people for their civil feuds, corruption and opposition to the Imperial Eagle. Then at Dante's request the crusader spirit interprets for his descendant the various predictions made to the latter during his passage through Hell and Purgatory. Evil days will come upon him (it must be remembered that this prophecy by Cacciaguida is supposed to occur a year or two before Dante's exile), he will be exiled from Florence and will become a homeless wanderer. Let him, however, write his poem and declare his vision, no matter if offense will be taken by the high ones of the earth. He, having a prophet's work to do, must speak with all the boldness of a prophet without fear or dissimulation. The words, while assuring the poet of the sweetness of everlasting fame, bring to his mind, also, the bitterness of the injustice of his exile and suffering, and apparently he harbors the thought of vengeance upon his enemies. Beatrice, however, checks his resentment, assuring him that she, so near to God, will assist him--a most beautiful passage showing the relations between her and the poet, whether the words are taken literally as exhibiting her as his intercessor before the throne of the Most High, or allegorically considered as declaring that Revealed Truth takes from man the desire of vengeance and places his case in the hands of Him who has said: "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." For Dante's spiritual perfection his lovely guide bids him not simply look into her her eyes (allegorically meaning not merely to contemplate theological truth) but follow the example of men sturdy of faith and valiant of deed. The passage here follows: "Now was alone rejoicing in its word That soul beatified, and I was tasting My own, the bitter tempering with the sweet, And the Lady who to God was leading me Said: 'Change thy thought; consider that I am Near unto Him who every wrong disburdens.' Unto the loving accents of my comfort I turned me round, and then what love I saw Within those holy eyes I here relinquish Not only that my language I distrust, But that my mind cannot return so far Above itself, unless another guide it. Thus much upon that point can I repeat. That, her again beholding, my affection From every other longing was released. While the eternal pleasure, which direct Rayed upon Beatrice, from her fair face Contented me with its reflected aspect, Conquering me with the radiance of a smile She said to me, 'Turn thee about and listen; Not in mine eyes alone is Paradise. Here are blessed spirits that below, ere yet They came to Heaven, were of such great renown That every Muse therewith would affluent be Therefore look thou upon the cross' horns.'" (XVIII, 4.) Now rising to Jupiter, where appear the spirits of those who upon earth in a signal manner loved and rightly administered justice, Dante is again made aware of his uplifting by the increased beauty of Beatrice, by the new light different from that of ruddy Mars, which envelopes him and by the perception of his own increase of virtue and power. Here the poet has recourse to a most ingenious system of symbols to give variety to his descriptions and doctrine, and so to sustain the interest of the reader. Many hundreds of the souls of the just appear as golden lights and so group themselves as to spell against the glowing white background of the light of the planet, the maxim from the Book of Wisdom: "_Diligite justitiam qui judicatis terram_" (Love justice ye who judge the earth.) Then fade away all the letters except the last one, the M of terram, M, symbol of Monarchy, and that M stands out in general outline somewhat like the Florentine lily, the armorial sign of Florence. And now other golden lights come from the Empyrean and transform the M into the figure of an eagle, the bird of Jove, with outstretched wings. But the marvel is only partly revealed, for soon the Eagle speaks and its voice, though made up of a thousand voices of the Just, comes forth a single sound, like a single heat that comes from many brands or the one odor that is exhaled from many flowers. What a startling spectacle it must have been to the mind of the thirteenth century, used to candles as the ordinary means of illumination, to have visualized before it the blessed spirits in the light of Heaven, dancing, whirling, circling in perfect harmony and making more formal designs to express their bliss by the rapidity of their rhythmical movements! Even though exquisitely quaint as the picture may appear to us, it has been executed so reverently that criticism has rarely if ever attacked this conception of our poet. With light as his principal material to make known to us the joys of Heaven, he has to paint everything in high light, using no shadows and he solves his artistic problem by the variety of his "splendors" and by the deep symbolism of their action. His nine Heavens are not meant to be a picture true to reality of what the Souls in Heaven are doing. These nine Heavens, as we said before, are only myths to which from the Empyrean come forth the Elect in condescension to Dante's sense-bound faculties, in order to symbolize certain truths. So in this sixth sphere the poet would teach us that the Heaven of Jupiter represents justice on earth and on the screen of this sphere he would put forth by means of the Imperial Eagle the arguments he has already advanced in his Monarchia that the Roman Empire is divine in its origin--that only from such an institution can human justice proceed from civil government. He represents unity coming from the Roman Empire by his showing to us the unison with which all the splendors of the Eagle speak in a voice blended as one sound--clearly also an allegory for the Guelf forces to become an integral part of the Universal Monarchy. Justice is the quality which this Heaven symbolizes and the Eagle reads in Dante's mind a doubt against the operation of justice and proceeds to dispel it. "For saidst thou: 'Born a man is on the shore Of Indus, and is none who there can speak Of Christ, nor who can read, nor who can write; And all his inclinations and his actions Are good, so far as human reason sees, Without a sin in life or in discourse: He dieth unbaptized and without faith; Where is this justice that condemneth him? Where is his fault, if he do not believe?'" (XIX, 70.) The question is answered both directly and indirectly. The exclusion of the virtuous pagan from Heaven is assumed to be an act of injustice "but who art thou who wouldst set upon the seat to judge at a thousand miles away with the short sight that carries but a span?" (XIX, 79.) As our very idea of justice comes from God all just and all wise, that thought ought to assure us that not even the virtuous heathen will be excluded from Heaven. Faith indeed is required for salvation, but many having faith will be condemned, while many seemingly without it will be admitted into Heaven. "But look thou, many crying are, 'Christ, Christ'! Who at the judgment will be far less near To him than some shall be who knew not Christ. Such Christians shall the Ethiop condemn When the two companies shall be divided, The one forever rich, the other poor." (XIX, 106.) The indirect answer to Dante's objection as to the exclusion of the virtuous heathen from Heaven is given by the poet speaking through the beak of the Eagle and showing in this Heaven as one of the lights of the Eagle itself, the soul of Rhipeus mentioned by �neas "as above all others the most just among the Trojans and the strictest observer of right." "So now," says Benvenuto, the fourteenth century lecturer on Dante, "our author fitly introduces a pagan infidel in the person of Rhipeus, of whose salvation there would seem the very slightest chance of all; by reason of the time, so many centuries before the advent of Christ; by reason of the place, for he was of Troy where exceeding pride was then paramount; by reason of the sect, for he was a pagan and gentile, not a Jew. Briefly then our author wishes us to gather from this fiction--this conclusion,--that even such a pagan of whose salvation no one hoped, is capable of salvation." In the Heaven of Saturn, Beatrice tells the poet that she does not smile out of regard for his human vision not powerful enough to sustain her excess of beauty. The lovely symphonies of Paradise are also silent for the same reason. This in effect is a poetical way of saying that the bliss and glory in Saturn are greater than any beatitude in the lower spheres. This seventh Heaven is the Heaven where appear saints distinguished for contemplation, the principle representatives being St. Peter Damian and St. Benedict. The latter wrote a treatise in which he likened the rule of his order to a ladder having twelve rungs by means of which the mystic might mount to Heaven. The second rung in that ladder is silence. If Dante was familiar with the Benedictine treatise, the significance of silence in Saturn is at once suggested. The figure of a ladder is a very common one in mystical theology, which borrows the conception from the experience of Jacob (Gen. XXVIII, 12). "And he saw in his sleep a ladder standing upon the earth and the top thereof touching heaven, the angels also of God ascending and descending." To symbolize the truth that Heaven is to be reached through the Church by means of the contemplation of eternal things Dante now shows us the Golden Ladder, down which gleam so many radiant spirits that it seems as if all the stars of Heaven are approaching. "Colored like gold, on which the sunshine gleams, A stairway I beheld to such a height Uplifted, that mine eye pursued it not. Likewise beheld I down the steps descending So many splendors, that I thought each light That in the heaven appears was there diffused." (XXI, 28.) In the Heaven of the Fixed Stars the triumph of Christ gladdens the wondering eyes of the poet: "Behold the hosts of Christ's triumphal march and all the fruit harvested by the rolling of these spheres." At these words of Beatrice Dante turns and beholds all the saints seen in the other spheres and many other spirits gathered round the God-man to praise Him for the Redemption and Atonement. Christ here reveals Himself in the form of a gorgeous Sun surrounded by those countless spirits, appearing as lights or flowers. Apparently the poet gets just a momentary glimpse of the glorified humanity of the Saviour. The direct rays of the divine splendor cannot long be endured, so, in condescension to Dante's weakness of vision, a cloudy screen permits the poet to sustain the Vision now irradiating its light on the living, spiritual flowers. "Saw I, above the myriad of lamps, A sun that one and all of them enkindled, E'en as our own doth the supernal sights, And through the living light transparent shone The lucent substance so intensely clear Into my sight, that I sustained it not. 'O Beatrice, thou gentle guide and dear!' To me she said: 'What overmasters thee A virtue is from which naught shields itself. There are the wisdom and the omnipotence That ope the thoroughfares 'twixt heaven and earth For which there erst had been so long a yearning.'" (XXIII, 28.) After Christ withdraws to the Empyrean the poet finds that he has been so much strengthened and enlightened by the Vision that increased power of sight is given to him again to behold the smile of his guide. She says to him: "Open thine eyes and look at what I am Thou has beheld such things, that strong enough Hast thou become to tolerate my smile." (XXIII, 46.) He continues in ecstasy to gaze upon her surpassing beauty until she bids him look upon the "meadow of flowers," the angels and saints: "Why doth my face so much enamor thee, That to the garden fair thou turnest not, Which under the rays of Christ is blossoming? There is the Rose in which the Word Divine Became incarnate; there the lilies are By whose perfume the good way was discovered." (XXIII, 70.) The lilies are the apostles, the Rose the Blessed Virgin Mary. "Mary," says Cardinal Newman, "is the most beautiful flower that ever was seen in the spiritual world. She is the Queen of spiritual flowers and therefore she is called Rose, for the rose is fitly called of all flowers that most beautiful." Dante says: "The name of the fair flower that I e'er invoke morning and night utterly enthralled my soul to gaze upon the greater fire." Now with joy the poet sees the coronation by the spirits of Mary, Mystical Rose, and then his eyes follow her as she mounts to the Empyrean in the wake of her divine Son while the gleaming saints sing her praises in the _Regina Coeli_. The eight Heavens through which the poet has come, have been so many stages of preparation for the final vision of Paradise. His eyes have been gradually gaining strength by gazing upon miracles of light and beauty and by seeing truth embodied in many representative forms to fit him finally to see God in His Essence. Before that consummation, however, one more preparatory vision is necessary. The poet must first see the symbolic image of God. "What!" you may exclaim, "will Dante be audacious enough to attempt to picture the Invisible Himself? Granted that 'he is all wings and pure imagination' can he hope to image the Incomprehensible Being 'who only hath immortality and inhabiteth light inaccessible, whom no man hath seen nor can see?' (I Tim. VI, 16). Will he not defeat his purpose by employing a symbol circumscribing Him who is beyond circumscription?" But the genius of Dante does not fail him in his daring undertaking, and this is the more remarkable because instead of selecting as a symbol something infinitely large, he choses something atomically small. In the ninth Heaven surrounded by the nine orders of pure spirits God is represented "as an indivisible atomic Point radiating light and symbolizing the unity of the Divinity as a fitting prelude to the more intimate vision of the Blessed Trinity which will be vouchsafed in the Empyrean." "A Point I saw that darted light so sharp no lid unclosing may bear up against its keenness. On that Point depend the heavens and the whole of nature" (XXXVIII, 16). On the appropriateness of this symbol Ozanam makes this interesting comment: "God reveals Himself as necessarily indivisible and consequently incapable of having ascribed to Him the abstraction of quantity and quality by which we know creatures: indefinable, because every definition is an analysis which decomposes the subject defined; incomparable because there are no terms to institute a comparison; so that one may say, giving the words an oblique meaning, that He is infinitely little, that He is nothing. But on the other hand, that which is without extension, moves without resistance; that which is not to be grasped, cannot be contained; that which can be enclosed within no limits, either actual or logical is by that very fact limitless. The infinitely little is then also the infinitely great and we may say that it is all." The indivisible atomic Point of intensest light as a symbol of God is indeed a sublime conception of faith and genius that appeals equally to the child, the philosopher and the mystic. The supreme thing still necessary for the consummation of Dante's pilgrimage is the Beatific Vision of God. That occurs in the Empyrean where symbol gives way to reality, where the Elect are seen no longer in forms veiled in light but in the glorified semblance of their earthly bodies, where contemplation gives direct vision of God in His essence. How will the poet, while still in the flesh, endure this vision of the Infinite, Incomprehensible Eternal God? Prepared as he has been by the experiences of the nine Heavens, he has still further need of supernatural assistance. That is now given to him by means of a flash wrapping him in a garment of light, which blinds him and then illuminates his sight and intellect and enables him to see a more complete foreshadowing of truth dissolving into Divine Wisdom. The spectacle he now beholds, perhaps suggested to the poet by the passage from the Apocalypse (XXII, 1). "And he showed me a river of water of life, clear as crystal proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb,"--the spectacle which now presents itself is that of a river of light flowing between two banks of flowers and vivid with darting sparks. The river represents illuminating grace, the sparks angels, the flowers saints. This river of light wherein are reflected the Elect, as verdure and flowers on a hillside are mirrored in a limpid stream at its foot, is poetically represented as having the effect of a sacrament. It bestows grace and that grace called _lumen gloriae_, light of glory, endowing the soul with a faculty beyond its natural needs or merits, so disposes the soul that it becomes deiform and is rendered capable of immediate intuition of the Divine Essence. "There is a light above, which visible Makes the Creator unto every creature Who only in beholding Him, has peace." (XXX, 100.) Beatrice tells Dante that he must drink his fill of the stupendous splendor by gazing intently on the river of pure light, so that he may be able to contemplate the whole unveiled glory and then see God directly. As Dante gazes on the illuminating stream it undergoes a marvelous transformation, taking the form of a Rose the center of which is a sea of radiance. "And even as the penthouse of mine eyelids Drank of it, it forthwith appeared to me Out of its length to be transformed to round. Then as a folk who have been under masks Seem other than before, if they divest The semblance not their own they disappeared in, Thus into greater pomp were changed for me The flowerets and the sparks, so that I saw Both of the Courts of Heaven made manifest." (XXX, 87.) The two courts of Heaven, angels and saints, are made manifest in the Rose which spreads out like a vast amphitheatre the lowest circle of which is wider than the circumference of the sun. Above the center of the Rose as the Point of light, is God in all His glory and love, adored in blissful raptures by the saints who form the petals of the heavenly flower. Angels with faces aflame, in white garments and with golden wings fly down to the petals as bees to flowers, bringing God's blessings to the saints and fly back to God as bees to their hive, carrying the adoration of the Elect. Beatrice leads the poet into the center of the Heavenly Rose. "Into the yellow of the Rose Eternal That spreads, and multiplies, and breathes an odor Of praise unto the ever-vernal Sun, As one who silent is and fain would speak, Me Beatrice drew on, and said: 'Behold Of the white stoles how vast the convent is! Behold how vast the circuit of our city! Behold our seats so filled to overflowing, That here henceforward are few people wanting!'" (XXX, 124.) While Dante gazes on the supernatural spectacle Beatrice slips away to take her place the third seat below the throne of the Blessed Virgin. As his guide she has led him to the highest Heaven and has instructed him in all that concerns God and His attributes. Her mission as Revelation or Divine Science being finished, she withdraws and sends St. Bernard to bring the poet into intimate union with the Godhead. "The general form of Paradise already My glance had comprehended as a whole, In no part hitherto remaining fixed, And round I turned me with rekindled wish My lady to interrogate of things Concerning which my mind was in suspense. One thing I meant, another answered me; I thought I should see Beatrice, and saw An Old Man habited like the glorious people. O'er flowing was he in his eyes and cheeks With joy benign, in attitude of pity As to a tender father is becoming. And 'She, where is she?' instantly I said; Whence he: 'To put an end to thy desire, Me Beatrice hath sent from mine own place. And if thou lookest up to the third round Of the first rank, again shalt thou behold her Upon the throne her merits have assigned her.' Without reply I lifted up mine eyes, And saw her, as she made herself a crown Reflecting from herself the eternal rays. Not from that region which the highest thunders Is any mortal eye so far removed, In whatsoever sea it deepest sinks, As there from Beatrice my sight; but this Was nothing unto me; because her image Descended not to me by medium blurred." (XXXI, 52.) St. Bernard, the mystic, celebrating the Blessed Virgin's praises in a marvelous outburst of song, unsurpassed for lyrical beauty, beseeches her intercession that Dante may see God face to face. "Now doth this man, who from the lowest depth Of the universe as far as here has seen One after one the spiritual lives, Supplicate thee through grace for so much power That with his eyes he may uplift himself Higher towards the uttermost salvation. And I, who never burned for my own seeing More than I do for his, all of my prayers Proffer to thee, and pray they come not short, That thou wouldst scatter from him every cloud Of his mortality so with thy prayers, That the Chief Pleasure be to him displayed. Still farther do I pray thee, Queen, who canst Whate'er thou wilt, that sound thou mayst preserve After so great a vision his affections. Let thy protection conquer human movements; See Beatrice and all the blessed ones My prayers to second clasp their hands to thee! The eyes beloved and revered of God, Fastened upon the speaker, showed to us How grateful unto her are prayers devout; Then unto the Eternal Light they turned, On which it is not credible could be By any creature bent an eye so clear." (XXXIII, 22.) The prayer is granted. "My vision becoming undimmed, more and more entered the beam of light which in itself is Truth." (XXXIII, 52.) The veil is removed. He gazes into the limitless depths of the Divinity. He enjoys the Beatific Vision. First he sees by immediate intuition the Divine Essence in its creative power, the examplar of all substances, modes and accidents united in harmony and love; then he beholds the Creator Himself and all the divine perfections and all the eternal plans of God. Clear to the poet now is the truth of the mystery of the Blessed Trinity unveiled in circles of light like rainbows of green, white and red of equal circumference, the Second being as it were the splendor of the First and the Third emanating from the two others. Unravelled also is the mystery of the two natures human and divine, in the divine person of Christ seen in human form in the second luminous circle. But the Vision is so far above the poet's memory to retain or his speech to express that he cannot find words to make intelligible the splendor he beholds or the rapture he experiences. "Oh grace abounding, wherein I presumed to fix my look on the eternal light so long that I consumed my sight thereon! Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe; substance and accidents and their relations, as though together fused, after such fashion that what I tell of is one simple flame. "In the profound and shining being of the deep light appeared to me three circles, of three colours and one magnitude; one by the second as Iris by Iris seemed reflected, and the third seemed a fire breathed equally from one and from the other. Oh, but how scant the utterance, and how faint, to my conceit! and it, to what I saw, is such that it sufficeth not to call it little. O light eternal who only in thyself abidest, only thyself dost understand, and to thyself, self-understood, self-understanding, turnest love and smiling! That circling which appeared in thee to be conceived as a reflected light, by mine eyes scanned some little, in itself, of its own colour, seemed to be painted with our effigy, and thereat my sight was all committed to it. "To the high fantasy here power failed; but already my desire and will were rolled--even as a wheel that moveth equally--by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars." (XXXIII, 82.) 
33896	----	http://www.archive.org/details/danteessaytowhic00chur.) [Transcriber's Note: Spelling and punctuation have been retained as they appear in the original, but obvious printer errors have been corrected without note. Printer errors in Italian passages from _The Divine Comedy_ have been corrected using the Italian-English Princeton University Press edition (trans. Charles S. Singleton, 1973). A Table of Contents has been added for the reader's convenience. The original contains a separate Contents of De Monarchia at the end of De Monarchia.] DANTE AND DE MONARCHIA. [Illustration] DANTE. _An Essay._ BY R. W. CHURCH, M.A., D.C.L. DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD. _To which is added_ A TRANSLATION OF DE MONARCHIA. BY F. J. CHURCH. _London:_ MACMILLAN AND CO. 1879. CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. CONTENTS NOTICE DANTE DE MONARCHIA CONTENTS OF DE MONARCHIA PUBLISHER'S CATALOGUE NOTICE. The following Essay first appeared in the "Christian Remembrancer" of January, 1850, and it was reprinted in a volume of "Essays and Reviews," published in 1854. It was written before the appearance in Germany and England of the abundant recent literature on the subject. With the exception of a few trifling corrections, it is republished without change. By the desire of Mr. Macmillan, a translation of the _De Monarchia_ is subjoined. I am indebted for it to my son, Mr. F.J. Church, late Scholar of New College. It is made from the text of Witte's second edition of the _De Monarchia_, 1874. The _De Monarchia_ has been more than once translated into Italian and German, in earlier or later times. But I do not know that any English translation has yet appeared. It is analysed in the fifteenth chapter of Mr. Bryce's "Holy Roman Empire." Witte, with much probability, I think, places the composition of the work in the first part of Dante's life, before his exile in 1301, while the pretensions and arguments of Boniface VIII. (1294-1303) were being discussed by Guelf and Ghibelline partisans, but before they were formally embodied in the famous Bull _Unam Sanctam_, 1302. The character of the composition, for the most part, formal, general, and scholastic, sanguine in tone and with little personal allusion, is in strong contrast with the passionate and despairing language of resentment and disappointment which marks his later writings. As an example of the political speculation of the time, it should be compared with the "_De Regimine Principum_," ascribed to Thomas Aquinas. The whole subject of the mediæval idea of the Empire is admirably discussed in Mr. Bryce's book referred to above. R.W.C. ST. PAUL'S, _November_, 1878. DANTE.[1] [JAN. 1850.] [Footnote 1: _Dante's Divine Comedy, the Inferno; a literal Prose Translation, with the Text of the Original._ By J.A. CARLYLE, M.D., London: 1849. I have never quite forgiven myself for not having said more of the unpretending but honest and most useful volume which stood at the head of this essay when it first appeared as an article. It was placed there, according to what was then a custom of article writers, as a peg to hang remarks upon which might or might not be criticisms of the particular book so noticed. It did not offer itself specially to my use, and my attention was busy with my own work. But this was no excuse for availing myself of a good book, and not giving it the notice which it deserved. To an English student beginning Dante, and wishing to study him in a scholarly manner, it is really more useful than a verse translation can be; and I have always greatly regretted that the plan of translating the whole work was dropped for want of the appreciation which the first instalment ought to have had. (1878.)] The _Divina Commedia_ is one of the landmarks of history. More than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art, and the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the mind's power, which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up ineffaceably and for ever as time goes on, marking out its advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the consent of all who come after. It stands with the _Iliad_ and Shakspere's Plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the _Novum Organon_ and the _Principia_, with Justinian's _Code_, with the Parthenon and S. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens European literature, as the _Iliad_ did that of Greece and Rome. And, like the _Iliad_, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in undiminished freshness the literature which it began. We approach the history of such works, in which genius seems to have pushed its achievements to a new limit, with a kind of awe. The beginnings of all things, their bursting out from nothing, and gradual evolution into substance and shape, cast on the mind a solemn influence. They come too near the fount of being to be followed up without our feeling the shadows which surround it. We cannot but fear, cannot but feel ourselves cut off from this visible and familiar world--as we enter into the cloud. And as with the processes of nature, so it is with those offsprings of man's mind, by which he has added permanently one more great feature to the world, and created a new power which is to act on mankind to the end. The mystery of the inventive and creative faculty, the subtle and incalculable combinations by which it was led to its work, and carried through it, are out of the reach of investigating thought. Often the idea recurs of the precariousness of the result; by how little the world might have lost one of its ornaments--by one sharp pang, or one chance meeting, or any other among the countless accidents among which man runs his course. And then the solemn recollection supervenes, that powers were formed, and life preserved, and circumstances arranged, and actions controlled, that thus it should be: and the work which man has brooded over, and at last created, is the foster-child too of that "Wisdom which reaches from end to end, strongly and sweetly disposing all things." It does not abate these feelings, that we can follow in some cases and to a certain extent, the progress of a work. Indeed, the sight of the particular accidents among which it was developed--which belong perhaps to a heterogeneous and widely discordant order of things, which are out of proportion and out of harmony with it, which do not explain it, which have, as it may seem to us, no natural right to be connected with it, to bear on its character, or contribute to its accomplishment, to which we feel, as it were, ashamed to owe what we can least spare, yet on which its forming mind and purpose were dependent, and with which they had to conspire--affects the imagination even more than cases where we see nothing. We are tempted less to musing and wonder by the _Iliad_, a work without a history, cut off from its past, the sole relic and vestige of its age, unexplained in its origin and perfection, than by the _Divina Commedia_, destined for the highest ends and most universal sympathy, yet the reflection of a personal history, and issuing seemingly from its chance incidents. The _Divina Commedia_ is singular among the great works with which it ranks, for its strong stamp of personal character and history. In general we associate little more than the name--not the life--of a great poet with his works; personal interest belongs more usually to greatness in its active than its creative forms. But the whole idea and purpose of the _Commedia_, as well as its filling up and colouring, are determined by Dante's peculiar history. The loftiest, perhaps, in its aim and flight of all poems, it is also the most individual; the writer's own life is chronicled in it, as well as the issues and upshot of all things. It is at once the mirror to all time of the sins and perfections of men, of the judgments and grace of God, and the record, often the only one, of the transient names, and local factions, and obscure ambitions, and forgotten crimes, of the poet's own day; and in that awful company to which he leads us, in the most unearthly of his scenes, we never lose sight of himself. And when this peculiarity sends us to history, it seems as if the poem which was to hold such a place in Christian literature hung upon and grew out of chance events, rather than the deliberate design of its author. History indeed here, as generally, is but a feeble exponent of the course of growth in a great mind and great ideas. It shows us early a bent and purpose--the man conscious of power and intending to use it--and then the accidents among which he worked: but how that current of purpose threaded its way among them, how it was thrown back, deflected, deepened, by them, we cannot learn from history. It presents but a broken and mysterious picture. A boy of quick and enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a Saint in Paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction--quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory of her whom he has lost. It is the promise and purpose of a great work. But a prosaic change seems to come over this half-ideal character. The lover becomes the student--the student of the 13th century--struggling painfully against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in premiss and ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of half-awakened taste, and the mannerisms of the Provençals. Boethius and Cicero, and the mass of mixed learning within his reach, are accepted as the consolation of his human griefs: he is filled with the passion of universal knowledge, and the desire to communicate it. Philosophy has become the lady of his soul--to write allegorical poems in her honour, and to comment on them with all the apparatus of his learning in prose, his mode of celebrating her. Further, he marries; it is said, not happily. The antiquaries, too, have disturbed romance by discovering that Beatrice also was married some years before her death. He appears, as time goes on, as a burgher of Florence, the father of a family, a politician, an envoy, a magistrate, a partisan, taking his full share in the quarrels of the day. At length we see him, at once an exile, and the poet of the _Commedia_. Beatrice reappears--shadowy, melting at times into symbol and figure--but far too living and real, addressed with too intense and natural feeling to be the mere personification of anything. The lady of the philosophical Canzoni has vanished. The student's dream has been broken, as the boy's had been; and the earnestness of the man, enlightened by sorrow, overleaping the student's formalities and abstractions, reverted in sympathy to the earnestness of the boy, and brooded once more on that Saint in Paradise, whose presence and memory had once been so soothing, and who now seemed a real link between him and that stable country, "where the angels are in peace." Round her image, the reflection of purity, and truth, and forbearing love, was grouped that confused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged itself in awful order--and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction, but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari--no figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love, dissipated by study and business, and revived in memory by heavy sorrow--a boyish resolution, made in a moment of feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous to say in Dante's case, laid aside, for apparently more manly studies, gave the idea and suggested the form of the "Sacred poem of earth and heaven." And the occasion of this startling unfolding of the poetic gift, of this passage of a soft and dreamy boy, into the keenest, boldest, sternest of poets, the free and mighty leader of European song, was, what is not ordinarily held to be a source of poetical inspiration,--the political life. The boy had sensibility, high aspirations, and a versatile and passionate nature; the student added to this energy, various learning, gifts of language, and noble ideas on the capacities and ends of man. But it was the factions of Florence which made Dante a great poet. But for them, he might have been a modern critic and essayist born before his time, and have held a high place among the writers of fugitive verses; in Italy, a graceful but trifling and idle tribe, often casting a deep and beautiful thought into a mould of expressive diction, but oftener toying with a foolish and glittering conceit, and whose languid genius was exhausted by a sonnet. He might have thrown into the shade the Guidos and Cinos of his day, to be eclipsed by Petrarch. But he learned in the bitter feuds of Italy not to trifle; they opened to his view, and he had an eye to see, the true springs and abysses of this mortal life--motives and passions stronger than lovers' sentiments, evils beyond the consolations of Boethius and Cicero; and from that fiery trial which without searing his heart, annealed his strength and purpose, he drew that great gift and power, by which he stands pre-eminent even among his high compeers, the gift of being real. And the idea of the _Commedia_ took shape, and expanded into its endless forms of terror and beauty, not under the roof-tree of the literary citizen, but when the exile had been driven out to the highways of the world, to study nature on the sea or by the river or on the mountain track, and to study men in the courts of Verona and Ravenna, and in the schools of Bologna and Paris--perhaps of Oxford. The connexion of these feuds with Dante's poem has given to the middle age history of Italy an interest of which it is not undeserving in itself, full as it is of curious exhibitions of character and contrivance, but to which politically it cannot lay claim, amid the social phenomena, so far grander in scale and purpose and more felicitous in issue, of the other western nations. It is remarkable for keeping up an antique phase, which, in spite of modern arrangements, it has not yet lost. It is a history of cities. In ancient history all that is most memorable and instructive gathers round cities; civilisation and empire were concentrated within walls; and it baffled the ancient mind to conceive how power should be possessed and wielded, by numbers larger than might be collected in a single market-place. The Roman Empire indeed aimed at being one in its administration and law; but it was not a nation, nor were its provinces nations. Yet everywhere but in Italy, it prepared them for becoming nations. And while everywhere else parts were uniting and union was becoming organisation--and neither geographical remoteness, nor unwieldiness of numbers, nor local interests and differences, were untractable obstacles to that spirit of fusion which was at once the ambition of the few and the instinct of the many; and cities, even where most powerful, had become the centres of the attracting and joining forces, knots in the political network--while this was going on more or less happily throughout the rest of Europe, in Italy the ancient classic idea lingered in its simplicity, its narrowness and jealousy, wherever there was any political activity. The history of Southern Italy indeed is mainly a foreign one, the history of modern Rome merges in that of the Papacy; but Northern Italy has a history of its own, and that is a history of separate and independent cities--points of reciprocal and indestructible repulsion, and within, theatres of action where the blind tendencies and traditions of classes and parties weighed little on the freedom of individual character, and citizens could watch and measure and study one another with the minuteness of private life. Two cities were the centres of ancient history in its most interesting time. And two cities of modern Italy represent, with entirely undesigned but curiously exact coincidence, the parts of Athens and Rome. Venice, superficially so unlike, is yet in many of its accidental features, and still more in its spirit, the counterpart of Rome, in its obscure and mixed origin, in its steady growth, in its quick sense of order and early settlement of its polity, in its grand and serious public spirit, in its subordination of the individual to the family, and the family to the state, in its combination of remote dominion with the liberty of a solitary and sovereign city. And though the associations and the scale of the two were so different--though Rome had its hills and its legions, and Venice its lagunes and galleys--the long empire of Venice, the heir of Carthage and predecessor of England on the seas, the great aristocratic republic of 1000 years, is the only empire that has yet matched Rome in length and steadiness of tenure. Brennus and Hannibal were not resisted with greater constancy than Doria and Louis XII.; and that great aristocracy, long so proud, so high-spirited, so intelligent, so practical, who combined the enterprise and wealth of merchants, the self-devotion of soldiers and gravity of senators, with the uniformity and obedience of a religious order, may compare without shame its Giustiniani, and Zenos, and Morosini, with Roman Fabii and Claudii. And Rome could not be more contrasted with Athens than Venice with Italian and contemporary Florence--stability with fitfulness, independence impregnable and secure, with a short-lived and troubled liberty, empire meditated and achieved, with a course of barren intrigues and quarrels. Florence, gay, capricious, turbulent, the city of party, the head and busy patroness of democracy in the cities round her--Florence, where popular government was inaugurated with its utmost exclusiveness and most pompous ceremonial; waging her little summer wars against Ghibelline tyrants, revolted democracies, and her own exiles; and further, so rich in intellectual gifts, in variety of individual character, in poets, artists, wits, historians--Florence in its brilliant days recalled the image of ancient Athens, and did not depart from its prototype in the beauty of its natural site, in its noble public buildings, in the size and nature of its territory. And the course of its history is similar and the result of similar causes--a traditional spirit of freedom, with its accesses of fitful energy, its periods of grand display and moments of glorious achievement, but producing nothing politically great or durable, and sinking at length into a resigned servitude. It had its Peisistratidæ more successful than those of Athens; it had, too, its Harmodius and Aristogeiton; it had its great orator of liberty, as potent and as unfortunate as the antagonist of Philip. And finally, like Athens, it became content with the remembrance of its former glory, with being the fashionable and acknowledged seat of refinement and taste, with being a favoured dependency on the modern heir of the Cæsars. But if to Venice belongs a grander public history, Florentine names and works, like Athenian, will be living among men, when the Brenta shall have been left unchecked to turn the Lagunes into ploughland, and when Rome herself may no longer be the seat of the Popes. The year of Dante's birth was a memorable one in the annals of Florence, of Italy, and of Christendom.[2] The year 1265 was the year of that great victory of Benevento, where Charles of Anjou overthrew Manfred of Naples, and destroyed at one blow the power of the house of Swabia. From that time till the time of Charles V., the emperors had no footing in Italy. Further, that victory set up the French influence in Italy, which, transient in itself, produced such strange and momentous consequences, by the intimate connexion to which it led between the French kings and the Popes. The protection of France was dearly bought by the captivity of Avignon, the great western schism, and the consequent secularisation of the Papacy, which lasted on uninterrupted till the Council of Trent. Nearly three centuries of degradation and scandal, unrelieved by one heroic effort among the successors of Gregory VII., connected the Reformation with the triumph of Charles and the Pope at Benevento. Finally, by it the Guelf party was restored for good in Florence; the Guelf democracy, which had been trampled down by the Uberti and Manfred's chivalry at Monteaperti, once more raised its head; and fortune, which had long wavered between the rival lilies, finally turned against the white one, till the name of Ghibelline became a proscribed one in Florence, as Jacobite was once in Scotland, or Papist in England, or Royalist in France. [Footnote 2: May, 1265. (Pelli.) Benevento: Feb. 26, 1265/6. The Florentine year began March 25.] The names of Guelf and Ghibelline were the inheritance of a contest which, in its original meaning, had been long over. The old struggle between the priesthood and the empire was still kept up traditionally, but its ideas and interests were changed: they were still great and important ones, but not those of Gregory VII. It had passed over from the mixed region of the spiritual and temporal into the purely political. The cause of the popes was that of the independence of Italy--the freedom and alliance of the great cities of the north, and the dependence of the centre and south on the Roman See. To keep the Emperor out of Italy--to create a barrier of powerful cities against him south of the Alps--to form behind themselves a compact territory, rich, removed from the first burst of invasion, and maintaining a strong body of interested feudatories, had now become the great object of the popes. It may have been a wise policy on their part, for the maintenance of their spiritual influence, to attempt to connect their own independence with the political freedom of the Italian communities; but certain it is that the ideas and the characters which gave a religious interest and grandeur to the earlier part of the contest, appear but sparingly, if at all, in its later forms. The two parties did not care to keep in view principles which their chiefs had lost sight of. The Emperor and the Pope were both real powers, able to protect and assist; and they divided between them those who required protection and assistance. Geographical position, the rivalry of neighbourhood, family tradition, private feuds, and above all private interest, were the main causes which assigned cities, families, and individuals to the Ghibelline or Guelf party. One party called themselves the Emperor's liegemen, and their watchword was authority and law; the other side were the liegemen of Holy Church, and their cry was liberty; and the distinction as a broad one is true. But a democracy would become Ghibelline, without scruple, if its neighbour town was Guelf; and among the Guelf liegemen of the Church and liberty the pride of blood and love of power were not a whit inferior to that of their opponents. Yet, though the original principle of the contest was lost, and the political distinctions of parties were often interfered with by interest or accident, it is not impossible to trace in the two factions differences of temper, of moral and political inclinations, which though visible only on a large scale and in the mass, were quite sufficient to give meaning and reality to their mutual opposition. These differences had come down, greatly altered of course, from the quarrel in which the parties took their rise. The Ghibellines as a body reflected the worldliness, the licence, the irreligion, the reckless selfishness, the daring insolence, and at the same time the gaiety and pomp, the princely magnificence and generosity and largeness of mind of the house of Swabia; they were the men of the court and camp, imperious and haughty from ancient lineage or the Imperial cause, yet not wanting in the frankness and courtesy of nobility; careless of public opinion and public rights, but not dead to the grandeur of public objects and public services. Among them were found, or to them inclined, all who, whether from a base or a lofty ambition, desired to place their will above law[3]--the lord of the feudal castle, the robber-knight of the Apennine pass, the magnificent but terrible tyrants of the cities, the pride and shame of Italy, the Visconti and Scaligers. That renowned Ghibelline chief, whom the poet finds in the fiery sepulchres of the unbelievers with the great Ghibelline emperor and the princely Ghibelline cardinal--the disdainful and bitter but lofty spirit of Farinata degli Uberti, the conqueror, and then singly and at his own risk, the saviour of his country which had wronged him, represents the good as well as the bad side of his party. [Footnote 3: "Maghinardo da Susinana (_il Demonio_, Purg. 14) fu uno grande e savio tiranno ... gran castellano, e con molti fedeli: savio fu di guerra e bene avventuroso in più battaglie, e al suo tempo fece gran cose. Ghibellino era di sua nazione e in sue opere; ma co' Fiorentini era Guelfo e nimico di tutti i loro nimici, o Guelfi o Ghibellini che fossono."--G. Vill. vii. 149. A Ghibelline by birth and disposition; yet, from circumstances, a close ally of the Guelfs of Florence.] The Guelfs, on the other hand, were the party of the middle classes; they rose out of and held to the people; they were strong by their compactness, their organisation in cities, their commercial relations and interests, their command of money. Further, they were professedly the party of strictness and religion, a profession which fettered them as little as their opponents were fettered by the respect they claimed for imperial law. But though by personal unscrupulousness and selfishness, and in instances of public vengeance, they sinned as deeply as the Ghibellines, they stood far more committed as a party to a public meaning and purpose--to improvement in law and the condition of the poor, to a protest against the insolence of the strong, to the encouragement of industry. The genuine Guelf spirit was austere, frugal, independent, earnest, religious, fond of its home and Church, and of those celebrations which bound together Church and home; but withal very proud, very intolerant; in its higher form intolerant of evil, but intolerant always to whatever displeased it. Yet there was a grave and noble manliness about it which long kept it alive in Florence. It had not as yet turned itself against the practical corruptions of the Church, which was its ally; but this also it was to do, when the popes had forsaken the cause of liberty, and leagued themselves with the brilliant tyranny of the Medici. Then Savonarola invoked, and not in vain, the stern old Guelf spirit of resistance, of domestic purity and severity, and of domestic religion, against unbelief and licentiousness even in the Church; and the Guelf "_Piagnoni_" presented, in a more simple and generous shape, a resemblance to our own Puritans, as the Ghibellines often recall the coarser and worse features of our own Cavaliers. In Florence, these distinctions had become mere nominal ones, confined to the great families who carried on their private feuds under the old party names, when Frederick II. once more gave them their meaning. "Although the accursed Guelf and Ghibelline factions lasted amongst the nobles of Florence, and they often waged war among themselves out of private grudges, and took sides for the said factions, and held one with another, and those who called themselves Guelfs desired the establishment of the Pope and Holy Church, and those who called themselves Ghibellines favoured the Emperor and his adherents, yet withal the people and commonalty of Florence maintained itself in unity, to the well-being and honour and establishment of the commonwealth."[4] But the appearance on the scene of an emperor of such talent and bold designs revived the languid contest, and gave to party a cause, and to individual passions and ambition an impulse and pretext. The division between Guelf and Ghibelline again became serious, involved all Florence, armed house against house, and neighbourhood against neighbourhood, issued in merciless and vindictive warfare, grew on into a hopeless and deadly breach, and finally lost to Florence, without remedy or repair, half her noble houses and the love of the greatest of her sons. The old badge of their common country became to the two factions the sign of their implacable hatred; the white lily of Florence, borne by the Ghibellines, was turned to red by the Guelfs, and the flower of two colours marked a civil strife as cruel and as fatal, if on a smaller scale, as that of the English roses.[5] [Footnote 4: G. Villani, vi. 33.] [Footnote 5: G. Villani, vi. 33, 43; _Parad._ 19.] It was waged with the peculiar characteristics of Italian civil war. There the city itself was the scene of battle. A thirteenth century city in Italy bore on its face the evidence that it was built and arranged for such emergencies. Its crowded and narrow streets were a collection of rival castles, whose tall towers, rising thick and close over its roofs, or hanging perilously over its close courts, attested the emulous pride and the insecurity of Italian civic life. There, within a separate precinct, flanked and faced by jealous friends or deadly enemies, were clustered together the dwellings of the various members of each great house--their common home and the monument of their magnificence and pride, and capable of being, as was so often necessary, their common refuge. In these fortresses of the leading families, scattered about the city, were the various points of onset and recovery in civic battle; in the streets barricades were raised, mangonels and crossbows were plied from the towers, a series of separate combats raged through the city, till chance at length connected the attacks of one side, or some panic paralysed the resistance of the other, or a conflagration interposed itself between the combatants, burning out at once Guelf and Ghibelline, and laying half Florence in ashes. Each party had their turn of victory; each, when vanquished, went into exile, and carried on the war outside the walls; each had their opportunity of remodelling the orders and framework of government, and each did so relentlessly at the cost of their opponents. They excluded classes, they proscribed families, they confiscated property, they sacked and burned warehouses, they levelled the palaces, and outraged the pride of their antagonists. To destroy was not enough, without adding to it the keenest and newest refinement of insult. Two buildings in Florence were peculiarly dear--among their "_cari luoghi_"--to the popular feeling and the Guelf party: the Baptistery of St. John, "il mio bel S. Giovanni," "to which all the good people resorted on Sundays,"[6] where they had all received baptism, where they had been married, where families were solemnly reconciled; and a tall and beautiful tower close by it, called the "Torre del Guardamorto," where the bodies of the "good people," who of old were all buried at S. Giovanni, rested on their way to the grave. The victorious Ghibellines, when they levelled the Guelf towers, overthrew this one, and endeavoured to make it crush in its fall the sacred church, "which," says the old chronicler, "was prevented by a miracle." The Guelfs, when their day came, built the walls of Florence with the stones of Ghibelline palaces.[7] One great family stands out pre-eminent in this fierce conflict as the victim and monument of party war. The head of the Ghibellines was the proud and powerful house of the Uberti, who shared with another great Ghibelline family, the Pazzi, the valley of the upper Arno. They lighted up the war in the Emperor's cause. They supported its weight and guided it. In time of peace they were foremost and unrestrained in defiance of law and in scorn of the people--in war, the people's fiercest and most active enemies. Heavy sufferers, in their property, and by the sword and axe, yet untamed and incorrigible, they led the van in that battle, so long remembered to their cost by the Guelfs, the battle of Monteaperti (1260)-- Lo strazio, e 'l gran scempio Che fece l'Arbia colorata in rossa.--_Inf._ 10. [Footnote 6: G. Villani, vi. 33, iv. 10; _Inf._ 19; _Parad._ 25.] [Footnote 7: G. Villani, vi. 39, 65.] That the head of their house, Farinata, saved Florence from the vengeance of his meaner associates, was not enough to atone for the unpardonable wrongs which they had done to the Guelfs and the democracy. When the red lily of the Guelfs finally supplanted the white one as the arms of Florence, and the badge of Guelph triumph, they were proscribed for ever, like the Peisistratidæ and the Tarquins. In every amnesty their names were excepted. The site on which their houses had stood was never again to be built upon, and remains the Great Square of Florence; the architect of the Palace of the People was obliged to sacrifice its symmetry, and to place it awry, that its walls might not encroach on the accursed ground.[8] "They had been," says a writer, contemporary with Dante, speaking of the time when he also became an exile; "they had been for more than forty years outlaws from their country, nor ever found mercy nor pity, remaining always abroad in great state, nor ever abased their honour, seeing that they ever abode with kings and lords, and to great things applied themselves."[9] They were loved as they were hated. When under the protection of a cardinal one of them visited the city, and the chequered blue and gold blazon of their house was, after an interval of half a century, again seen in the streets of Florence; "many ancient Ghibelline men and women pressed to kiss the arms,"[10] and even the common people did him honour. [Footnote 8: G. Villani, vi. 33, viii. 26; Vasari, _Arnolfo di Lapo_, i. 255 (Fir. 1846).] [Footnote 9: _Dino Compagni_, p. 88.] [Footnote 10: _Dino Compagni_, p. 107.] But the fortunes of Florentine factions depended on other causes than merely the address or vigour of their leaders. From the year of Dante's birth and Charles's victory, Florence, as far as we shall have to do with it, became irrevocably Guelf. Not that the whole commonalty of Florence formally called itself Guelf, or that the Guelf party was co-extensive with it; but the city was controlled by Guelf councils, devoted to the objects of the great Guelf party, and received in return the support of that party in curbing the pride of the nobles, and maintaining democratic forms. The Guelf party of Florence, though it was the life and soul of the republic, and irresistible in its disposal of the influence and arms of Florence, and though it embraced a large number of the most powerful families, is always spoken of as something distinct from, and external to, the governing powers, and the whole body of the people. It was a body with a separate and self-constituted existence;--in the state and allied to it, but an independent element, holding on to a large and comprehensive union without the state. Its organisation in Florence is one of the most curious among the many curious combinations which meet us in Italian history. After the final expulsion of the Ghibellines, the Guelf party took form as an institution, with definite powers, and a local existence. It appears with as distinct a shape as the Jacobin Club or the Orange Lodges, side by side with the government. It was a corporate body with a common seal, common property, not only in funds but lands--officers, archives, a common palace,[11] a great council, a secret committee, and last of all, a public accuser of the Ghibellines; of the confiscated Ghibelline estates one-third went to the republic, another third to compensate individual Guelfs, the rest was assigned to the Guelf party.[12] A pope, (Clement IV., 1265-68) had granted them his own arms[13]; and their device, a red eagle clutching a serpent, may be yet seen, with the red lily, and the party-coloured banner of the commonalty, on the battlements of the Palazzo Vecchio. [Footnote 11: Giotto painted in it: Vasari, _Vit. di Giotto_, p. 314.] [Footnote 12: G. Villani, vii. 2, 17.] [Footnote 13: _Ibid._ vii. 2.] But the expulsion of the Ghibellines did but little to restore peace. The great Guelf families, as old as many of the Ghibellines, had as little reverence as they for law or civic rights. Below these, the acknowledged nobility of Florence, were the leading families of the "people," houses created by successful industry or commerce, and pushing up into that privileged order, which, however ignored and even discredited by the laws, was fully recognised by feeling and opinion in the most democratic times of the republic. Rivalries and feuds, street broils and conspiracies, high-handed insolence from the great men, rough vengeance from the populace, still continued to vex jealous and changeful Florence. The popes sought in vain to keep in order their quarrelsome liegemen; to reconcile Guelf with Guelf, and even Guelf with Ghibelline. Embassies went and came, to ask for mediation and to proffer it; to apply the healing paternal hand; to present an obsequious and ostentatious submission. Cardinal legates came in state, and were received with reverential pomp; they formed private committees, and held assemblies, and made marriages; they harangued in honeyed words, and gained the largest promises; on one occasion the Great Square was turned into a vast theatre, and on this stage one hundred and fifty dissidents on each side came forward, and in the presence and with the benediction of the cardinal kissed each other on the mouth.[14] And if persuasion failed, the pope's representative hesitated not to excommunicate and interdict the faithful but obdurate city. But whether excommunicated or blessed, Florence could not be at peace; however wise and subtle had been the peace-maker's arrangements, his departing _cortège_ was hardly out of sight of the city before they were blown to the winds. Not more successful were the efforts of the sensible and moderate citizens who sighed for tranquillity within its walls. Dino Compagni's interesting though not very orderly narrative describes with great frankness, and with the perplexity of a simple-hearted man puzzled by the continual triumph of clever wickedness, the variety and the fruitlessness of the expedients devised by him and other good citizens against the resolute and incorrigible selfishness of the great Guelfs--ever, when checked in one form, breaking out in another; proof against all persuasion, all benefits; not to be bound by law, or compact, or oath; eluding or turning to its own account the deepest and sagest contrivances of constitutional wisdom. [Footnote 14: G. Villani, vii. 56.] A great battle won against Ghibelline Arezzo[15] raised the renown and the military spirit of the Guelf party, for the fame of the battle was very great; the hosts contained the choicest chivalry of either side, armed and appointed with emulous splendour. The fighting was hard, there was brilliant and conspicuous gallantry, and the victory was complete. It sealed Guelf ascendancy. The Ghibelline warrior-bishop of Arezzo fell, with three of the Uberti, and other Ghibelline chiefs. It was a day of trial. "Many that day who had been thought of great prowess were found dastards, and many who had never been spoken of were held in high esteem." It repaired the honour of Florence, and the citizens showed their feeling of its importance by mixing up the marvellous with its story. Its tidings came to Florence--so runs the tale in Villani, who declares what he "heard and saw" himself--at the very hour in which it was won. The Priors of the republic were resting in their palace during the noonday heat; suddenly the chamber door was shaken, and the cry heard: "Rise up! the Aretini are defeated." The door was opened, but there was no one; their servants had seen no one enter the palace, and no one came from the army till the hour of vespers, on a long summer's day. In this battle the Guelf leaders had won great glory. The hero of the day was the proudest, handsomest, craftiest, most winning, most ambitious, most unscrupulous Guelf noble in Florence--one of a family who inherited the spirit and recklessness of the proscribed Uberti, and did not refuse the popular epithet of "_Malefami_"--Corso Donati. He did not come back from the field of Campaldino, where he had won the battle by disobeying orders with any increased disposition to yield to rivals, or court the populace, or respect other men's rights. Those rivals, too--and they also had fought gallantly in the post of honour at Campaldino--were such as he hated from his soul--rivals whom he despised, and who yet were too strong for him. His blood was ancient, they were upstarts; he was a soldier, they were traders; he was poor, they the richest men in Florence. They had come to live close to the Donati, they had bought the palace of an old Ghibelline family, they had enlarged, adorned, and fortified it, and kept great state there. They had crossed him in marriages, bargains, inheritances. They had won popularity, honour, influence; and yet they were but men of business, while he had a part in all the political movements of the day. He was the friend and intimate of lords and noblemen, with great connexions and famous through all Italy; they were the favourites of the common people for their kindness and good nature; they even showed consideration for Ghibellines. He was an accomplished man of the world, keen and subtle, "full of malicious thoughts, mischievous and crafty;" they were inexperienced in intrigue, and had the reputation of being clumsy and stupid. He was the most graceful and engaging of courtiers; they were not even gentlemen. Lastly, in the debates of that excitable republic he was the most eloquent speaker, and they were tongue-tied.[16] [Footnote 15: _Campaldino_, in 1289. G. Vill. vii. 131; _Dino Comp._ p. 14.] [Footnote 16: _Dino Comp._ pp. 32, 75, 94, 133.] "There was a family," writes Dino Compagni, "who called themselves the Cerchi, men of low estate, but good merchants and very rich; and they dressed richly, and maintained many servants and horses, and made a brave show; and some of them bought the palace of the Conti Guidi, which was near the houses of the Pazzi and Donati, who were more ancient of blood but not so rich; therefore, seeing the Cerchi rise to great dignity, and that they had walled and enlarged the palace, and kept great state, the Donati began to have a great hatred against them." Villani gives the same account of the feud.[17] "It began in that quarter of scandal the Sesta of Porta S. Piero, between the Cerchi and Donati, on the one side through jealousy, on the other through churlish rudeness. Of the house of the Cerchi was head Messer Vieri de' Cerchi, and he and those of his house were people of great business, and powerful, and of great relationships, and most wealthy traders, so that their company was one of the greatest in the world; men they were of soft life, and who meant no harm; boorish and ill-mannered, like people who had come in a short time to great state and power. The Donati were gentlemen and warriors, and of no excessive wealth.... They were neighbours in Florence and in the country, and by the conversation of their jealousy with the peevish boorishness of the others, arose the proud scorn that there was between them." The glories of Campaldino were not as oil on these troubled waters. The conquerors flouted each other all the more fiercely in the streets on their return, and ill-treated the lower people with less scruple. No gathering for festive or serious purposes could be held without tempting strife. A marriage, a funeral, a ball, a gay procession of cavaliers and ladies--any meeting where one stood while another sat, where horse or man might jostle another, where pride might be nettled or temper shown, was in danger of ending in blood. The lesser quarrels meanwhile ranged themselves under the greater ones; and these, especially that between the Cerchi and Donati, took more and more a political character. The Cerchi inclined more and more to the trading classes and the lower people; they threw themselves on their popularity, and began to hold aloof from the meetings of the "Parte Guelfa," while this organised body became an instrument in the hands of their opponents, a club of the nobles. Corso Donati, besides mischief of a more substantial kind, turned his ridicule on their solemn dulness and awkward speech, and his friends the jesters, one Scampolino in particular, carried his gibes and nicknames all over Florence. The Cerchi received all in sullen and clogged indifference. They were satisfied with repelling attacks, and nursed their hatred.[18] [Footnote 17: G. Vill. viii. 39.] [Footnote 18: _Dino Compagni_, pp. 32, 34, 38.] Thus the city was divided, and the attempts to check the factions only exasperated them. It was in vain that, when at times the government and the populace lost patience, severe measures were taken. It was in vain that the reformer, Gian della Bella, carried for a time his harsh "orders of justice" against the nobles, and invested popular vengeance with the solemnity of law and with the pomp and ceremony of a public act--that when a noble had been convicted of killing a citizen, the great officer, "Standard-bearer," as he was called, "of justice," issued forth in state and procession, with the banner of justice borne before him, with all his train, and at the head of the armed citizens, to the house of the criminal, and razed it to the ground. An eyewitness describes the effect of such chastisement:--"I, Dino Compagni, being Gonfalonier of Justice in 1293, went to their houses, and to those of their relations, and these I caused to be pulled down according to the laws. This beginning in the case of the other Gonfaloniers came to an evil effect; because, if they demolished the houses according to the laws, the people said that they were cruel; and if they did not demolish them completely, they said that they were cowards; and many distorted justice for fear of the people." Gian della Bella was overthrown with few regrets even on the part of the people. Equally vain was the attempt to keep the peace by separating the leaders of the disturbances. They were banished by a kind of ostracism; they departed in ostentatious meekness, Corso Donato to plot at Rome, Vieri de' Cerchi to return immediately to Florence. Anarchy had got too fast a hold on the city, and it required a stronger hand than that of the pope, or the signory of the republic, to keep it down. Yet Florence prospered. Every year it grew richer, more intellectual, more refined, more beautiful, more gay. With its anarchy there was no stagnation. Torn and divided as it was, its energy did not slacken, its busy and creative spirit was not deadened, its hopefulness not abated. The factions, fierce and personal as they were, did not hinder that interest in political ideas, that active and subtle study of the questions of civil government, that passion and ingenuity displayed in political contrivance, which now pervaded Northern Italy, everywhere marvellously patient and hopeful, though far from being equally successful. In Venice at the close of the thirteenth century, that polity was finally settled and consolidated, by which she was great as long as cities could be imperial, and which even in its decay survived the monarchy of Louis XIV. and existed within the memory of living men. In Florence, the constructive spirit of law and order only resisted, but never triumphed. Yet it was at this time resolute and sanguine, ready with experiment and change, and not yet dispirited by continual failure. Political interest, however, and party contests were not sufficient to absorb and employ the citizens of Florence. Their genial and versatile spirit, so keen, so inventive, so elastic, which made them such hot and impetuous partisans, kept them from being only this. The time was one of growth; new knowledge, new powers, new tastes were opening to men--new pursuits attracted them. There was commerce, there was the school philosophy, there was the science of nature, there was ancient learning, there was the civil law, there were the arts, there was poetry, all rude as yet, and unformed, but full of hope--the living parents of mightier offspring. Frederick II. had once more opened Aristotle to the Latin world; he had given an impulse to the study of the great monuments of Roman legislation which was responded to through Italy; himself a poet, his example and his splendid court had made poetry fashionable. In the end of the thirteenth century a great stride was made at Florence. While her great poet was growing up to manhood, as rapid a change went on in her streets, her social customs, the wealth of her citizens, their ideas of magnificence and beauty, their appreciation of literature. It was the age of growing commerce and travel; Franciscan missionaries had reached China, and settled there;[19] in 1294, Marco Polo returned to Venice, the first successful explorer of the East. The merchants of Florence lagged not; their field of operation was Italy and the West; they had their correspondents in London, Paris, and Bruges; they were the bankers of popes and kings.[20] And their city shows to this day the wealth and magnificence of the last years of the thirteenth century. The ancient buildings, consecrated in the memory of the Florentine people, were repaired, enlarged, adorned with marble and bronze--Or San Michele, the Badia, the Baptistery; and new buildings rose on a grander scale. In 1294 was begun the Mausoleum of the great Florentine dead, the Church of S. Croce. In the same year, a few months later, Arnolfo laid the deep foundations which were afterwards to bear up Brunelleschi's dome, and traced the plan of the magnificent cathedral. In 1298 he began to raise a Town-hall worthy of the Republic, and of being the habitation of its magistrates, the frowning mass of the Palazzo Vecchio. In 1299, the third circle of the walls was commenced, with the benediction of bishops, and the concourse of all the "lords and orders" of Florence. And Giotto was now beginning to throw Cimabue into the shade--Giotto, the shepherd's boy, painter, sculptor, architect, and engineer at once, who a few years later was to complete and crown the architectural glories of Florence by that masterpiece of grace, his marble Campanile. [Footnote 19: See the curious letters of _John de Monte Corvino_, about his mission in Cathay, 1289-1305, in Wadding, vi. 69.] [Footnote 20: _E.g._ the _Mozzi_, of Greg. X.; _Peruzzi_, of Philip le Bel; _Spini_, of Boniface VIII.; _Cerchi del Garbo_, of Benedict XI. (G. Vill. vii. 42, viii. 63, 71; _Dino Comp._ p. 35).] Fifty years made then all that striking difference in domestic habits, in the materials of dress, in the value of money, which they have usually made in later centuries. The poet of the fourteenth century describes the proudest nobleman of a hundred years before "with his leathern girdle and clasp of bone;" and in one of the most beautiful of all poetic celebrations of the good old time, draws the domestic life of ancient Florence in the household where his ancestor was born: A così riposato, a così bello Viver di cittadini, a così fida Cittadinanza, a così dolce ostello Maria mi diè, chiamata in alte grida.--_Par._ c. 15.[21] [Footnote 21: Florence, confined within that ancient wall, Whence still the chimes at noon and evening sound, Was sober, modest, and at peace with all. Myself have seen Bellincion Berti pace The street in leathern belt; his lady come Forth from her toilet with unpainted face. * * * * Oh happy wives! each soon to lay her head In her own tomb; and no one yet compelled To weep deserted in a lonely bed. * * * * To such pure life of beauty and repose-- Such faithful citizens--such happy men-- The virgin gave me, when my mother's throes Forced her with cries to call on Mary's name.--WRIGHT.] There high-born dames, he says, still plied the distaff and the loom; still rocked the cradle with the words which their own mothers had used; or working with their maidens, told them old tales of the forefathers of the city, "of the Trojans, of Fiesole, and of Rome." Villani still finds this rudeness within forty years of the end of the century, almost within the limits of his own and Dante's life; and speaks of that "old first people," _il primo Popolo Vecchio_, with their coarse food and expenditure, their leather jerkins, and plain close gowns, their small dowries and late marriages, as if they were the first founders of the city, and not a generation which had lasted on into his own.[22] Twenty years later, his story is of the gaiety, the riches, the profuse munificence, the brilliant festivities, the careless and joyous life, which attracted foreigners to Florence as the city of pleasure; of companies of a thousand or more, all clad in white robes, under a lord, styled "of Love," passing their time in sports and dances; of ladies and knights, "going through the city with trumpets and other instruments, with joy and gladness," and meeting together in banquets evening and morning; entertaining illustrious strangers, and honourably escorting them on horseback in their passage through the city; tempting by their liberality, courtiers, and wits, and minstrels, and jesters, to add to the amusements of Florence.[23] Nor were these the boisterous triumphs of unrefined and coarse merriment. How variety of character was drawn out, how its more delicate elements were elicited and tempered, how nicely it was observed, and how finely drawn, let the racy and open-eyed story-tellers of Florence testify. [Footnote 22: G. Vill. vi. 69 (1259).] [Footnote 23: G. Vill. vii. 89 (1283).] Not perhaps in these troops of revellers, but amid music and song, and in the pleasant places of social and private life, belonging to the Florence of arts and poetry, not to the Florence of factions and strife, should we expect to find the friend of the sweet singer, Casella, and of the reserved and bold speculator, Guido Cavalcanti; the mystic poet of the _Vita Nuova_, so sensitive and delicate, trembling at a gaze or a touch, recording visions, painting angels, composing Canzoni and commenting on them; finally devoting himself to the austere consolations of deep study. To superadd to such a character that of a democratic politician of the middle ages, seems an incongruous and harsh combination. Yet it was a real one in this instance. The scholar's life is, in our idea of it, far separated from the practical and the political; we have been taught by our experience to disjoin enthusiasm in love, in art, in what is abstract or imaginative, from keen interest and successful interference in the affairs and conflicts of life. The practical man may sometimes be also a _dilettante_; but the dreamer or the thinker, wisely or indolently, keeps out of the rough ways where real passions and characters meet and jostle, or if he ventures, seldom gains honour there. The separation, though a natural one, grows wider as society becomes more vast and manifold, as its ends, functions, and pursuits are disentangled, while they multiply. But in Dante's time, and in an Italian city, it was not such a strange thing that the most refined and tender interpreter of feeling, the popular poet, whose verses touched all hearts, and were in every mouth, should be also at once the ardent follower of all abstruse and difficult learning, and a prominent character among those who administered the State. In that narrow sphere of action, in that period of dawning powers and circumscribed knowledge, it seemed no unreasonable hope or unwise ambition to attempt the compassing of all science, and to make it subserve and illustrate the praise of active citizenship.[24] Dante, like other literary celebrities of the time, was not less from the custom of the day, than from his own purpose, a public man. He took his place among his fellow-citizens; he went out to war with them; he fought, it is said, among the skirmishers at the great Guelf victory of Campaldino; to qualify himself for office in the democracy, he enrolled himself in one of the Guilds of the people, and was matriculated in the "Art" of the Apothecaries; he served the State as its agent abroad; he went on important missions to the cities and courts of Italy--according to a Florentine tradition, which enumerates fourteen distinct embassies, even to Hungary and France. In the memorable year of Jubilee, 1300, he was one of the Priors of the Republic. There is no shrinking from fellowship and co-operation and conflict with the keen or bold men of the market-place and council-hall, in that mind of exquisite and, as drawn by itself, exaggerated sensibility. The doings and characters of men, the workings of society, the fortunes of Italy, were watched and thought of with as deep an interest as the courses of the stars, and read in the real spectacle of life with as profound emotion as in the miraculous page of Virgil; and no scholar ever read Virgil with such feeling--no astronomer ever watched the stars with more eager inquisitiveness. The whole man opens to the world around him; all affections and powers, soul and sense, diligently and thoughtfully directed and trained, with free and concurrent and equal energy, with distinct yet harmonious purposes, seek out their respective and appropriate objects, moral, intellectual, natural, spiritual, in that admirable scene and hard field where man is placed to labour and love, to be exercised, proved, and judged. [Footnote 24: _Vide_ the opening of the _De Monarchia_.] In a fresco in the chapel of the old palace of the Podestà[25] at Florence is a portrait of Dante, said to be by the hand of his contemporary Giotto. It was discovered in 1841 under the whitewash, and a tracing made by Mr. Seymour Kirkup has been reproduced in fac-simile by the Arundel Society. The fresco was afterwards restored or repainted with no happy success. He is represented as he might have been in the year of Campaldino (1289). The countenance is youthful yet manly, more manly than it appears in the engravings of the picture; but it only suggests the strong deep features of the well-known traditional face. He is drawn with much of the softness, and melancholy pensive sweetness, and with something also of the quaint stiffness of the _Vita Nuova_--with his flower and his book. With him is drawn his master, Brunetto Latini,[26] and Corso Donati. We do not know what occasion led Giotto thus to associate him with the great "Baron." Dante was, indeed, closely connected with the Donati. The dwelling of his family was near theirs, in the "Quarter of Scandal," the Ward of the Porta S. Piero. He married a daughter of their house, Madonna Gemma. None of his friends are commemorated with more affection than the companion of his light and wayward days, remembered not without a shade of anxious sadness, yet with love and hope, Corso's brother, Forese.[27] No sweeter spirit sings and smiles in the illumined spheres of Paradise, than she whom Forese remembers as on earth one, Che tra bella e buona Non so qual fosse più--[28] and who, from the depth of her heavenly joy, teaches the poet that in the lowest place among the blessed there can be no envy[29]--the sister of Forese and Corso, Piccarda. The _Commedia_, though it speaks, as if in prophecy, of Corso's miserable death, avoids the mention of his name.[30] Its silence is so remarkable as to seem significant. But though history does not group together Corso and Dante, the picture represents the truth--their fortunes were linked together. They were actors in the same scene--at this distance of time two of the most prominent; though a scene very different from that calm and grave assembly, which Giotto's placid pencil has drawn on the old chapel wall. [Footnote 25: The Bargello, a prison (1850); a museum (1878). _V._ Vasari, p. 311.] [Footnote 26: He died in 1294. G. Vill. viii. 10.] [Footnote 27: _Purgat._ c. 23.] [Footnote 28: _Ibid._ c. 24. My sister, good and beautiful--which most I know not.--WRIGHT.] [Footnote 29: _Parad._ c. 3.] [Footnote 30: _Purg._ c. 24, 82-87.] The outlines of this part of Dante's history are so well known that it is not necessary to dwell on them; and more than the outlines we know not. The family quarrels came to a head, issued in parties, and the parties took names; they borrowed them from two rival factions in a neighbouring town, Pistoia, whose feud was imported into Florence; and the Guelfs became divided into the Black Guelfs who were led by the Donati, and the White Guelfs who sided with the Cerchi.[31] It still professed to be but a family feud, confined to the great houses; but they were too powerful and Florence too small for it not to affect the whole Republic. The middle classes and the artisans looked on, and for a time not without satisfaction, at the strife of the great men; but it grew evident that one party must crush the other, and become dominant in Florence; and of the two, the Cerchi and their White adherents were less formidable to the democracy than the unscrupulous and overbearing Donati, with their military renown and lordly tastes; proud not merely of being nobles, but Guelf nobles; always loyal champions, once the martyrs, and now the hereditary assertors, of the great Guelf cause. The Cerchi with less character and less zeal, but rich, liberal, and showy, and with more of rough kindness and vulgar good-nature for the common people, were more popular in Guelf Florence than the "Parte Guelfa;" and, of course, the Ghibellines wished them well. Both the contemporary historians of Florence lead us to think that they might have been the governors and guides of the Republic--if they had chosen, and had known how; and both, though condemning the two parties equally, seemed to have thought that this would have been the best result for the State. But the accounts of both, though they are very different writers, agree in their scorn of the leaders of the White Guelfs. They were upstarts, purse-proud, vain, and coarse-minded; and they dared to aspire to an ambition which they were too dull and too cowardly to pursue, when the game was in their hands. They wished to rule; but when they might, they were afraid. The commons were on their side, the moderate men, the party of law, the lovers of republican government, and for the most part the magistrates; but they shrank from their fortune, "more from cowardice than from goodness, because they exceedingly feared their adversaries."[32] Boniface VIII. had no prepossessions in Florence, except for energy and an open hand; the side which was most popular he would have accepted and backed; but "he would not lose," he said, "the men for the women." "_Io non voglio perdere gli uomini per le femminelle._"[33] If the Black party furnished types for the grosser or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet's Hell, the White party surely were the originals of that picture of stupid and cowardly selfishness, in the miserable crowd who moan and are buffeted in the vestibule of the Pit, mingled with the angels who dared neither to rebel nor be faithful, but "_were for themselves_;" and whoever it may be who is singled out in the "setta dei cattivi," for deeper and special scorn--he, Che fece per viltà il gran rifiuto--[34] the idea was derived from the Cerchi in Florence. [Footnote 31: In 1300. G. Villani, viii. 38, 39.] [Footnote 32: _Dino Comp._ p. 45.] [Footnote 33: _Ibid._ p. 62.] [Footnote 34: _Inf._ c. 3, 60.] A French prince was sent by the Pope to mediate and make peace in Florence. The Black Guelfs and Corso Donati came with him. The magistrates were overawed and perplexed. The White party were, step by step, amused, entrapped, led blindly into false plots, entangled in the elaborate subtleties, and exposed with all the zest and mockery, of Italian intrigue--finally chased out of their houses and from the city, condemned unheard, outlawed, ruined in name and property, by the Pope's French mediator. With them fell many citizens who had tried to hold the balance between the two parties: for the leaders of the Black Guelfs were guilty of no errors of weakness. In two extant lists of the proscribed--condemned by default, for corruption and various crimes, especially for hindering the entrance into Florence of Charles de Valois, to a heavy fine and banishment--then, two months after, for contumacy, to be burned alive if he ever fell into the hands of the Republic--appears the name of Dante Alighieri; and more than this, concerning the history of his expulsion, we know not.[35] [Footnote 35: Pelli, _Memorie per servire alla vita di Dante._ Fir. 1823, pp. 105, 106.] Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more than the general character. He acted for a time in concert with the expelled party, when they attempted to force their way back to Florence; he gave them up at last in scorn and despair: but he never returned to Florence. And he found no new home for the rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his exile to his death, he was a wanderer. The character is stamped on his writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or dim, do but disclose him to us at different points, appearing here and there, we are not told how or why. One old record, discovered by antiquarian industry, shows him in a village church near Florence, planning, with the Cerchi and the White party, an attack on the Black Guelfs. In another, he appears in the Val di Magra, making peace between its small potentates: in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for awhile, in the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumour brings him to the West--with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little certain can be made out about the places where he was an honoured and admired, but it may be, not always a welcome guest, till we find him sheltered, cherished, and then laid at last to rest, by the Lords of Ravenna. There he still rests, in a small, solitary chapel, built, not by a Florentine, but a Venetian. Florence, "that mother of little love," asked for his bones; but rightly asked in vain.[36] His place of repose is better in those remote and forsaken streets "by the shore of the Adrian Sea," hard by the last relics of the Roman Empire--the mausoleum of the children of Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian--than among the assembled dead of S. Croce, or amid the magnificence of S. Maria del Fiore.[37] [Footnote 36: See Dr. Barlow's _Sixth Centenary Festivals of Dante_. (1866.)] [Footnote 37: These notices have been carefully collected by _Pelli_, who seems to have left little to glean (_Memorie_, &c. Ed. 2da, 1823). A few additions have been made by _Gerini_ (_Mem. Stor. della Lunigiana_), and _Troya_ (_Veltro Allegorico_), but they are not of much importance. _Arrivabene_ (_Secolo di Dante_) has brought together a mass of illustration which is very useful, and would be more so, if he were more careful, and quoted his authorities. _Balbo_ arranges these materials with sense and good feeling; though, as a writer, he is below his subject. A few traits and anecdotes may be found in the novelists--as Sacchetti.] The _Commedia_, at the first glance, shows the traces of its author's life. It is the work of a wanderer. The very form in which it is cast is that of a journey, difficult, toilsome, perilous, and full of change. It is more than a working out of that touching phraseology of the middle ages, in which "the way" was the technical theological expression for this mortal life; and "_viator_" meant man in his state of trial, as "_comprehensor_" meant man made perfect, having attained to his heavenly country. It is more than merely this. The writer's mind is full of the recollections and definite images of his various journeys. The permanent scenery of the _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_, very variously and distinctly marked, is that of travel. The descent down the sides of the Pit, and the ascent of the Sacred Mountain, show one familiar with such scenes--one who had climbed painfully in perilous passes, and grown dizzy on the brink of narrow ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery from the gorges of the Alps and Apennines, or the terraces and precipices of the Riviera. Local reminiscences abound:--the severed rocks of the Adige Valley--the waterfall of S. Benedetto--the crags of Pietra-pana and S. Leo, which overlook the plains of Lucca and Ravenna--the "fair river" that flows among the poplars between Chiaveri and Sestri--the marble quarries of Carrara--the "rough and desert ways between Lerici and Turbia," and those towery cliffs, going sheer into the deep sea at Noli, which travellers on the Corniche road some thirty years ago may yet remember with fear. Mountain experience furnished that picture of the traveller caught in an Alpine mist and gradually climbing above it; seeing the vapours grow thin, and the sun's orb appear faintly through them; and issuing at last into sunshine on the mountain top, while the light of sunset was lost already on the shores below: Ai raggi, morti già nei bassi lidi:--_Purg._ 17. or that image of the cold dull shadow over the torrent, beneath the Alpine fir-- Un'ombra smorta Qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri Sovra suoi freddi rivi, l'Alpe porta:--_Purg._ 33.[38] or of the large snow-flakes falling without wind, among the mountains-- d'un cader lento Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde Come di neve in Alpe senza vento.--_Inferno_, 14.[39] [Footnote 38: A death-like shade-- Like that beneath black boughs and foliage green O'er the cool streams in Alpine glens display'd.--WRIGHT.] [Footnote 39: O'er all the sandy desert falling slow, Were shower'd dilated flakes of fire, like snow On Alpine summits, when the wind is low.--IBID.] He delights in a local name and local image--the boiling pitch, and the clang of the shipwrights in the arsenal of Venice--the sepulchral fields of Arles and Pola--the hot-spring of Viterbo--the hooded monks of Cologne--the dykes of Flanders and Padua--the Maremma, with its rough brushwood, its wild boars, its snakes, and fevers. He had listened to the south wind among the pine tops, in the forest by the sea, at Ravenna. He had watched under the Carisenda tower at Bologna, and seen the driving clouds "give away their motion" to it, and make it seem to be falling; and had noticed how at Rome the October sun sets between Corsica and Sardinia.[40] His images of the sea are numerous and definite--the ship backing out of the tier in harbour, the diver plunging after the fouled anchor, the mast rising, the ship going fast before the wind, the water closing in its wake, the arched backs of the porpoises the forerunners of a gale, the admiral watching everything from poop to prow, the oars stopping altogether at the sound of the whistle, the swelling sails becoming slack when the mast snaps and falls.[41] Nowhere could we find so many of the most characteristic and strange sensations of the traveller touched with such truth. Everyone knows the lines which speak of the voyager's sinking of heart on the first evening at sea, and of the longings wakened in the traveller at the beginning of his journey by the distant evening bell[42]; the traveller's _morning_ feelings are not less delicately noted--the strangeness on first waking in the open air with the sun high; morning thoughts, as day by day he wakes nearer home; the morning sight of the sea-beach quivering in the early light; the tarrying and lingering, before setting out in the morning[43]-- Noi eravam lunghesso 'l mare ancora, Come gente che pensa al suo cammino, Che va col cuore, e col corpo dimora.[44] [Footnote 40: _Inf._ 31, 18.] [Footnote 41: _Ibid._ 17, 16, 31; _Purg._ 24; _Par._ 2; _Inf._ 22; _Purg._ 30; _Par._ 25; _Inf._ 7.] [Footnote 42: _Purg._ 8. "Era già l'ora," &c.] [Footnote 43: _Purg._ 19, 27, 1, 2.] [Footnote 44: By ocean's shore we still prolonged our stay Like men, who, thinking of a journey near, Advance in thought, while yet their limbs delay.--WRIGHT.] He has recorded equally the anxiety, the curiosity, the suspicion with which, in those times, stranger met and eyed stranger on the road; and a still more characteristic trait is to be found in those lines where he describes the pilgrim gazing around in the church of his vow, and thinking how he shall tell of it: E quasi peregrin che si ricrea Nel tempio del suo voto riguardando, E spera già ridir com'ello stea:--_Parad._ 31.[45] or again, in that description, so simple and touching, of his thoughts while waiting to see the relic for which he left his home: Quale è colui che forse di Croazia Viene a veder la Veronica nostra, Che per l'antica fama non si sazia, Ma dice nel pensier, fin che si mostra; Signor mio Gesù Cristo, Dio verace, Or fu sì fatta la sembianza vostra?--_Parad._ 31.[46] [Footnote 45: And like a pilgrim who with fond delight Surveys the temple he has vow'd to see, And hopes one day its wonders to recite.--IBID.] [Footnote 46: Like one who, from Croatia come to see Our Veronica (image long adored), Gazes, as though content he ne'er could be-- Thus musing, while the relic is pourtray'd-- "Jesus my God, my Saviour and my Lord, O were thy features these I see display'd?"--WRIGHT. Quella imagine benedetta la quale Gesù Cristo lasciò a noi per esempio della sua bellissima figura.--_Vita Nuova_, p. 353. He speaks of the pilgrims going to Rome to see it; compare also the sonnet to the pilgrims, p. 355: Deh peregrini, che pensosi andate Forse di cosa, che non v'è presente, Venite voi di sì lontana gente, Com'alla vista voi ne dimostrate.] Of these years then of disappointment and exile the _Divina Commedia_ was the labour and fruit. A story in Boccaccio's life of Dante, told with some detail, implies indeed that it was begun, and some progress made in it, while Dante was yet in Florence--begun in Latin, and he quotes three lines of it--continued afterwards in Italian. This is not impossible; indeed the germ and presage of it may be traced in the _Vita Nuova_. The idealised saint is there, in all the grace of her pure and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul. She is already in glory with Mary the queen of angels. She already beholds the face of the Everblessed. And the _envoye_ of the _Vita Nuova_ is the promise of the _Commedia_. "After this sonnet," (in which he describes how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld a lady receiving honour, and dazzling by her glory the unaccustomed spirit)--"After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak more of this blessed one, until such time as I should be able to indite more worthily of her. And to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power, as she truly knows. So that, if it shall be the pleasure of Him, by whom all things live, that my life continue for some years, I hope to say of her that which never hath been said of any woman. And afterwards, may it please Him, who is the Lord of kindness, that my soul may go to behold the glory of her lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously gazes on the countenance of Him, _qui est per omnia secula benedictus_."[47] It would be wantonly violating probability and the unity of a great life, to suppose that this purpose, though transformed, was ever forgotten or laid aside. The poet knew not indeed what he was promising, what he was pledging himself to--through what years of toil and anguish he would have to seek the light and the power he had asked; in what form his high venture should be realised. But the _Commedia_ is the work of no light resolve, and we need not be surprised at finding the resolve and the purpose at the outset of the poet's life. We may freely accept the key supplied by the words of the _Vita Nuova_. The spell of boyhood is never broken, through the ups and downs of life. His course of thought advances, alters, deepens, but is continuous. From youth to age, from the first glimpse to the perfect work, the same idea abides with him, "even from the flower till the grape was ripe." It may assume various changes--an image of beauty, a figure of philosophy, a voice from the other world, a type of heavenly wisdom and joy--but still it holds, in self-imposed and willing thraldom, that creative and versatile and tenacious spirit. It was the dream and hope of too deep and strong a mind to fade and come to naught--to be other than the seed of the achievement and crown of life. But with all faith in the star and the freedom of genius, we may doubt whether the prosperous citizen would have done that which was done by the man without a home. Beatrice's glory might have been sung in grand though barbarous Latin to the literati of the fourteenth century; or a poem of new beauty might have fixed the language and opened the literature of modern Italy; but it could hardly have been the _Commedia_. That belongs, in its date and its greatness, to the time when sorrow had become the poet's daily portion, and the condition of his life. [Footnote 47: _Vita Nuova_, last paragraph. See _Purg._ 30; _Parad._ 30, 6, 28-33.] 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. [Footnote 48: See _Convito_, 1, 2.] 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. 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] [Footnote 49: _Vide_ Ozanam, _Dante_, pp. 535, _sqq._ Ed.] [Footnote 50: O ye who fain would listen to my song, Following in little bark full eagerly My venturous ship, that chanting hies along, Turn back unto your native shores again; Tempt not the deep, lest haply losing me, In unknown paths bewildered ye remain. I am the first this voyage to essay; Minerva breathes--Apollo is my guide; And new-born muses do the Bears display. Ye other few, who have look'd up on high For angels' food betimes, e'en here supplied Largely, but not enough to satisfy,-- Mid the deep ocean ye your course may take, My track pursuing the pure waters through, Ere reunites the quickly-closing wake. Those glorious ones, who drove of yore their prow To Colchos, wonder'd not as ye will do, When they saw Jason working at the plough. WRIGHT'S _Dante_.] 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: 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] [Footnote 51: _Convito_, 1, 10.] [Footnote 52: For now so rarely Poet gathers these, Or Cæsar, winning an immortal praise (Shame unto man's degraded energies), That joy should to the Delphic God arise When haply any one aspires to gain The high reward of the Peneian prize.--WRIGHT.] 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] [Footnote 53: Brunetto Latini's Prophecy, _Inf._ 15.] [Footnote 54: See the grand ending of _Purg._ 27. Tratto t'ho qui con ingegno e con arte; Lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce: Fuor se' dell'erte vie, fuor se' dell'arte. Vedi il sole che 'n fronte ti riluce. Vede l'erbetta, i fiori, e gli arboscelli Che questa terra sol da sè produce. Mentre che vegnon lieti gli occhi belli Che lagrimando a te venir mi fenno, Seder ti puoi e puoi andar tra elli. Non aspettar mio dir più nè mio cenno; Libero, dritto, sano è tuo arbitrio, E fallo fora non fare a suo senno: Perch'io te sopra te corono e mitrio.] [Footnote 55: _Purg._ c. 21.] 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] [Footnote 56: Ceased had the voice--when in composed array Four mighty shades approaching I survey'd;-- Nor joy, nor sorrow did their looks betray. * * * * Assembled thus, was offered to my sight The school of him, the Prince of poetry, Who, eagle-like, o'er others takes his flight. When they together had conversed awhile, They turned to me with salutation bland, Which from my master drew a friendly smile: And greater glory still they bade me share, Making me join their honourable band-- The sixth united to such genius rare.--WRIGHT.] This sustained magnanimity and lofty self-reliance, which never betrays itself, is one of the main elements in the grandeur of the _Commedia_. It is an imposing spectacle to see such fearlessness, such freedom, and such success in an untried path, amid unprepared materials and rude instruments, models scanty and only half understood, powers of language still doubtful and suspected, the deepest and strongest thought still confined to unbending forms and the harshest phrase; exact and extensive knowledge, as yet far out of reach; with no help from time, which familiarises all things, and of which, manner, elaboration, judgment, and taste are the gifts and inheritance;--to see the poet, trusting to his eye "which saw everything"[57] and his searching and creative spirit, venture undauntedly into all regions of thought and feeling, to draw thence a picture of the government of the universe. [Footnote 57: "Dante che tutto vedea."--_Sacchetti_, Nov. 114.] But such greatness had to endure its price and its counterpoise. Dante was alone:--except in his visionary world, solitary and companionless. The blind Greek had his throng of listeners; the blind Englishman his home and the voices of his daughters; Shakspere had his free associates of the stage; Goethe, his correspondents, a court, and all Germany to applaud. Not so Dante. The friends of his youth are already in the region of spirits, and meet him there--Casella, Forese;--Guido Cavalcanti will soon be with them. In this upper world he thinks and writes as a friendless man--to whom all that he had held dearest was either lost or embittered; he thinks and writes for himself. And so he is his own law; he owns no tribunal of opinion or standard of taste, except among the great dead. He hears them exhort him to "let the world talk on--to stand like a tower unshaken by the winds."[58] He fears to be "a timid friend to truth," "--to lose life among those who shall call this present time antiquity."[59] He belongs to no party. He is his own arbiter of the beautiful and the becoming; his own judge over right and injustice, innocence and guilt. He has no followers to secure, no school to humour, no public to satisfy; nothing to guide him, and nothing to consult, nothing to bind him, nothing to fear, out of himself. In full trust in heart and will, in his sense of truth, in his teeming brain, he gives himself free course. If men have idolised the worthless, and canonised the base, he reverses their award without mercy, and without apology; if they have forgotten the just because he was obscure, he remembers him: if "Monna Berta and Ser Martino,"[60] the wimpled and hooded gossips of the day, with their sage company, have settled it to their own satisfaction that Providence cannot swerve from their general rules, cannot save where they have doomed, or reject where they have approved--he both fears more and hopes more. Deeply reverent to the judgment of the ages past, reverent to the persons whom they have immortalised for good and even for evil, in his own day he cares for no man's person and no man's judgment. And he shrinks not from the auguries and forecastings of his mind about their career and fate. Men reasoned rapidly in those days on such subjects, and without much scruple; but not with such deliberate and discriminating sternness. The most popular and honoured names in Florence, Farinata e 'l Tegghiaio, che fur sì degni, Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, e 'l Mosca E gli altri, ch'a ben far poser gl'ingegni; have yet the damning brand: no reader of the _Inferno_ can have forgotten the shock of that terrible reply to the poet's questionings about their fate: Ei son tra le anime più nere.[61] [Footnote 58: _Purg._ 5.] [Footnote 59: La luce in che rideva il mio tesoro Ch'io trovai lì, si fe' prima corrusca, Quale a raggio di sole specchio d'oro; Indi rispose: coscienza fusca O della propria o dell'altrui vergogna Pur sentirà la tua parola brusca; Ma nondimen, rimossa ogni menzogna, Tutta tua vision fa manifesta, E lascia pur grattar dov'è la rogna: Che se la voce tua sarà molesta Nel primo gusto, vital nutrimento Lascerà poi quando sarà digesta. Questo tuo grido farà come vento Che le più alte cime più percuote: E ciò non fia d'onor poco argomento. Però ti son mostrate, in queste ruote, Nel monte, e nella valle dolorosa, Pur l'anime che son di fama note. Che l'animo di quel ch'ode non posa, Nè ferma fede, per esemplo ch'aja La sua radice incognito e nascosa, Nè per altro argumento che non paja.--_Parad._ 17.] [Footnote 60: Non creda Monna Berta e Ser Martino Per vedere un furare, altro offerere, Vederli dentro al consiglio divino: Chè quel può surger, e quel può cadere.--_Ibid._ 13.] [Footnote 61: _Inf._ 6.] If he is partial, it is no vulgar partiality: friendship and old affection do not venture to exempt from its fatal doom the sin of his famous master, Brunetto Latini;[62] nobleness and great deeds, a kindred character and common wrongs, are not enough to redeem Farinata; and he who could tell her story bowed to the eternal law, and dared not save Francesca. If he condemns by a severer rule than that of the world, he absolves with fuller faith in the possibilities of grace. Many names of whom history has recorded no good, are marked by him for bliss; yet not without full respect for justice. The penitent of the last hour is saved, but he suffers loss. Manfred's soul is rescued; mercy had accepted his tears, and forgiven his great sins; and the excommunication of his enemy did not bar his salvation: Per lor maladizion sì non si perde Che non possa tornar l'eterno amore Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.--_Purg._ 3. [Footnote 62: Che in la mente m'è fitta, ed or m'accuora, _La cara buona imagine paterna._--_Inf._ 15.] Yet his sin, though pardoned, was to keep him for long years from the perfection of heaven.[63] And with the same independence with which he assigns their fate, he selects his instances--instances which are to be the types of character and its issues. No man ever owned more unreservedly the fascination of greatness, its sway over the imagination and the heart; no one prized more the grand harmony and sense of fitness which there is, when the great man and the great office are joined in one, and reflect each other's greatness. The famous and great of all ages are gathered in the poet's vision; the great names even of fable--Geryon and the giants, the Minotaur and Centaurs, and the heroes of Thebes and Troy. But not the great and famous only: this is too narrow, too conventional a sphere; it is not real enough. He felt, what the modern world feels so keenly, that wonderful histories are latent in the inconspicuous paths of life, in the fugitive incidents of the hour, among the persons whose faces we have seen. The Church had from the first been witness to the deep interest of individual life. The rising taste for novels showed that society at large was beginning to be alive to it. And it is this feeling--that behind the veil there may be grades of greatness but nothing insignificant--that led Dante to refuse to restrict himself to the characters of fame. He will associate with them the living men who have stood round him; they are part of the same company with the greatest. That they have interested him, touched him, moved his indignation or pity, struck him as examples of great vicissitude or of a perfect life, have pleased him, loved him--this is enough why they should live in his poem as they have lived to him. He chooses at will; history, if it has been negligent at the time about those whom he thought worthy of renown, must be content with its loss. He tells their story, or touches them with a word like the most familiar names, according as he pleases. The obscure highway robber, the obscure betrayer of his sister's honour--Rinier da Corneto and Rinier Pazzo, and Caccianimico--are ranked, not according to their obscurity, but according to the greatness of their crimes, with the famous conquerors, and "scourges of God," and seducers of the heroic age, Pyrrhus and Attila, and the great Jason of "royal port, who sheds no tear in his torments."[64] He earns as high praise from Virgil, for his curse on the furious wrath of the old frantic Florentine burgher, as if he had cursed the disturber of the world's peace.[65] And so in the realms of joy, among the faithful accomplishers of the highest trusts, kings and teachers of the nations, founders of orders, sainted empresses, appear those whom, though the world had forgotten or misread them, the poet had enshrined in his familiar thoughts, for their sweetness, their gentle goodness, their nobility of soul; the penitent, the nun, the old crusading ancestor, the pilgrim who had deserted the greatness which he had created, the brave logician, who "syllogised unpalatable truths" in the Quartier Latin of Paris.[66] [Footnote 63: Charles of Anjou, his Guelf conqueror, is placed above him, in the valley of the kings (_Purg._ 7), "Colui dal maschio naso"--notwithstanding the charges afterwards made against him (_Purg._ 20).] [Footnote 64: See the magnificent picture, _Inf._ 18.] [Footnote 65: _Ibid._ 8.] [Footnote 66: Cunizza, Piccarda, Cacciaguida, Roméo. (_Parad._ 9, 3, 15, 6, 10.) ----La luce eterna di Sigieri Che leggendo nel vico degli Strami Sillogizzò invidiosi veri---- in company with S. Thomas Aquinas, in the sphere of the Sun. Ozanam gives a few particulars of this forgotten professor of the "Rue du Fouarre," pp. 320-23.] There is small resemblance in all this--this arbitrary and imperious tone, this range of ideas, feelings, and images, this unshackled freedom, this harsh reality--to the dreamy gentleness of the _Vita Nuova_, or even the staid argumentation of the more mature _Convito_. The _Vita Nuova_ is all self-concentration--a brooding, not unpleased, over the varying tides of feeling, which are little influenced by the world without; where every fancy, every sensation, every superstition of the lover is detailed with the most whimsical subtlety. The _Commedia_, too, has its tenderness--and that more deep, more natural, more true, than the poet had before adapted to the traditionary formulæ of the "Courts of Love,"--the eyes of Beatrice are as bright, and the "conquering light of her smile;"[67] they still culminate, but they are not alone, in the poet's heaven. And the professed subject of the _Commedia_ is still Dante's own story and life; he still makes himself the central point. And steeled as he is by that high and hard experience of which his poem is the projection and type--"Ben tetragono ai colpi di ventura"--a stern and brief-spoken man, set on objects, and occupied with a theme, lofty and vast as can occupy man's thoughts, he still lets escape ever and anon some passing avowal of delicate sensitiveness,[68] lingers for a moment on some indulged self-consciousness, some recollection of his once quick and changeful mood--"io che son trasmutabil per tutte guise"[69]--or half playfully alludes to the whispered name of a lady,[70] whose pleasant courtesy has beguiled a few days of exile. But he is no longer spell-bound and entangled in fancies of his own weaving--absorbed in the unprofitable contemplation of his own internal sensations. The man is indeed the same, still a Florentine, still metaphysical, still a lover. He returns to the haunts and images of youth, to take among them his poet's crown; but "with other voice and other garb,"[71] a penitent and a prophet--with larger thoughts, wider sympathies, freer utterance; sterner and fiercer, yet nobler and more genuine in his tenderness--as one whom trial has made serious, and keen, and intolerant of evil, but not sceptical or callous; yet with the impressions and memories of a very different scene from his old day-dreams. [Footnote 67: Vincendo me col lume d'un sorriso.--_Parad._ 18.] [Footnote 68: For instance, his feeling of distress at gazing at the blind, who were not aware of his presence-- A me pareva andando fare oltraggio Vedendo altrui, non essendo veduto:--_Purg._ 13. and of shame, at being tempted to listen to a quarrel between two lost spirits: Ad ascoltarli er'io del tutto fisso, Quando 'l Maestro mi disse: or pur mira, Che per poco è, che teco non mi risso. Quando io 'l senti' a me parlar con ira Volsimi verso lui con tal vergogna, Ch'ancor per la memoria mi si gira, &c.--_Inf._ 30. and the burst, O dignitosa coscienza e netta, Come t'è picciol fallo amaro morso.--_Purg._ 3.] [Footnote 69: _Parad._ 5.] [Footnote 70: _Purg._ 24.] [Footnote 71: _Parad._ 25.] After that it was the pleasure of the citizens of that fairest and most famous daughter of Rome, Florence, to cast me forth from her most sweet bosom (wherein I had been nourished up to the maturity of my life, and in which, with all peace to her, I long with all my heart to rest my weary soul, and finish the time which is given me), I have passed through almost all the regions to which this language reaches, a wanderer, almost a beggar, displaying, against my will, the stroke of fortune, which is ofttimes unjustly wont to be imputed to the person stricken. Truly, I have been a ship without a sail or helm, carried to divers harbours, and gulfs, and shores, by that parching wind which sad poverty breathes; and I have seemed vile in the eyes of many, who perchance, from some fame, had imagined of me in another form; in the sight of whom not only did my presence become nought, but every work of mine less prized, both what had been and what was to be wrought.--_Convito_, Tr. i. c. 3. Thus proved, and thus furnished--thus independent and confident, daring to trust his instinct and genius in what was entirely untried and unusual, he entered on his great poem, to shadow forth, under the figure of his own conversion and purification, not merely how a single soul rises to its perfection, but how this visible world, in all its phases of nature, life, and society, is one with the invisible, which borders on it, actuates, accomplishes, and explains it. It is this vast plan--to take into his scope, not the soul only in its struggles and triumph, but all that the soul finds itself engaged with in its course; the accidents of the hour, and of ages past; the real persons, great and small, apart from and without whom it cannot think or act; the material world, its theatre and home--it is this which gives so many various sides to the _Commedia_, which makes it so novel and strange. It is not a mere personal history, or a pouring forth of feeling, like the _Vita Nuova_, though he is himself the mysterious voyager, and he opens without reserve his actual life and his heart; he speaks, indeed, in the first person, yet he is but a character of the drama, and in great part of it with not more of distinct personality than in that paraphrase of the penitential Psalms, in which he has preluded so much of the _Commedia_. Yet the _Commedia_ is not a pure allegory; it admits, and makes use of the allegorical, but the laws of allegory are too narrow for it; the real in it is too impatient of the veil, and breaks through in all its hardness and detail, into what is most shadowy. History is indeed viewed not in its ephemeral look, but under the light of God's final judgments; in its completion, not in its provisional and fragmentary character; viewed therefore but in faith;--but its issues, which in this confused scene we ordinarily contemplate in the gross, the poet brings down to detail and individuals; he faces and grasps the tremendous thought that the very men and women whom we see and speak to, are now the real representatives of sin and goodness, the true actors in that scene which is so familiar to us as a picture--unflinching and terrible heart, he endures to face it in its most harrowing forms. But he wrote not for sport, nor to give poetic pleasure; he wrote to warn; the seed of the _Commedia_ was sown in tears, and reaped in misery: and the consolations which it offers are awful as they are real. Thus, though he throws into symbol and image, what can only be expressed by symbol and image, we can as little forget in reading him this real world in which we live, as we can in one of Shakspere's plays. It is not merely that the poem is crowded with real personages, most of them having the single interest to us of being real. But all that is associated with man's history and existence is interwoven with the main course of thought--all that gives character to life, all that gives it form and feature, even to quaintness, all that occupies the mind, or employs the hand--speculation, science, arts, manufactures, monuments, scenes, customs, proverbs, ceremonies, games, punishments, attitudes of men, habits of living creatures. The wildest and most unearthly imaginations, the most abstruse thoughts take up into, and incorporate with themselves the forcible and familiar impressions of our mother earth, and do not refuse the company and aid even of the homeliest. This is not mere poetic ornament, peculiarly, profusely, or extravagantly employed. It is one of the ways in which his dominant feeling expresses itself--spontaneous and instinctive in each several instance of it, but the kindling and effluence of deliberate thought, and attending on a clear purpose--the feeling of the real and intimate connexion between the objects of sight and faith. It is not that he sees in one the simple counterpart and reverse of the other, or sets himself to trace out universally their mutual correspondences; he has too strong a sense of the reality of this familiar life to reduce it merely to a shadow and type of the unseen. What he struggles to express in countless ways, with all the resources of his strange and gigantic power, is that this world and the next are both equally real, and both one--parts, however different, of one whole. The world to come we know but in "a glass darkly;" man can only think and imagine of it in images, which he knows to be but broken and faint reflections: but this world we know, not in outline, and featureless idea, but by name, and face, and shape, by place and person, by the colours and forms which crowd over its surface, the men who people its habitations, the events which mark its moments. Detail fills the sense here, and is the mark of reality. And thus he seeks to keep alive the feeling of what that world is which he connects with heaven and hell; not by abstractions, not much by elaborate and highly-finished pictures, but by names, persons, local features, definite images. Widely and keenly has he ranged over and searched into the world--with a largeness of mind which disdained not to mark and treasure up, along with much unheeded beauty, many a characteristic feature of nature, unnoticed because so common. All his pursuits and interests contribute to the impression, which, often instinctively it may be, he strives to produce, of the manifold variety of our life. As a man of society, his memory is full of its usages, formalities, graces, follies, fashions--of expressive motions, postures, gestures, looks--of music, of handicrafts, of the conversation of friends or associates--of all that passes, so transient, yet so keenly pleasant or distasteful, between man and man. As a traveller, he recalls continually the names and scenes of the world;--as a man of speculation, the secrets of nature--the phenomena of light, the theory of the planets' motions, the idea and laws of physiology. As a man of learning, he is filled with the thoughts and recollections of ancient fable and history; as a politician, with the thoughts, prognostications, and hopes, of the history of the day; as a moral philosopher he has watched himself, his external sensations and changes, his inward passions, his mental powers, his ideas, his conscience; he has far and wide noted character, discriminated motives, classed good and evil deeds. All that the man of society, of travel, of science, of learning, the politician, the moralist, could gather, is used at will in the great poetic structure; but all converges to the purpose, and is directed by the intense feeling of the theologian, who sees this wonderful and familiar scene melting into, and ending in another yet more wonderful, but which will one day be as familiar--who sees the difficult but sure progress of the manifold remedies of the Divine government to their predestined issue; and, over all, God and His saints. So comprehensive in interest is the _Commedia_. Any attempt to explain it, by narrowing that interest to politics, philosophy, the moral life, or theology itself, must prove inadequate. Theology strikes the key-note; but history, natural and metaphysical science, poetry, and art, each in their turn join in the harmony, independent, yet ministering to the whole. If from the poem itself we could be for a single moment in doubt of the reality and dominant place of religion in it, the plain-spoken prose of the _Convito_ would show how he placed "the Divine Science, full of all peace, and allowing no strife of opinions and sophisms, for the excellent certainty of its subject, which is God," in single perfection above all other sciences, "which are, as Solomon speaks, but queens, or concubines, or maidens; but she is the 'Dove,' and the 'perfect one'--'Dove,' because without stain of strife--'perfect,' because perfectly she makes us behold the truth, in which our soul stills itself and is at rest." But the same passage[72] shows likewise how he viewed all human knowledge and human interests, as holding their due place in the hierarchy of wisdom, and among the steps of man's perfection. No account of the _Commedia_ will prove sufficient, which does not keep in view, first of all, the high moral purpose and deep spirit of faith with which it was written, and then the wide liberty of materials and means which the poet allowed himself in working out his design. [Footnote 72: _Convito_, Tr. 2, c. 14, 15.] Doubtless, his writings have a political aspect. The "great Ghibelline poet" is one of Dante's received synonymes; of his strong political opinions, and the importance he attached to them, there can be no doubt. And he meant his poem to be the vehicle of them, and the record to all ages of the folly and selfishness with which he saw men governed. That he should take the deepest interest in the goings on of his time, is part of his greatness; to suppose that he stopped at them, or that he subordinated to political objects or feelings all the other elements of his poem, is to shrink up that greatness into very narrow limits. Yet this has been done by men of mark and ability, by Italians, by men who read the _Commedia_ in their own mother-tongue. It has been maintained as a satisfactory account of it--maintained with great labour and pertinacious ingenuity--that Dante meant nothing more by his poem than the conflicts and ideal triumph of a political party. The hundred cantos of that vision of the universe are but a manifesto of the Ghibelline propaganda, designed, under the veil of historic images and scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to announce; and Beatrice, in all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of the jargon, cant, and slang of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of Dante's works, by imagining for him a character in which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's Historic Doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse blindness.[73] [Footnote 73: In the _Remains of Arthur Henry Hallam_ is a paper, in which he examines and disposes of this theory with a courteous and forbearing irony, which would have deepened probably into something more, on thinking over it a second time.] Dante was not a Ghibelline, though he longed for the interposition of an Imperial power. Historically he did not belong to the Ghibelline party. It is true that he forsook the Guelfs, with whom he had been brought up, and that the White Guelfs, with whom he was expelled from Florence, were at length merged and lost in the Ghibelline party[74]; and he acted with them for a time.[75] But no words can be stronger than those in which he disjoins himself from that "evil and foolish company," and claims his independence-- A te fia bello _Averti fatto parte per te stesso_.[76] [Footnote 74: _Dino Comp._ pp. 89-91.] [Footnote 75: His name appears among the White delegates in 1307. Pelli, p. 117.] [Footnote 76: _Parad._ 17.] And it is not easy to conceive a Ghibelline partisan putting into the mouth of Justinian, the type of law and empire, a general condemnation of his party as heavy as that of their antagonists;--the crime of having betrayed, as the Guelfs had resisted, the great symbol of public right-- Omai puoi giudicar di que' cotali Ch'io accusai di sopra, e de' lor falli Che son cagion di tutti i vostri mali. L'uno al pubblico segno i gigli gialli Oppone, e _quel s'appropria l'altro a parte_, Sì ch'è forte a veder qual più si falli. _Faccian li Ghibellin, faccian lor arte Sott'altro segno; chè mal segue quello Sempre chi la giustizia e lui diparte._[77] [Footnote 77: _Ibid._ 6.] And though, as the victim of the Guelfs of Florence, he found refuge among Ghibelline princes, he had friends among Guelfs also. His steps and his tongue were free to the end. And in character and feeling, in his austerity, his sturdiness and roughness, his intolerance of corruption and pride, his strongly-marked devotional temper, he was much less a Ghibelline than like one of those stern Guelfs who hailed Savonarola. But he had a very decided and complete political theory, which certainly was not Guelf; and, as parties then were, it was not much more Ghibelline. Most assuredly no set of men would have more vigorously resisted the attempt to realise his theory, would have joined more heartily with all immediate opponents--Guelfs, Black, White, and Green, or even Boniface VIII.,--to keep out such an emperor as Dante imagined, than the Ghibelline nobles and potentates. Dante's political views were a dream; though a dream based on what had been, and an anticipation of what was, in part at least, to come. It was a dream in the middle ages, in divided and republican Italy, the Italy of cities--of a real and national government, based on justice and law. It was the dream of a real _state_. He imagined that the Roman empire had been one great state; he persuaded himself that Christendom might be such. He was wrong in both instances; but in this case, as in so many others, he had already caught the spirit and ideas of a far-distant future; and the political organisation of modern times, so familiar to us that we cease to think of its exceeding wonder, is the practical confirmation, though in a form very different from what he imagined, of the depth and farsightedness of those expectations which are in outward form so chimerical--"_i miei non falsi errori_." He had studied the "infinite disorders of the world" in one of their most unrestrained scenes, the streets of an Italian republic. Law was powerless, good men were powerless, good intentions came to naught; neither social habits nor public power could resist, when selfishness chose to have its way. The Church was indeed still the salt of the nations; but it had once dared and achieved more; it had once been the only power which ruled them. And this it could do no longer. If strength and energy had been enough to make the Church's influence felt on government, there was a Pope who could have done it--a man who was undoubtedly the most wondered at and admired of his age, whom friend or foe never characterised, without adding the invariable epithet of his greatness of soul--the "_magnanimus peccator_,"[78] whose Roman grandeur in meeting his unworthy fate fascinated into momentary sympathy even Dante.[79] But among the things which Boniface VIII. could not do, even if he cared about it, was the maintaining peace and law in Italian towns. And while this great political power was failing, its correlative and antagonist was paralysed also. "Since the death of Frederic II.," says Dante's contemporary, "the fame and recollections of the empire were well-nigh extinguished."[80] Italy was left without government--"come nave senza nocchiero in gran tempesta"--to the mercies of her tyrants: Che le terre d'Italia tutte piene Son di tiranni, e un Marcel diventa Ogni villan, che parteggiando viene.--_Purg._ 6. [Footnote 78: Benvenuto da Imola.] [Footnote 79: Veggio in Alagna entrar lo fiordaliso, E nel vicario suo Cristo esser catto; Veggiolo un'altra volta esser deriso; Veggio rinnovellar l'aceto e 'l fele, E tra vivi ladroni essere anciso.--_Purg._ 20. G. Villani, viii. 63. Come magnanimo e valente, disse, _Dacchè per tradimento, come Gesù Cristo, voglio esser preso e mi conviene morire, almeno voglio morire come Papa_; e di presente si fece parare dell'ammanto di S. Piero, e colla corona di Constantino in capo, e colle chiavi e croce in mano, e in su la sedia papale si pose a sedere, e giunto a lui Sciarra e gli altri suoi nimici; con villane parole lo scherniro.] [Footnote 80: _Dino Compagni_, p. 135.] In this scene of violence and disorder, with the Papacy gone astray, the empire debased and impotent, the religious orders corrupted, power meaning lawlessness, the well-disposed become weak and cowardly, religion neither guide nor check to society, but only the consolation of its victims--Dante was bold and hopeful enough to believe in the Divine appointment, and in the possibility, of law and government--of a state. In his philosophy, the institutions which provide for man's peace and liberty in this life are part of God's great order for raising men to perfection;--not indispensable, yet ordinary parts; having their important place, though but for the present time; and though imperfect, real instruments of His moral government. He could not believe it to be the intention of Providence, that on the introduction of higher hopes and the foundation of a higher society, civil society should collapse and be left to ruin, as henceforth useless or prejudicial in man's trial and training; that the significant intimations of nature, that law and its results, justice, peace, and stability, ought to be and might be realised among men, had lost their meaning and faded away before the announcement of a kingdom not of this world. And if the perfection of civil society had not been superseded by the Church, it had become clear, if events were to be read as signs, that she was not intended to supply its political offices and functions. She had taught, elevated, solaced, blessed, not only individual souls, but society; she had for a time even governed it: but though her other powers remained, she could govern it no longer. Failure had made it certain that, in his strong and quaint language, "_Virtus authorizandi regnum nostræ mortalitatis est contra naturam ecclesiæ; ergo non est de numero virtutum suarum_."[81] Another and distinct organisation was required for this, unless the temporal order was no longer worthy the attention of Christians. [Footnote 81: _De Monarch._ lib. iii. p. 188, Ed. Fraticelli.] This is the idea of the _De Monarchia_; and though it holds but a place in the great scheme of the _Commedia_, it is prominent there also--an idea seen but in a fantastic shape, encumbered and confused with most grotesque imagery, but the real idea of polity and law, which the experience of modern Europe has attained to. He found in clear outline in the Greek philosophy, the theory of merely human society; and raising its end and purpose, "_finem totius humanæ civilitatis_," to a height and dignity which Heathens could not forecast, he adopted it in its more abstract and ideal form. He imagined a single authority, unselfish, inflexible, irresistible, which could make all smaller tyrannies to cease, and enable every man to live in peace and liberty, so that he lived in justice. It is simply what each separate state of Christendom has by this time more or less perfectly achieved. The theoriser of the middle ages could conceive of its accomplishment only in one form, as grand as it was impossible--a universal monarchy. But he did not start from an abstraction. He believed that history attested the existence of such a monarchy. The prestige of the Roman empire was then strong. Europe still lingers on the idea, and cannot even yet bring itself to give up its part in that great monument of human power. But in the middle ages the Empire was still believed to exist. It was the last greatness which had been seen in the world, and the world would not believe that it was over. Above all, in Italy, a continuity of lineage, of language, of local names, and in part of civilisation and law, forbad the thought that the great Roman people had ceased to be. Florentines and Venetians boasted that they were Romans: the legends which the Florentine ladies told to their maidens at the loom were tales of their mother city, Rome. The Roman element, little understood, but profoundly reverenced and dearly cherished, was dominant; the conductor of civilisation, and enfolding the inheritance of all the wisdom, experience, feeling, art, of the past, it elevated, even while it overawed, oppressed, and enslaved. A deep belief in Providence added to the intrinsic grandeur of the empire a sacred character. The flight of the eagle has been often told and often sung; but neither in Livy or Virgil, Gibbon or Bossuet, with intenser sympathy or more kindred power, than in those rushing and unflagging verses in which the middle-age poet hears the imperial legislator relate the fated course of the "sacred sign," from the day when Pallas died for it, till it accomplished the vengeance of heaven in Judæa, and afterwards, under Charlemagne, smote down the enemies of the Church.[82] [Footnote 82: _Parad._ c. 6.] The following passage, from the _De Monarchia_, will show the poet's view of the Roman empire, and its office in the world: To the reasons above alleged, a memorable experience brings confirmation: I mean that state of mankind which the Son of God, when He would for man's salvation take man upon Him, either waited for, or ordered when so He willed. For if from the fall of our first parents, which was the starting-point of all our wanderings, we retrace the various dispositions of men and their times, we shall not find at any time, except under the divine monarch Augustus, when a perfect monarchy existed, that the world was everywhere quiet. And that then mankind was happy in the tranquillity of universal peace, this all writers of history, this famous poets, this even the Scribe of the meekness of Christ has deigned to attest. And lastly, Paul has called that most blessed condition, the fulness of time. Truly time, and the things of time, were full, for no mystery of our felicity then lacked its minister. But how the world has gone on from the time when that seamless robe was first torn by the claws of covetousness, we may read, and would that we might not also see. O race of men, by how great storms and losses, by how great shipwrecks hast thou of necessity been vexed since, transformed into a beast of many heads, thou hast been struggling different ways, sick in understanding, equally sick in heart. The higher intellect, with its invincible reasons, thou reckest not of; nor of the inferior, with its eye of experience; nor of affection, with the sweetness of divine suasion, when the trumpet of the Holy Ghost sounds to thee--"Behold, how good is it, and how pleasant, brethren, to dwell together in unity."--_De Monarch._ lib. i. p. 54. Yet this great Roman empire existed still unimpaired in name--not unimposing even in what really remained of it. Dante, to supply a want, turned it into a theory--a theory easy to smile at now, but which contained and was a beginning of unknown or unheeded truth. What he yearns after is the predominance of the principle of justice in civil society. That, if it is still imperfect, is no longer a dream in our day; but experience had never realised it to him, and he takes refuge in tentative and groping theory. The divinations of the greatest men have been vague and strange, and none have been stranger than those of the author of the _De Monarchia_. The second book, in which he establishes the title of the Roman people to Universal Empire, is as startling a piece of mediæval argument as it would be easy to find. As when we cannot attain to look upon a cause, we commonly wonder at a new effect, so when we know the cause, we look down with a certain derision on those who remain in wonder. And I indeed wondered once how the Roman people had, without any resistance, been set over the world; and looking at it superficially, I thought that they had obtained this by no right, but by mere force of arms. But when I fixed deeply the eyes of my mind on it, and by most effectual signs knew that Divine Providence had wrought this, wonder departed, and a certain scornful contempt came in its stead, when I perceived the nations raging against the pre-eminence of the Roman people:--when I see the people imagining a vain thing, as I once used to do; when, moreover, I grieve over kings and princes agreeing in this only, to be against their Lord and his anointed Roman Emperor. Wherefore in derision, not without a certain grief, I can cry out, for that glorious people and for Cæsar, with him who cried in behalf of the Prince of Heaven, "Why did the nations rage, and the people imagine vain things; the kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were joined in one against the Lord and his anointed." But (because natural love suffers not derision to be of long duration, but, like the summer sun, which, scattering the morning mists, irradiates the east with light, so prefers to pour forth the light of correction) therefore to break the bonds of the ignorance of such kings and rulers, to show that the human race is free from _their_ yoke, I will exhort myself, in company with the most holy Prophet, taking up his following words, "Let us break their bonds, and cast away from us their yoke."--_De Monarch._ lib. ii. p. 58. And to prove this pre-eminence of right in the Roman people, and their heirs, the Emperors of Christendom, he appeals not merely to the course of Providence, to their high and noble ancestry, to the blessings of their just and considerate laws, to their unselfish guardianship of the world--"_Romanum imperium de fonte nascitur pietatis_;"--not merely to their noble examples of private virtue, self-devotion, and public spirit--"those most sacred victims of the Decian house, who laid down their lives for the public weal, as Livy--not as _they_ deserved, but as _he_ was able--tells to their glory; and that unspeakable sacrifice of freedom's sternest guardians, the Catos;" not merely to the "judgment of God" in that great duel and wager of battle for empire, in which heaven declared against all other champions and "co-athletes"--Alexander, Pyrrhus, Hannibal, and by all the formalities of judicial combat awarded the great prize to those who fought, not for love or hatred, but justice--"_Quis igitur nunc adeo obtusæ mentis est, qui non videat, sub jure duelli gloriosum populum coronam totius orbis esse lucratum?_"--not merely to arguments derived "from the principles of the Christian faith"--but to _miracles_. "The Roman empire," he says, "was, in order to its perfections, aided by the help of miracles; therefore it was willed by God; and, by consequence, both was, and is, of right." And these miracles, "proved by the testimony of illustrious authorities," are the prodigies of Livy--the ancile of Numa, the geese of the Capitol, the escape of Clelia, the hail-storm which checked Hannibal.[83] [Footnote 83: _De Monarch._ lib. ii. pp. 62, 66, 78, 82, 84, 108-114, 116, 72-76.] The intellectual phenomenon is a strange one. It would be less strange if Dante were arguing in the schools, or pleading for a party. But even Henry of Luxemburg cared little for such a throne as the poet wanted him to fill, much less Can Grande and the Visconti. The idea, the theory, and the argument, are of the writer's own solitary meditation. We may wonder. But there are few things more strange than the history of argument. How often has a cause or an idea turned out, in the eyes of posterity, so much better than its arguments. How often have we seen argument getting as it were into a groove, and unable to extricate itself, so as to do itself justice. The everyday cases of private experience, of men defending right conclusions on wrong or conventional grounds, or in a confused form, entangled with conclusions of a like yet different nature;--of arguments, theories, solutions, which once satisfied, satisfying us no longer on a question about which we hold the same belief--of one party unable to comprehend the arguments of another--of one section of the same side smiling at the defence of their common cause by another--are all reproduced on a grander scale in the history of society. There too, one age cannot comprehend another; there too it takes time to disengage, subordinate, eliminate. Truth of this sort is not the elaboration of one keen or strong mind, but of the secret experience of many; "_nihil sine ætate est, omnia tempus expectant_." But a counterpart to the _De Monarchia_ is not wanting in our own day; theory has not ceased to be mighty. In warmth and earnestness, in sense of historic grandeur, in its support of a great cause and a great idea, not less than in the thought of its motto, [Greek: heis koiranos estô], De Maistre's volume _Du Pape_, recalls the antagonist _De Monarchia_; but it recalls it not less in its bold dealing with facts, and its bold assumption of principles, though the knowledge and debates of five more busy centuries, and the experience of modern courts and revolutions, might have guarded the Piedmontese nobleman from the mistakes of the old Florentine. But the idea of the _De Monarchia_ is no key to the _Commedia_. The direct and primary purpose of the _Commedia_ is surely its obvious one. It is to stamp a deep impression on the mind, of the issues of good and ill doing here--of the real worlds of pain and joy. To do this forcibly, it is done in detail--of course it can only be done in figure. Punishment, purification, or the fulness of consolation are, as he would think, at this very moment, the lot of all the numberless spirits who have ever lived here--spirits still living and sentient as himself: parallel with our life, they too are suffering or are at rest. Without pause or interval, in all its parts simultaneously, this awful scene is going on--the judgments of God are being fulfilled--could we but see it. It exists, it might be seen, at each instant of time, by a soul whose eyes were opened, which was carried through it. And this he imagines. It had been imagined before; it is the working out, which is peculiar to him. It is not a barren vision. His subject is, besides the eternal world, the soul which contemplates it; by sight, according to his figures--in reality, by faith. As he is led on from woe to deeper woe, then through the tempered chastisements and resignation of Purgatory to the beatific vision, he is tracing the course of the soul on earth, realising sin and weaning itself from it--of its purification and preparation for its high lot, by converse with the good and wise, by the remedies of grace, by efforts of will and love, perhaps by the dominant guidance of some single pure and holy influence, whether of person, or institution, or thought. Nor will we say but that beyond this earthly probation, he is not also striving to grasp and imagine to himself something of that awful process and training, by which, whether in or out of the flesh, the spirit is made fit to meet its Maker, its Judge, and its Chief Good. Thus it seems that even in its main design, the poem has more than one aspect; it is a picture, a figure, partially a history, perhaps an anticipation. And this is confirmed, by what the poet has himself distinctly stated, of his ideas of poetic composition. His view is expressed generally in his philosophical treatise, the _Convito_; but it is applied directly to the _Commedia_, in a letter, which, if in its present form, of doubtful authenticity, without any question represents his sentiments, and the substance of which is incorporated in one of the earliest writings on the poem, Boccaccio's commentary. The following is his account of the subject of the poem: For the evidence of what is to be said, it is to be noted, that this work is not of one single meaning only, but may be said to have many meanings ("_polysensuum_"). For the first meaning is that of the letter--another is that of things signified by the letter; the first of these is called the literal sense, the second, the allegorical or moral. This mode of treating a subject may for clearness' sake be considered in those verses of the Psalm, "_In exitu Israel_." "When Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from the strange people, Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion." For if we look at the _letter_ only, there is here signified, the going out of the children of Israel in the time of Moses--if at the _allegory_ there is signified our redemption through Christ--if at the _moral_ sense there is signified to us the conversion of the soul from the mourning and misery of sin to the state of grace--if at the _anagogic_ sense,[84] there is signified the passing out of the holy soul from the bondage of this corruption to the liberty of everlasting glory. And these mystical meanings, though called by different names, may all be called _allegorical_ as distinguished from the literal or historical sense.... This being considered, it is plain that there ought to be a twofold subject, concerning which the two corresponding meanings may proceed. Therefore we must consider first concerning the subject of this work as it is to be understood literally, then as it is to be considered allegorically. The subject then of the whole work, taken literally only, is the state of souls after death considered in itself. For about this, and on this, the whole work turns. But if the work be taken allegorically, its subject is man, as, by his freedom of choice deserving well or ill, he is subject to the justice which rewards and punishes.[85] [Footnote 84: _Litera_ gesta refert, quid credas _allegoria_, _Moralis_ quid agas, quid speres _anagogia_. De Witte's note from _Buti_.] [Footnote 85: Ep. ad _Kan Grand._ § 6, 7.] The passage in the _Convito_ is to the same effect; but his remarks on the _moral_ and _anagogic_ meaning may be quoted: The third sense is called _moral_; that it is which readers ought to go on noting carefully in writings, for their own profit and that of their disciples: as in the Gospel it may be noted, when Christ went up to the mountain to be transfigured, that of the twelve Apostles, he took with him only three; in which morally we may understand, that in the most secret things we ought to have but few companions. The fourth sort of meaning is called _anagogic_, that is, above our sense; and this is when we spiritually interpret a passage, which even in its literal meaning, by means of the things signified, expresses the heavenly things of everlasting glory: as may be seen in that song of the Prophet, which says, that in the coming out of the people of Israel from Egypt, Judah was made holy and free; which although it is manifestly true according to the letter, is not less true as spiritually understood; that is, that when the soul comes out of sin, it is made holy and free, in its own power.[86] [Footnote 86: _Convito_, Tr. 2, c. 1.] With this passage before us there can be no doubt of the meaning, however veiled, of those beautiful lines, already referred to, in which Virgil, after having conducted the poet up the steeps of Purgatory, where his sins have been one by one cancelled by the ministering angels, finally takes leave of him, and bids him wait for Beatrice, on the skirts of the earthly Paradise: Come la scala tutta sotto noi Fu corsa e fummo in su 'l grado superno, In me ficcò Virgilio gli occhi suoi, E disse: "Il temporal fuoco, e l'eterno Veduto hai, figlio, e se' venuto in parte Ov'io per me più oltre non discerno. Tratto t'ho qui con ingegno e con arte: Lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce; Fuor se' dell'erte vie, fuor se' dell'arte. Vedi il sole che 'n fronte ti riluce: Vedi l'erbetta, i fiori, e gli arboscelli Che quella terra sol da sè produce. Mentre che vegnon lieti gli occhi belli Che lagrimando a te venir mi fenno, Seder ti puoi e puoi andar tra elli. Non aspettar mio dir più nè mio cenno: Libero, dritto, sano è tuo arbitrio, E fallo fora non fare a suo senno:-- Perch'io te sopra te corono e mitrio."[87] [Footnote 87: When we had run O'er all the ladder to its topmost round, As there we stood, on me the Mantuan fix'd His eyes, and thus he spake: "Both fires, my son, The temporal and the eternal, thou hast seen: And art arrived, where of itself my ken No further reaches. I with skill and art, Thus far have drawn thee. Now thy pleasure take For guide. Thou hast o'ercome the steeper way, O'ercome the straiter. Lo! the sun, that darts His beam upon thy forehead: lo! the herb, The arborets and flowers, which of itself This land pours forth profuse. Till those bright eyes With gladness come, which, weeping, made me haste To succour thee, thou mayest or seat thee down, Or wander where thou wilt. Expect no more Sanction of warning voice or sign from me, Free of thine own arbitrement to choose, Discreet, judicious. To distrust thy sense Were henceforth error. I invest thee then With crown and mitre, sovereign o'er thyself." _Purg._ c. 27--CARY.] The general meaning of the _Commedia_ is clear enough. But it certainly does appear to refuse to be fitted into a connected formal scheme of interpretation. It is not a homogeneous, consistent allegory, like the _Pilgrim's Progress_ and the _Fairy Queen_. The allegory continually breaks off, shifts its ground, gives place to other elements, or mingles with them--like a stream which suddenly sinks into the earth, and after passing under plains and mountains, reappears in a distant point, and in different scenery. We can, indeed, imagine its strange author commenting on it, and finding or marking out its prosaic substratum, with the cold-blooded precision and scholastic distinctions of the _Convito_. However, he has not done so. And of the many enigmas which present themselves, either in its structure or separate parts, the key seems hopelessly lost. The early commentators are very ingenious, but very unsatisfactory; they see where we can see, but beyond that they are as full of uncertainty as ourselves. It is in character with that solitary and haughty spirit, while touching universal sympathies, appalling and charming all hearts, to have delighted in his own dark sayings, which had meaning only to himself. It is true that, whether in irony, or from that quaint studious care for the appearance of literal truth, which makes him apologise for the wonders which he relates, and confirm them by an oath, "on the words of his poem,"[88] he provokes and challenges us; bids us admire "doctrine hidden under strange verses;"[89] bids us strain our eyes, for the veil is thin: Aguzza, qui, lettor, ben l'occhi al vero: Chè il velo è ora ben tanto sottile, Certo, che il trapassar dentro è leggiero.--_Purg._ c. 8. But eyes are still strained in conjecture and doubt. [Footnote 88: Sempre a quel ver, ch'ha faccia di menzogna, De' l'uom chiuder le labbra, quanto puote, Però che senza colpa fa vergogna. Ma qui tacer nol posso; e per le note Di questa _Commedia_, lettor, ti giuro S'elle non sien di lunga grazia vote, &c.--_Inf._ 16.] [Footnote 89: _Inf._ 9.] Yet the most certain and detailed commentary, one which assigned the exact reason for every image or allegory, and its place and connexion in a general scheme, would add but little to the charm or to the use of the poem. It is not so obscure but that every man's experience who has thought over and felt the mystery of our present life, may supply the commentary--the more ample, the wider and more various has been his experience, the deeper and keener his feeling. Details and links of connexion may be matter of controversy. Whether the three beasts of the forest mean definitely the vices of the time, or of Florence specially, or of the poet himself--"the wickedness of his heels, compassing him round about"--may still exercise critics and antiquaries; but that they carry with them distinct and special impressions of evil, and that they are the hindrances of man's salvation, is not doubtful. And our knowledge of the key of the allegory, where we possess it, contributes but little to the effect. We may infer from the _Convito_[90] that the eyes of Beatrice stand definitely for the _demonstrations_, and her smiles for the _persuasions_ of wisdom; but the poetry of the Paradiso is not about demonstrations and persuasions, but about looks and smiles; and the ineffable and holy calm--"_serenitatis et æternitatis afflatus_"--which pervades it, comes from the sacred truths, and holy persons, and that deep spirit of high-raised yet composed devotion, which it requires no interpreter to show us. [Footnote 90: _Convito_, Tr. 3, c. 15.] Figure and symbol, then, are doubtless the law of composition in the _Commedia_; but this law discloses itself very variously, and with different degrees of strictness. In its primary and most general form, it is palpable, consistent, pervading. There can be no doubt that the poem is meant to be understood figuratively--no doubt of what in general it is meant to shadow forth--no doubt as to the general meaning of its parts, their connexion with each other. But in its secondary and subordinate applications, the law works--to our eye at least--irregularly, unequally, and fitfully. There can be no question that Virgil, the poet's guide, represents the purely human element in the training of the soul and of society, as Beatrice does the divine. But neither represent the whole; he does not sum up all appliances of wisdom in Virgil, nor all teachings and influences of grace in Beatrice; these have their separate figures. And both represent successively several distinct forms of their general antitypes. They have various degrees of abstractness, and narrow down, according to that order of things to which they refer and correspond, into the special and the personal. In the general economy of the poem, Virgil stands for human wisdom in its widest sense; but he also stands for it in its various shapes, in the different parts. He is the type of human philosophy and science.[91] He is, again, more definitely, that spirit of imagination and poetry, which opens men's eyes to the glory of the visible, and the truth of the invisible; and to Italians, he is a definite embodiment of it, their own great poet, "_vates, poeta noster_."[92] In the Christian order, he is human wisdom, dimly mindful of its heavenly origin--presaging dimly its return to God--sheltering in heathen times that "vague and unconnected family of religious truths, originally from God, but sojourning without the sanction of miracle or visible home, as pilgrims up and down the world."[93] In the political order, he is the guide of law-givers, wisdom fashioning the impulses and instincts of men into the harmony of society, contriving stability and peace, guarding justice; fit part for the poet to fill, who had sung the origin of Rome, and the justice and peace of Augustus. In the order of individual life, and the progress of the individual soul, he is the human conscience witnessing to duty, its discipline and its hopes, and with yet more certain and fearful presage, to its vindication; the human conscience seeing and acknowledging the law, but unable to confer power to fulfil it--wakened by grace from among the dead, leading the living man up to it, and waiting for its light and strength. But he is more than a figure. To the poet himself, who blends with his high argument his whole life, Virgil had been the utmost that mind can be to mind--teacher, quickener and revealer of power, source of thought, exemplar and model, never disappointing, never attained to, observed with "long study and great love:" Tu duca, tu signor, e tu maestro.--_Inf._ 2. [Footnote 91: "O tu ch'onori ogni scienza ed arte."--_Inf._ 4. "Quel savio gentil che tutto seppe."--_Inf._ 7. "Il mar di tutto 'l senno."--_Inf._ 8.] [Footnote 92: _De Monarchia._] [Footnote 93: Newman's _Arians_.] And towards this great master, the poet's whole soul is poured forth in reverence and affection. To Dante he is no figure, but a person--with feelings and weaknesses--overcome by the vexation, kindling into the wrath, carried away by the tenderness, of the moment. He reads his scholar's heart, takes him by the hand in danger, carries him in his arms and in his bosom, "like a son more than a companion," rebukes his unworthy curiosity, kisses him when he shows a noble spirit, asks pardon for his own mistakes. Never were the kind, yet severe ways of a master, or the disciple's diffidence and open-heartedness, drawn with greater force, or less effort; and he seems to have been reflecting on his own affection to Virgil, when he makes Statius forget that they were both but shades: Or puoi la quantitate Comprender dell'amor ch'a te mi scalda, Quando _dismento la nostra vanitate Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda_.--_Purg._ 21. And so with the poet's second guide. The great idea which Beatrice figures, though always present, is seldom rendered artificially prominent, and is often entirely hidden beneath the rush of real recollections, and the creations of dramatic power. Abstractions venture and trust themselves among realities, and for the time are forgotten. A name, a real person, a historic passage, a lament or denunciation, a tragedy of actual life, a legend of classic times, the fortunes of friends--the story of Francesca or Ugolino, the fate of Buonconte's corpse, the apology of Pier delle Vigne, the epitaph of Madonna Pia, Ulysses' western voyage, the march of Roman history--appear and absorb for themselves all interest: or else it is a philosophical speculation, or a theory of morality, or a case of conscience--not indeed alien from the main subject, yet independent of the allegory, and not translateable into any new meaning--standing on their own ground, worked out each according to its own law; but they do not disturb the main course of the poet's thought, who grasps and paints each detail of human life in its own peculiarity, while he sees in each a significance and interest beyond itself. He does not stop in each case to tell us so, but he makes it felt. The tale ends, the individual disappears, and the great allegory resumes its course. It is like one of those great musical compositions which alone seem capable of adequately expressing, in a limited time, a course of unfolding and change, in an idea, a career, a life, a society--where one great thought predominates, recurs, gives colour and meaning, and forms the unity of the whole, yet passes through many shades and transitions; is at one time definite, at another suggestive and mysterious; incorporating and giving free place and play to airs and melodies even of an alien cast; striking off abruptly from its expected road, but without ever losing itself, without breaking its true continuity, or failing of its completeness. This then seems to us the end and purpose of the _Commedia_;--to produce on the mind a sense of the judgments of God, analogous to that produced by Scripture itself. They are presented to us in the Bible in shapes which address themselves primarily to the heart and conscience, and seek not carefully to explain themselves. They are likened to the "great deep," to the "strong mountains"--vast and awful, but abrupt and incomplete, as the huge, broken, rugged piles and chains of mountains. And we see them through cloud and mist, in shapes only approximating to the true ones. Still they impress us deeply and truly, often the more deeply because unconsciously. A character, an event, a word, isolated and unexplained, stamps its meaning ineffaceably, though ever a matter of question and wonder; it may be dark to the intellect, yet the conscience understands it, often but too well. In such suggestive ways is the Divine government for the most part put before us in the Bible--ways which do not satisfy the understanding, but which fill us with a sense of reality. And it seems to have been by meditating on them, which he certainly did, much and thoughtfully--and on the infinite variety of similar ways in which the strongest impressions are conveyed to us in ordinary life, by means short of clear and distinct explanation--by looks, by images, by sounds, by motions, by remote allusion and broken words, that Dante was led to choose so new and remarkable a mode of conveying to his countrymen his thoughts and feelings and presentiments about the mystery of God's counsel. The Bible teaches us by means of real history, traced so far as is necessary along its real course. The poet expresses his view of the world also in real history, but carried on into figure. The poetry with which the Christian Church had been instinct from the beginning, converges and is gathered up in the _Commedia_. The faith had early shown its poetical aspect. It is superfluous to dwell on this, for it is the charge against ancient teaching that it was too large and imaginative. It soon began to try rude essays in sculpture and mosaic: expressed its feeling of nature in verse and prose, rudely also, but often with originality and force; and opened a new vein of poetry in the thoughts, hopes, and aspirations of regenerate man. Modern poetry must go back, for many of its deepest and most powerful sources, to the writings of the Fathers, and their followers of the School. The Church further had a poetry of its own, besides the poetry of literature; it had the poetry of devotion--the Psalter chanted daily, in a new language and a new meaning; and that wonderful body of hymns, to which age after age had contributed its offering, from the Ambrosian hymns to the _Veni, Sancte Spiritus_ of a king of France, the _Pange lingua_ of Thomas Aquinas, the _Dies iræ_, and _Stabat Mater_, of the two Franciscan brethren, Thomas of Celano, and Jacopone.[94] The elements and fragments of poetry were everywhere in the Church--in her ideas of life, in her rules and institutions for passing through it, in her preparation for death, in her offices, ceremonial, celebrations, usages, her consecration of domestic, literary, commercial, civic, military, political life, the meanings and ends she had given them, the religious seriousness with which the forms of each were dignified--in her doctrine, and her dogmatic system--her dependence on the unseen world--her Bible. From each and all of these, and from that public feeling, which, if it expressed itself but abruptly and incoherently, was quite alive to the poetry which surrounded it, the poet received due impressions of greatness and beauty, of joy and dread. Then the poetry of Christian religion and Christian temper, hitherto dispersed, or manifested in act only, found its full and distinct utterance, not unworthy to rank in grandeur, in music, in sustained strength, with the last noble voices from expiring Heathenism. [Footnote 94: Trench, Sacred Latin Poetry, 1849.] But a long interval had passed since then. The _Commedia_ first disclosed to Christian and modern Europe that it was to have a literature of its own, great and admirable, though in its own language and embodying its own ideas. "It was as if, at some of the ancient games, a stranger had appeared upon the plain, and thrown his quoit among the marks of former casts, which tradition had ascribed to the demi-gods."[95] We are so accustomed to the excellent and varied literature of modern times, so original, so perfect in form and rich in thought, so expressive of all our sentiments, meeting so completely our wants, fulfilling our ideas, that we can scarcely imagine the time when this condition was new--when society was beholden to a foreign language for the exponents of its highest thoughts and feelings. But so it was when Dante wrote. The great poets, historians, philosophers of his day, the last great works of intellect, belonged to old Rome, and the Latin language. So wonderful and prolonged was the fascination of Rome. Men still lived under its influence; believed that the Latin language was the perfect and permanent instrument of thought in its highest forms, the only expression of refinement and civilisation; and had not conceived the hope that their own dialects could ever rise to such heights of dignity and power. Latin, which had enchased and preserved such precious remains of ancient wisdom, was now shackling the living mind in its efforts. Men imagined that they were still using it naturally on all high themes and solemn business; but though they used it with facility, it was no longer natural; it had lost the elasticity of life, and had become in their hands a stiffened and distorted, though still powerful, instrument. The very use of the word _latino_ in the writers of this period, to express what is clear and philosophical in language,[96] while it shows their deep reverence for it, shows how Latin civilisation was no longer their own, how it had insensibly become an external and foreign element. But they found it very hard to resign their claim to a share in its glories; with nothing of their own to match against it, they still delighted to speak of it as "our language," or its writers as "our poets," "our historians."[97] [Footnote 95: Hallam's _Middle Ages_, c. ix. vol. iii. p. 563.] [Footnote 96: _Parad._ 3, 12, 17. _Convit._ p. 108. "A più _Latinamente_ vedere la sentenza letterale."] [Footnote 97: _Vid._ the _De Monarchia_.] The spell was indeed beginning to break. Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's strange, stern, speculative friend, who is one of the fathers of the Italian language, is characterised in the _Commedia_[98] by his scornful dislike of Latin, even in the mouth of Virgil. Yet Dante himself, the great assertor, by argument and example, of the powers of the Vulgar tongue, once dared not to think that the Vulgar tongue could be other to the Latin, than as a subject to his sovereign. He was bolder when he wrote _De Vulgari Eloquio_: but in the earlier _Convito_, while pleading earnestly for the beauty of the Italian, he yields with reverence the first place to the Latin--for nobleness, because the Latin is permanent, and the Vulgar subject to fluctuation and corruption; for power, because the Latin can express conceptions to which the Vulgar is unequal; for beauty, because the structure of the Latin is a masterly arrangement of scientific art, and the beauty of the Vulgar depends on mere use.[99] The very title of his poem, the _Commedia_, contains in it a homage to the lofty claims of the Latin. It is called a Comedy, and not Tragedy, he says, after a marvellous account of the essence and etymology of the two, first, because it begins sadly, and ends joyfully; and next, because of its language, that humble speech of ordinary life, "in which even women converse."[100] [Footnote 98: _Inf._ 10, and compare the _Vit. N._ p. 334, ed. Fraticelli.] [Footnote 99: _Convito_, i. 5.] [Footnote 100: Ep. ad Kan Grand. §9,--a curious specimen of the learning of the time: "Sciendum est, quod _Comoedia_ dicitur a [Greek: kômê], _villa_ et [Greek: ôdê], quod est _cantus_, unde _Comoedia_ quasi _villanus cantus_. Et est _Comoedia genus quoddam poeticæ narrationis_, ab omnibus aliis differens. Differt ergo a Tragoedia in materia per hoc, quod Tragoedia in principio est admirabilis et quieta, in fine foetida et horribilis; et dicitur propter hoc a [Greek: tragos], i.e. _hircus_, et [Greek: ôdê], quasi _cantus hircinus_, i.e. foetidus ad modum hirci, ut patet per Senecam in suis tragoediis. _Comoedia_ vero inchoat asperitatem alicujus rei, sed ejus materia prospere terminatur, ut patet per Terentium in suis _Comoediis_.... Similiter differunt in modo loquendi; elate et sublime Tragoedia, _Comoedia_ vero remisse et humiliter sicut vult Horat. in Poët.... Et per hoc patet, quod _Comoedia_ diciter præsens opus. Nam si ad materiam respiciamus, a principio horribilis et foetida est, quia _Infernus_: in fine prospera, desiderabilis et grata, quia _Paradisus_. Si ad modum loquendi, remissus est modus et humilis, quia locutio Vulgaris, in qua et mulierculæ communicant. Et sic patet quia _Comoedia_ dicitur." Cf. de Vulg. Eloq. 2, 4, _Parad._ 30. He calls the Æneid, "_l'alta Tragedia_," _Inf._ 20, 113. Compare also Boccaccio's explanation of his mother's dream of the _peacock_. Dante, he says, is like the Peacock, among other reasons, "because the peacock has coarse feet, and a quiet gait;" and "the vulgar language, on which the _Commedia_ supports itself, is coarse in comparison with the high and masterly literary style which every other poet uses, though it be more beautiful than others, being in conformity with modern minds. The quiet gait signifies the humility of the style, which is necessarily required in _Commedia_, as those know who understand what is meant by _Commedia_."] He honoured the Latin, but his love was for the Italian. He was its champion, and indignant defender against the depreciation of ignorance and fashion. Confident of its power and jealous of its beauty, he pours forth his fierce scorn on the blind stupidity, the affectation, the vain glory, the envy, and above all, the cowardice of Italians who held lightly their mother tongue. "Many," he says, after enumerating the other offenders, "from this pusillanimity and cowardice disparage their own language, and exalt that of others; and of this sort are those hateful dastards of Italy--_abbominevoli cattivi d'Italia_--who think vilely of that precious language; which, if it is vile in anything, is vile only so far as it sounds in the prostituted mouth of these adulterers."[101] He noted and compared its various dialects; he asserted its capabilities not only in verse, but in expressive, flexible, and majestic prose. And to the deliberate admiration of the critic and the man, were added the homely but dear associations, which no language can share with that of early days. Italian had been the language of his parents--"_Questo mio Volgare fu il congiugnitore delli miei generanti, che con esso parlavano_"--and further, it was this modern language, "_questo mio Volgare_," which opened to him the way of knowledge, which had introduced him to Latin, and the sciences which it contained. It was his benefactor and guide--he personifies it--and his boyish friendship had grown stronger and more intimate by mutual good offices. "There has also been between us the goodwill of intercourse; for from the beginning of my life I have had with it kindness and conversation, and have used it, deliberating, interpreting, and questioning; so that, if friendship grows with use, it is evident how it must have grown in me."[102] [Footnote 101: _Convito_, i. 11.] [Footnote 102: _Convito_, i. 13.] From this language he exacted a hard trial;--a work which should rank with the ancient works. None such had appeared; none had even advanced such a pretension. Not that it was a time dead to literature or literary ambition. Poets and historians had written, and were writing in Italian. The same year of jubilee which fixed itself so deeply in Dante's mind, and became the epoch of his vision--the same scene of Roman greatness in its decay, which afterwards suggested to Gibbon the _Decline and Fall_, prompted, in the father of Italian history, the desire to follow in the steps of Sallust and Livy, and prepare the way for Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Davila, and Fra Paolo.[103] Poetry had been cultivated in the Roman languages of the West--in Aquitaine and Provence, especially--for more than two centuries; and lately, with spirit and success, in Italian. Names had become popular, reputations had risen and waned, verses circulated and were criticised, and even descended from the high and refined circles to the workshop. A story is told of Dante's indignation, when he heard the canzoni which had charmed the Florentine ladies mangled by the rude enthusiasm of a blacksmith at his forge.[104] Literature was a growing fashion; but it was humble in its aspirations and efforts. Men wrote like children, surprised and pleased with their success; yet allowing themselves in mere amusement, because conscious of weakness which they could not cure. [Footnote 103: G. Villani was at Rome in the year of jubilee 1300, and describes the great concourse and order of the pilgrims, whom he reckons at 200,000, in the course of the year. "And I," he proceeds, "finding myself in that blessed pilgrimage in the holy city of Rome, seeing the great and ancient things of the same, and reading the histories of the great deeds of the Romans, written by Virgil, and by Sallust, and Lucan, and Titus Livius, and Valerius, and Paulus Orosius, and other masters of histories, who wrote as well of the smaller matters as of the greater, concerning the exploits and deeds of the Romans; and further, of the strange things of the whole world, for memory and example's sake to those who should come after--I, too, took their style and fashion, albeit that, as their scholar, I be not worthy to execute such a work. But, considering that our city of Florence, the daughter and creation of Rome, was in its rising, and on the eve of achieving great things, as Rome was in its decline, it seemed to me convenient to bring into this volume and new chronicle all the deeds and beginnings of the city of Florence, so far as I have been able to gather and recover them; and for the future, to follow at large the doings of the Florentines, and the other notable things of the world briefly, as long as it may be God's pleasure; under which hope, rather by his grace than by my poor science, I entered on this enterprise: and so, in the year 1300, being returned from Rome, I began to compile this book, in reverence towards God and St. John, and commendation of our city of Florence."--_G. Vill._ viii. 36.] [Footnote 104: _Sacchetti_, Nov. 114.] Dante, by the _Divina Commedia_, was the restorer of seriousness in literature. He was so, by the magnitude and pretensions of his work, and by the earnestness of its spirit. He first broke through the prescription which had confined great works to the Latin, and the faithless prejudices which, in the language of society, could see powers fitted for no higher task than that of expressing, in curiously diversified forms, its most ordinary feelings. But he did much more. Literature was going astray in its tone, while growing in importance; the _Commedia_ checked it. The Provençal and Italian poetry was, with the exception of some pieces of political satire, almost exclusively amatory, in the most fantastic and affected fashion. In expression, it had not even the merit of being natural; in purpose it was trifling; in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless it brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased at a high price, by intellectual distortion, and moral insensibility. But this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick II., for such it was, was deeply mined by religious unbelief. However strange this charge first sounds against the thirteenth century, no one can look at all closely into its history, at least in Italy, without seeing that the idea of infidelity--not heresy, but infidelity--was quite a familiar one; and that side by side with the theology of Aquinas and Bonaventura, there was working among those who influenced fashion and opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom learning was a profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost monstrous for its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's refined and enlightened court. The genius of the great doctors might have kept in safety the Latin Schools, but not the free and home thoughts which found utterance in the language of the people, if the solemn beauty of the Italian _Commedia_ had not seized on all minds. It would have been an evil thing for Italian, perhaps for European literature, if the siren tales of the _Decameron_ had been the first to occupy the ear with the charms of a new language. Dante has had hard measure, and from some who are most beholden to him. No one in his day served the Church more highly, than he whose faith and genius secured on her side the first great burst of imagination and feeling, the first perfect accents of modern speech. The first-fruits of the new literature were consecrated, and offered up. There was no necessity, or even probability in Italy in the fourteenth century that it should be so, as there might perhaps have been earlier. It was the poet's free act--free in one, for whom nature and heathen learning had strong temptations--that religion was the lesson and influence of the great popular work of the time. That which he held up before men's awakened and captivated minds, was the verity of God's moral government. To rouse them to a sense of the mystery of their state; to startle their commonplace notions of sin into an imagination of its variety, its magnitude, and its infinite shapes and degrees; to open their eyes to the beauty of the Christian temper, both as suffering and as consummated; to teach them at once the faithfulness and awful freeness of God's grace; to help the dull and lagging soul to conceive the possibility, in its own case, of rising step by step in joy without an end--of a felicity not unimaginable by man, though of another order from the highest perfection of earth;--this is the poet's end. Nor was it only vague religious feelings which he wished to excite. He brought within the circle of common thought, and translated into the language of the multitude, what the Schools had done to throw light on the deep questions of human existence, which all are fain to muse upon, though none can solve. He who had opened so much of men's hearts to themselves, opened to them also that secret sympathy which exists between them and the great mysteries of the Christian doctrine.[105] He did the work, in his day, of a great preacher. Yet he has been both claimed and condemned, as a disturber of the Church's faith. [Footnote 105: _Vide_ Ozanam.] He certainly did not spare the Church's rulers. He thought they were betraying the most sacred of all trusts; and if history is at all to be relied on, he had some grounds for thinking so. But it is confusing the feelings of the middle ages with our own, to convert every fierce attack on the Popes into an anticipation of Luther. Strong language of this sort was far too commonplace to be so significant. No age is blind to practical abuses, or silent on them; and when the middle ages complained, they did so with a full-voiced and clamorous rhetoric, which greedily seized on every topic of vilification within its reach. It was far less singular, and far less bold, to criticise ecclesiastical authorities, than is often supposed; but it by no means implied unsettled faith, or a revolutionary design. In Dante's case, if words have any meaning--not words of deliberate qualification, but his unpremeditated and incidental expressions--his faith in the Divine mission and spiritual powers of the Popes was as strong as his abhorrence of their degeneracy, and desire to see it corrected by a power which they would respect--that of the temporal sword. It would be to mistake altogether his character, to imagine of him, either as a fault or as an excellence, that he was a doubter. It might as well be supposed of Aquinas. No one ever acknowledged with greater seriousness, as a fact in his position in the world, the agreement in faith among those with whom he was born. No one ever inclined with more simplicity and reverence before that long communion and consent in feeling and purpose, the "_publicus_ sensus" of the Christian Church. He did feel difficulties; but the excitement of lingering on them was not among his enjoyments. That was the lot of the heathen; Virgil, made wise by death, counsels him not to desire it: "Matto è chi spera, che nostra ragione Possa trascorrer la 'nfinita via Che tiene una sustanzia in tre Persone. State contenti, umana gente, al _quia_; Chè se potuto aveste veder tutto, Mestier non era partorir Maria: E disiar vedeste senza frutto Tai, che sarebbe lor disio quetato, Ch'eternamente è dato lor per lutto; I' dico d'Aristotile e di Plato, E di molti altri:"--e qui chinò la fronte, E più non disse, e rimase turbato.--_Purg._ c. 3.[106] [Footnote 106: "Insensate he, who thinks with mortal ken To pierce Infinitude, which doth enfold Three Persons in one Substance. Seek not then, O mortal race, for reasons--but believe, And be contented; for had all been seen, No need there was for Mary to conceive. Men have ye known, who thus desired in vain; And whose desires, that might at rest have been, Now constitute a source of endless pain; Plato, the Stagirite; and many more, I here allude to;"--then his head he bent, Was silent, and a troubled aspect wore.--WRIGHT.] The Christian poet felt that it was greater to believe and to act. In the darkness of the world one bright light appeared, and he followed it. Providence had assigned him his portion of truth, his portion of daily bread; if to us it appears blended with human elements, it is perfectly clear that he was in no position to sift them. To choose was no trial of his. To examine and seek, where it was impossible to find, would have been folly. The authority from which he started had not yet been seriously questioned; there were no palpable signs of doubtfulness on the system which was to him the representative of God's will; and he sought for none. It came to him claiming his allegiance by custom, by universality, by its completeness as a whole, and satisfying his intellect and his sympathies in detail. And he gave his allegiance--reasonably, because there was nothing to hope for in doubting--wisely, because he gave it loyally and from his heart. And he had his reward--the reward of him who throws himself with frankness and earnestness into a system; who is not afraid or suspicious of it; who is not unfaithful to it. He gained not merely power--he gained that freedom and largeness of mind which the suspicious or the unfaithful miss. His loyalty to the Church was no cramping or blinding service; it left to its full play that fresh and original mind, left it to range at will in all history and all nature for the traces of Eternal wisdom, left it to please itself with all beauty, and pay its homage to all excellence. For upon all wisdom, beauty, and excellence, the Church had taught him to see, in various and duly distinguished degrees, the seal of the one Creator. She imparts to the poem, to its form and progressive development, her own solemnity, her awe, her calm, her serenity and joy; it follows her sacred seasons and hours; repeats her appointed words of benediction and praise; moulds itself on her belief, her expectations, and forecastings.[107] Her intimations, more or less distinct, dogma or tradition or vague hint, guide the poet's imagination through the land where all eyes are open. The journey begins under the Easter moon of the year of jubilee, on the evening of Good Friday; the days of her mourning he spends in the regions of woe, where none dares to pronounce the name of the Redeemer, and he issues forth to "behold again the stars," to learn how to die to sin and rise to righteousness, very early in the morning, as it begins to dawn, on the day of the Resurrection. The whole arrangement of the _Purgatorio_ is drawn from Church usages. It is a picture of men suffering in calm and holy hope the sharp discipline of repentance, amid the prayers, the melodies, the consoling images and thoughts, the orderly ritual, the hours of devotion, the sacraments of the Church militant. When he ascends in his hardiest flight, and imagines the joys of the perfect and the vision of God, his abundant fancy confines itself strictly to the limits sanctioned by her famous teachers--ventures into no new sphere, hazards no anticipations in which they have not preceded it, and is content with adding to the poetry which it elicits from their ideas, a beauty which it is able to conceive apart altogether from bodily form--the beauty, infinite in its variety, of the expression of the human eye and smile--the beauty of light, of sound, of motion. And when his song mounts to its last strain of triumph, and the poet's thought, imagination, and feeling of beauty, tasked to the utmost, nor failing under the weight of glory which they have to express, breathe themselves forth in words, higher than which no poetry has ever risen, and represent, in images transcending sense, and baffling it, yet missing not one of those deep and transporting sympathies which they were to touch, the sight, eye to eye, of the Creator by the creature--he beholds the gathering together, in the presence of God, of "all that from our earth has to the skies returned," and of the countless orders of their thrones mirrored in His light-- 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] [Footnote 107: See an article in the _Brit. Critic_, No. 65, p. 120.] [Footnote 108: See the form of benediction of the "Rosa d'oro." _Rituum Ecclesiæ Rom. Libri Tres._ fol. xxxv. Venet. 1516. Form of giving: "Accipe rosam de manibus nostris ... per quam designatus gaudium utriusque Hierusalem triumphantis scilicet et militantis ecclesiæ per quam omnibus Christi fidelibus manifestatur flos ipse pretiosissimus qui est gaudium et corona sanctorum omnium." He alludes to it in the _Convito_, iv. 29. O isplendor di Dio, per cu' io vidi L'alto trionfo del regno verace, Dammi virtù a dir com'io lo vidi. Lume è lassù, che visibile face Lo creatore a quella creatura, Che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace: E si distende in circular figura In tanto, che la sua circonferenza Sarebbe al Sol troppo larga cintura. * * * * E come clivo in acqua di suo imo Si specchia quasi per vedersi adorno, Quanto è nel verde e ne' fioretti opimo; Sì soprastando al lume intorno intorno Vidi specchiarsi in più di mille soglie, Quanto di noi lassù fatto ha ritorno. E se l'infimo grado in sè raccoglie Sì grande lume, quant'è la larghezza Di questa rosa nell'estreme foglie? * * * * Nel giallo della rosa sempiterna, Che si dilata, rigrada, e redole Odor di lode al Sol, che sempre verna, Qual'è colui, che tace e dicer vuole, Mi trasse Beatrice, e disse; mira Quanto è 'l convento delle bianche stole! Vedi nostra Città quanto ella gira! Vedi li nostri scanni sì ripieni, Che poca gente omai ci si disira. * * * * In forma dunque di candida rosa Mi si mostrava la milizia santa, Che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa.--_Parad._ 30, 31.] 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] [Footnote 109: Chi crederebbe giù nel mondo errante, Che Rifèo Trojano[A] in questo tondo Fosse la quinta delle luci sante? Ora conosce assai di quel, che 'l mondo Veder non può della divina grazia; Benchè sua vista non discerna il fondo.--_Parad._ c. 20.] [Footnote A: Rhipeus justissimus unus Qui fuit in Teucris, et servantissimus æqui.--_Æn._ ii.] 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. [Footnote 110: _Inf._ c. 26.] 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. even separate letters--to express an image, to spell a name, or as used in some popular proverb.[112] He employs without scruple, and often with marvellous force of description, any recollection that occurs to him, however homely, of everyday life;--the old tailor threading his needle with trouble (_Inf._ 15);--the cook's assistant watching over the boiling broth (_Inf._ 21);--the hurried or impatient horse-groom using his curry-comb (_Inf._ 29);--or the common sights of the street or the chamber--the wet wood sputtering on the hearth: Come d'un stizzo verde che arso sia Dall'un de' capi, che dall'altro geme E cigola per vento che va via;--_Inf._ 13.[113] the paper changing colour when about to catch fire: Come procede innanzi dall'ardore Per lo papiro suso un color bruno Che non è nero ancora, e 'l bianco muore:--_Inf._ 25.[114] the steaming of the hand when bathed, in winter: Fuman come man bagnata il verno:-- or the ways and appearances of animals--ants meeting on their path: Lì veggio d'ogni parte farsi presta Ciascun'ombra, e baciarsi una con una Senza restar, contente a breve festa: Così per entro loro schiera bruna _S'ammusa l'una con l'altra formica_, Forse a spiar lor via e lor fortuna;--_Purg._ 26.[115] the snail drawing in its horns (_Inf._ 25);--the hog shut out of its sty, and trying to gore with its tusks (_Inf._ 30);--the dogs' misery in summer (_Inf._ 17);--the frogs jumping on to the bank before the water-snake (_Inf._ 9);--or showing their heads above water: Come al orlo dell'acqua d'un fosso Stan gli ranocchi _pur col muso fuori_, Sì che celano i piedi, e l'altro grosso.--_Inf._ 22.[116] [Footnote 111: _Parad._ 7, 1-3.] [Footnote 112: To describe the pinched face of famine;-- Parean l'occhiaje annella senza gemme. Chi nel viso degli uomini legge OMO Ben avria quivi conosciuto l'_emme_ (M).--_Purg._ 23. Again, Quella reverenza che s'indonna Di tutto me, pur per B e per ICE.--_Parad._ 7. Nè O sì tosto mai, nè I si scrisse, Com'ei s'accese ed arse.--_Inf._ 24.] [Footnote 113: Like to a sapling, lighted at one end, Which at the other hisses with the wind, And drops of sap doth from the outlet send: So from the broken twig, both words and blood flow'd forth.--WRIGHT.] [Footnote 114: Like burning paper, when there glides before The advancing flame a brown and dingy shade, Which is not black, and yet is white no more.--IBID.] [Footnote 115: On either hand I saw them haste their meeting, And kiss each one the other--pausing not-- Contented to enjoy so short a greeting. Thus do the ants among their dingy band, Face one another--each their neighbour's lot Haply to scan, and how their fortunes stand.--WRIGHT.] [Footnote 116: As in a trench, frogs at the water side Sit squatting, with their noses raised on high, The while their feet, and all their bulk they hide-- Thus upon either hand the sinners stood. But Barbariccia now approaching nigh, Quick they withdrew beneath the boiling flood. I saw--and still my heart is thrill'd with fear-- One spirit linger; as beside a ditch, One frog remains, the others disappear.--IBID.] It must be said, that most of these images, though by no means all, occur in the _Inferno_; and that the poet means to paint sin not merely in the greatness of its ruin and misery, but in characters which all understand, of strangeness, of vileness, of despicableness, blended with diversified and monstrous horror. Even he seems to despair of his power at times: S'io avessi le rime e aspre, e chiocce, Come si converrebbe al tristo buco, Sovra 'l qual pontan tutte l'altre rocce; Io premerrei di mio concetto il suco Più pienamente; ma perch'io non l'abbo, Non senza tema a dicer mi conduco: Che non è 'mpresa da pigliare a gabbo Descriver fondo a tutto l'universo, Nè da lingua, che chiami mamma, o babbo.--_Inf._ 32.[117] [Footnote 117: Had I a rhyme so rugged, rough, and hoarse As would become the sorrowful abyss, O'er which the rocky circles wind their course, Then with a more appropriate form I might Endow my vast conceptions; wanting this, Not without fear I bring myself to write. For no light enterprise it is, I deem, To represent the lowest depth of all; Nor should a childish tongue attempt the theme.--WRIGHT.] Feeling the difference between sins, in their elements and, as far as we see them, their baseness, he treats them variously. His ridicule is apportioned with a purpose. He passes on from the doom of the sins of incontinence--the storm, the frost and hail, the crushing weights--from the flaming minarets of the city of Dis, of the Furies and Proserpine, "Donna dell'eterno pianto," where the unbelievers lie, each in his burning tomb--from the river of boiling blood--the wood with the Harpies--the waste of barren sand with fiery snow, where the violent are punished--to the Malebolge, the manifold circles of Falsehood. And here scorn and ridicule in various degrees, according to the vileness of the fraud, begin to predominate, till they culminate in that grim comedy, with its _dramatis personæ_ and battle of devils, Draghignazzo, and Graffiacane, and Malacoda, where the peculators and sellers of justice are fished up by the demons from the boiling pitch, but even there overreach and cheat their tormentors, and make them turn their fangs on each other. The diversified forms of falsehood seem to tempt the poet's imagination to cope with its changefulness and inventions, as well as its audacity. The transformations of the wildest dream do not daunt him. His power over language is nowhere more forcibly displayed than in those cantos, which describe the punishments of theft--men passing gradually into serpents, and serpents into men: Due e nessun l'imagine perversa Parea.--_Inf._ 25. And when the traitor, who murdered his own kinsman, was still alive, and seemed safe from the infamy which it was the poet's rule to bestow only on the dead, Dante found a way to inflict his vengeance without an anachronism:--Branca D'Oria's body, though on earth, is only animated by a fiend, and his spirit has long since fled to the icy prison.[118] [Footnote 118: Ed egli a me: Come 'l mio corpo stea Nel mondo sù, nulla scienzia porto. Cotal vantaggio ha questa Tolommea, Che spesse volte l'anima ci cade Innanzi, ch'Atropòs mossa le dea. E perchè tu più volontier mi rade Le 'nvetriate lagrime dal volto, Sappi, che tosto che l'anima trade, Come fec'io, il corpo suo l'è tolto Da un Dimonio, che poscia il governa, Mentre che 'l tempo suo tutto sia volto. Ella ruina in sì fatta cisterna; E forse pare ancor lo corpo suso Dell'ombra, che di qua dietro mi verna. Tu 'l dei saper, se tu vien pur mo giuso: Egli è ser Branca d'Oria, e son più anni Poscia passati, ch'ei fu sì racchiuso. Io credo, diss'io lui, che tu m'inganni, Che Branca d'Oria non morì unquanche, E mangia, e bee, e dorme, e veste panni. Nel fosso sù, diss'ei, di Malebranche, Là dove bolle la tenace pece, Non era giunto ancora Michel Zanche; Che questi lasciò 'l diavolo in sua vece Nel corpo suo, e d'un suo prossimano, Che 'l tradimento insieme con lui fece.--_Inf._ 33.] These are strange experiments in poetry; their strangeness is exaggerated as detached passages; but they are strange enough when they meet us in their place in the context, as parts of a scene, where the mind is strung and overawed by the sustained power, with which dreariness, horror, hideous absence of every form of good, is kept before the imagination and feelings, in the fearful picture of human sin. But they belong to the poet's system of direct and forcible representation. What his inward eye sees, what he feels, that he means us to see and feel as he does; to make us see and feel is his art. Afterwards we may reflect and meditate; but first we must see--must see what he saw. Evil and deformity are in the world, as well as good and beauty; the eye cannot escape them, they are about our path, in our heart and memory. He has faced them without shrinking or dissembling, and extorted from them a voice of warning. In all poetry that is written for mere delight, in all poetry which regards but a part or an aspect of nature, they have no place--they disturb and mar; but he had conceived a poetry of the whole, which would be weak or false without them. Yet they stand in his poem as they stand in nature--subordinate and relieved. If the grotesque is allowed to intrude itself--if the horrible and the foul, undisguised and unsoftened, make us shudder and shrink, they are kept in strong check and in due subjection by other poetical influences; and the same power which exhibits them in their naked strength, renders its full grace and glory to beauty; its full force and delicacy to the most evanescent feeling. Dante's eye was free and open to external nature in a degree new among poets; certainly in a far greater degree than among the Latins, even including Lucretius, whom he probably had never read. We have already spoken of his minute notice of the appearance of living creatures; but his eye was caught by the beautiful as well as by the grotesque. Take the following beautiful picture of the bird looking out for dawn: Come l'augello intra l'amate fronde, Posato al nido de' suoi dolci nati, La notte, che le cose ci nasconde, Che per veder gli aspetti desiati, E per trovar lo cibo, onde li pasca, In che i gravi labor gli sono aggrati, Previene 'l tempo in su l'aperta frasca, E con ardente affetto il sole aspetta, Fiso guardando, pur che l'alba nasca.--_Parad._ 23.[119] [Footnote 119: E'en as the bird that resting in the nest Of her sweet brood, the shelt'ring boughs among While all things are enwrapt in night's dark vest-- Now eager to behold the looks she loves, And to find food for her impatient young (Whence labour grateful to a mother proves), Forestalls the time, high perch'd upon the spray, And with impassion'd zeal the sun expecting, Anxiously waiteth the first break of day.--WRIGHT.] Nothing indeed can be more true and original than his images of birds; they are varied and very numerous. We have the water-birds rising in clamorous and changing flocks: Come augelli surti di riviera _Quasi congratulando a lor pasture_, Fanno di sè or tonda or lunga schiera;--_Parad._ 18.[120] the rooks, beginning to move about at daybreak: E come per lo natural costume, Le pole insieme, al cominciar del giorno Si muovono a scaldar le fredde piume, Poi altre vanno via senza ritorno, Altre rivolgon sè onde son mosse Ed altre roteando fan soggiorno;--_Parad._ 21.[121] the morning sounds of the swallow: Nell'ora che comincia i tristi lai La rondinella presso alla mattina, Forse a memoria de' suoi primi guai;--_Purg._ 9.[122] the joy and delight of the nightingale's song (_Purg._ 17); the lark, silent at last, filled with its own sweetness: Qual lodoletta, che 'n aere si spazia, Prima cantando, e _poi tace contenta Dell'ultima dolcezza che la sazia_;--_Parad._ 20.[123] the flight of the starlings and storks (_Inf._ 5, _Purg._ 24); the mournful cry and long line of the cranes (_Inf._ 5, _Purg._ 26); the young birds trying to escape from the nest (_Purg._ 25); the eagle hanging in the sky: Con l'ale aperte, e a calare intesa;-- the dove, standing close to its mate, or wheeling round it: Sì come quando 'l _colombo si pone Presso al compagno_, l'uno e l'altro pande _Girando e mormorando_ l'affezione;--_Parad._ 25.[124] or the flock of pigeons, feeding: Adunati alla pastura, Queti, _senza mostrar l'usato orgoglio_.--_Purg._ 2. [Footnote 120: And as birds rising from a stream, whence they Their pastures view, as though their joy confessing, Now form a round, and now a long array.--IBID.] [Footnote 121: And as with one accord, at break of day, The rooks bestir themselves, by nature taught To chase the dew-drops from their wings away; Some flying off, to reappear no more-- Others repairing to their nests again-- Some whirling round--then settling as before.--WRIGHT.] [Footnote 122: What time the swallow pours her plaintive strain, Saluting the approach of morning gray, Thus haply mindful of her former pain.--IBID.] [Footnote 123: E'en as the lark high soaring pours its throat Awhile, then rests in silence, as though still It dwelt enamour'd of its last sweet note.--IBID.] [Footnote 124: As when unto his partner's side, the dove Approaches near--both fondly circling round, And cooing, show the fervour of their love; So these great heirs of immortality Receive each other; while they joyful sound The praises of the food they share on high.--WRIGHT.] Hawking supplies its images: the falcon coming for its food: Il falcon che prima a piè si mira, Indi si volge al grido, e si protende, Per lo disio del pasto, che là il tira;--_Purg._ 19.[125] or just unhooded, pluming itself for its flight: Quasi falcon, ch'esce del cappello, Muove la testa, e con l'ale s'applaude, _Voglia mostrando, e facendosi bello_;--_Parad._ 19.[126] or returning without success, sullen and loath: Come 'l falcon ch'è stato assai su l'ali, Che senza veder logoro, o uccello, Fa dire al falconiere: Oimè tu cali! Discende lasso onde si muove snello Per cento ruote, _e da lungi si pone_ Dal suo maestro, _disdegnoso e fello_.--_Inf._ 17.[127] [Footnote 125: And, as a falcon, which first scans its feet, Then turns him to the call, and forward flies, In eagerness to catch the tempting meat.--IBID.] [Footnote 126: Lo, as a falcon, from the hood released, Uplifts his head, and joyous flaps his wings, His beauty and his eagerness increased.--WRIGHT.] [Footnote 127: E'en as a falcon, long upheld in air, Not seeing lure or bird upon the wing, So that the falconer utters in despair "Alas, thou stoop'st!" fatigued descends from high; And whirling quickly round in many a ring, Far from his master sits--disdainfully.--IBID.] It is curious to observe him taking Virgil's similes, and altering them. When Virgil describes the throng of souls, he compares them to falling leaves, or gathering birds in autumn: Quam multa in silvis auctumni frigore primo Lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto Quam multæ glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus Trans pontum fugat, et terris immittit apricis-- Dante uses the same images, but without copying: Come d'Autunno si levan le foglie, L'una appresso dell'altra, infin che 'l ramo Rende alla terra tutte le sue spoglie; Similemente il mal seme d'Adamo: Gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una Per cenni, com'augel per suo richiamo. Così sen vanno su per l'onda bruna, Ed avanti che sien di là discese, Anche di qua nuova schiera s'aduna.--_Inf._ 3.[128] [Footnote 128: As leaves in autumn, borne before the wind, Drop one by one, until the branch laid bare, Sees all its honours to the earth consign'd: So cast them downward at his summons all The guilty race of Adam from that strand-- Each as a falcon answering to the call.--WRIGHT.] Again--compared with one of Virgil's most highly-finished and perfect pictures, the flight of the pigeon, disturbed at first, and then becoming swift and smooth: Qualis spelunca subito commota columba, Cui domus et dulces latebroso in pumice nidi, Fertur in arva volans, plausumque exterrita pennis Dat tecto ingentem, mox aere lapsa quieto Radit iter liquidum, celeres neque commovet alas-- the Italian's simplicity and strength may balance the "ornata parola" of Virgil: Quali colombe dal disio chiamate, Con _l'ali aperte e ferme_ al dolce nido Volan per l'aer dal voler portate.--_Inf._ 5.[129] [Footnote 129: As doves, by strong affection urged, repair With firm expanded wings to their sweet nest, Borne by the impulse of their will through air.--IBID. It is impossible not to be reminded at every step, in spite of the knowledge and taste which Mr. Cary and Mr. Wright have brought to their most difficult task, of the truth which Dante has expressed with his ordinary positiveness. He is saying that he does not wish his Canzoni to be explained in Latin to those who could not read them in Italian: "Che sarebbe sposta la loro sentenzia colà dove elle _non la potessono colla loro bellezza portare_. E però sappia ciascuno che nulla cosa per legame musaico (_i.e._ poetico) armonizzata, si può della sua loquela in altra trasmutare senza rompere tutta la sua dolcezza e armonia. E questa è la ragione per che Omero non si mutò mai di Greco in Latino, come l'altre scritture che avemo da loro."--_Convito_, i. c. 8, p. 49. Dr. Carlyle has given up the idea of attempting to represent Dante's verse by English verse, and has confined himself to assisting Englishmen to read him in his own language. His prose translation is accurate and forcible. And he has added sensible and useful notes.] Take, again, the _times of the day_, with what is characteristic of them--appearances, lights, feelings--seldom dwelt on at length, but carried at once to the mind, and stamped upon it sometimes by a single word. The sense of _morning_, its inspiring and cheering strength, softens the opening of the _Inferno_; breathes its refreshing calm, in the interval of repose after the last horrors of hell, in the first canto of the _Purgatorio_; and prepares for the entrance into the earthly Paradise at its close. In the waning light of _evening_, and its chilling sense of loneliness, he prepared himself for his dread pilgrimage: Lo giorno se n'andava, e l'aer bruno Toglieva gli animai che sono 'n terra Dalle fatiche loro; ed io sol uno M'apparechiava a sostener la guerra Sì del cammino, e sì della pietate.--_Inf._ 2. Indeed there is scarcely an hour of day or night, which has not left its own recollection with him;--of which we cannot find some memorial in his poem. Evening and night have many. Evening, with its softness and melancholy--its exhaustion and languor, after the work, perhaps unfulfilled, of day--its regrets and yearnings--its sounds and doubtful lights--the distant bell, the closing chants of Compline, the _Salve Regina_, the _Te lucis ante terminum_--with its insecurity, and its sense of protection from above--broods over the poet's first resting-place on his heavenly road--that still, solemn, dreamy scene--the Valley of Flowers in the mountain side, where those who have been negligent about their salvation, but not altogether faithless and fruitless, the assembled shades of great kings and of poets, wait, looking upwards, "pale and humble," for the hour when they may begin in earnest their penance. (_Purg._ 7 and 8.) The level, blinding evening beams (_Purg._ 15); the contrast of gathering darkness in the valley or on the shore with the lingering lights on the mountain (_Purg._ 17); the rapid sinking of the sun, and approach of night in the south (_Purg._ 27); the flaming sunset clouds of August; the sheet-lightning of summer (_Purg._ 5); have left pictures in his mind, which an incidental touch reawakens, and a few strong words are sufficient to express. Other appearances he describes with more fulness. The stars coming out one by one, baffling at first the eye: Ed ecco intorno di chiarezza pari Nascer un lustro sopra quel che v'era, A guisa d'orizzonte, che rischiari. _E sì come al salir di prima sera Comincian per lo Ciel nuove parvenze, Sì che la cosa pare e non par vera_;--_Parad._ 14.[130] or else, bursting out suddenly over the heavens: Quando colui che tutto il mondo alluma, De l'emisperio nostro si discende, E 'l giorno d'ogni parte si consuma; Lo ciel che sol di lui prima s'accende, Subitamente si rifà parvente Per molte luci in che una risplende;--_Parad._ 20.[131] or the effect of shooting-stars: Quale per li seren tranquilli e puri Discorre ad ora ad or subito fuoco Movendo gli occhi che stavan sicuri, E pare stella che tramuti loco, Se non che dalla parte onde s'accende Nulla sen perde, ed esso dura poco;--_Parad._ 15.[132] or, again, that characteristic sight of the Italian summer night--the fire-flies: Quante il villan che al poggio si riposa, Nel tempo che colui che 'l mondo schiara La faccia sua a noi tien men ascosa, Come la mosca cede alla zenzara, Vede lucciole giù per la vallea Forse colà dove vendemmia ed ara.--_Inf._ 26.[133] [Footnote 130: And lo, on high, and lurid as the one Now there, encircling it, a light arose, Like heaven when re-illumined by the sun: And as at the first lighting up of eve The sky doth new appearances disclose, That now seem real, now the sight deceive.--WRIGHT.] [Footnote 131: When he, who with his universal ray The world illumines, quits our hemisphere, And, from each quarter, daylight wears away; The heaven, erst kindled by his beam alone, Sudden its lost effulgence doth repair By many lights illumined but by one.--IBID.] [Footnote 132: As oft along the pure and tranquil sky A sudden fire by night is seen to dart, Attracting forcibly the heedless eye; And seems to be a star that changes place, Save that no star is lost from out the part It quits, and that it lasts a moment's space.--WRIGHT.] [Footnote 133: As in that season when the sun least veils His face that lightens all, what time the fly Gives place to the shrill gnat, the peasant then, Upon some cliff reclined, beneath him sees Fire-flies innumerous spangling o'er the vale, Vineyard or tilth, where his day-labour lies.--CARY.] Noon, too, does not want its characteristic touches--the lightning-like glancing of the lizard's rapid motion: Come il ramarro sotto la gran fersa Ne' dì canicular cangiando siepe Folgore par, se la via attraversa;--_Inf._ 25.[134] the motes in the sunbeam at noontide (_Par._ 14); its clear, diffused, insupportable brightness, filling all things: E tutti eran già pieni Dell'alto dì i giron del sacro monte.--_Purg._ 19. and veiling the sun in his own light: Io veggio ben sì come _tu t'annidi Nel proprio lume_. * * * * Sì come 'l sol che si cela egli stessi Per troppa luce, quando 'l caldo ha rose Le temperanze de' vapori spessi.--_Parad._ 5. [Footnote 134: As underneath the dog-star's scorching ray The lizard, darting swift from fence to fence, Appears like lightning, if he cross the way.--WRIGHT.] But the sights and feelings of morning are what he touches on most frequently; and he does so with the precision of one who had watched them with often-repeated delight: the scented freshness of the breeze that stirs before daybreak: E quale annunziatrice degli albori Aura di maggio muovesi ed olezza Tutta impregnata dall'erba e da' fiori; Tal mi senti' un vento dar per mezza La fronte;--_Purg._ 24.[135] the chill of early morning (_Purg._ 19); the dawn stealing on, and the stars, one by one, fading "infino alla più bella" (_Parad._ 30); the brightness of the "trembling morning star"-- Par tremolando mattutina stella;-- the serenity of the dawn, the blue gradually gathering in the east, spreading over the brightening sky (_Parad._ 1); then succeeded by the orange tints--and Mars setting red, through the mist over the sea: Ed ecco, qual sul presso del mattino Per li grossi vapor Marte rosseggia Giù nel ponente, sopra 'l suol marino, Cotal m'apparve, s'io ancor lo veggia, Un lume per lo mar venir sì ratto Che 'l muover suo nessun volar pareggia;--_Purg._ 2.[136] the distant sea-beach quivering in the early light: L'alba vinceva l'ora mattutina Che fuggia innanzi, sì che di lontano Conobbi _il tremolar della marina_;--_Purg._ 1.[137] the contrast of east and west at the moment of sunrise, and the sun appearing, clothed in mist: Io vidi già nel cominciar del giorno La parte oriental tutta rosata E l'altro ciel di bel sereno adorno; E la faccia del sol nascere ombrata Sì che per temperanza di vapori L'occhio lo sostenea lunga fiata;--_Purg._ 3.[138] or breaking through it, and shooting his beams over the sky: Di tutte parti saettava il giorno Lo sol ch'avea con le saette conte Di mezzo 'l ciel cacciato 'l Capricorno.--_Purg._ 2.[139] [Footnote 135: As when, announcing the approach of day, Impregnated with herbs and flowers of Spring, Breathes fresh and redolent the air of May-- Such was the breeze that gently fann'd my head; And I perceived the waving of a wing Which all around ambrosial odours shed.--WRIGHT.] [Footnote 136: When lo! like Mars, in aspect fiery red Seen through the vapour, when the morn is nigh Far in the west above the briny bed, So (might I once more see it) o'er the sea A light approach'd with such rapidity, Flies not the bird that might its equal be.--WRIGHT.] [Footnote 137: Now 'gan the vanquish'd matin hour to flee; And seen from far, as onward came the day, I recognised the trembling of the sea.--IBID.] [Footnote 138: Erewhile the eastern regions have I seen At daybreak glow with roseate colours, and The expanse beside all beauteous and serene: And the sun's face so shrouded at its rise, And temper'd by the mists which overhung, That I could gaze on it with stedfast eyes.--WRIGHT.] [Footnote 139: On every side the sun shot forth the day, And had already with his arrows bright From the mid-heaven chased Capricorn away.--IBID.] But _light_ in general is his special and chosen source of poetic beauty. No poet that we know has shown such singular sensibility to its varied appearances--has shown that he felt it in itself the cause of a distinct and peculiar pleasure, delighting the eye apart from form, as music delights the ear apart from words, and capable, like music, of definite character, of endless variety, and infinite meanings. He must have studied and dwelt upon it like music. His mind is charged with its effects and combinations, and they are rendered with a force, a brevity, a precision, a heedlessness and unconsciousness of ornament, an indifference to circumstance and detail; they flash out with a spontaneous readiness, a suitableness and felicity, which show the familiarity and grasp given only by daily observation, daily thought, daily pleasure. Light everywhere--in the sky and earth and sea--in the star, the flame, the lamp, the gem--broken in the water, reflected from the mirror, transmitted pure through the glass, or coloured through the edge of the fractured emerald--dimmed in the mist, the halo, the deep water--streaming through the rent cloud, glowing in the coal, quivering in the lightning, flashing in the topaz and the ruby, veiled behind the pure alabaster, mellowed and clouding itself in the pearl--light contrasted with shadow--shading off and copying itself in the double rainbow, like voice and echo--light seen within light, as voice discerned within voice, "_quando una è ferma, e l'altra va e riede_"--the brighter "nestling" itself in the fainter--the purer set off on the less clear, "_come perla in bianca fronte_"--light in the human eye and face, displaying, figuring, and confounded with its expressions--light blended with joy in the eye: luce Come letizia in pupilla viva; and in the smile: Vincendo me col lume d'un sorriso; joy lending its expression to light: Quivi la donna mia vid'io sì lieta-- Che più lucente se ne fè il pianeta. E se la _stella si cambiò, e rise_, Qual mi fec'io;--_Parad._ 5. light from every source, and in all its shapes, illuminates, irradiates, gives its glory to the _Commedia_. The remembrance of our "serene life" beneath the "fair stars" keeps up continually the gloom of the _Inferno_. Light, such as we see it and recognise it, the light of morning and evening growing and fading, takes off from the unearthliness of the _Purgatorio_; peopled, as it is, by the undying, who, though suffering for sin, can sin no more, it is thus made like our familiar world, made to touch our sympathies as an image of our own purification in the flesh. And when he rises beyond the regions of earthly day, light, simple, unalloyed, unshadowed, eternal, lifts the creations of his thought above all affinity to time and matter; light never fails him, as the expression of the gradations of bliss; never reappears the same, never refuses the new shapes of his invention, never becomes confused or dim, though it is seldom thrown into distinct figure, and still more seldom _coloured_. Only once, that we remember, is the thought of colour forced on us; when the bright joy of heaven suffers change and eclipse, and deepens into red at the sacrilege of men.[140] [Footnote 140: _Parad._ 27.] Yet his eye is everywhere, not confined to the beauty or character of the sky and its lights. His range of observation and largeness of interest prevent that line of imagery, which is his peculiar instrument and predilection, from becoming, in spite of its brightness and variety, dreamy and monotonous; prevent it from arming against itself sympathies which it does not touch. He has watched with equal attention, and draws with not less power, the occurrences and sights of Italian country life; the summer whirlwind sweeping over the plain--"_dinanzi polveroso va superbo_" (_Inf._ 9); the rain-storm of the Apennines (_Purg._ 5); the peasant's alternations of feeling in spring: In quella parte del giovinetto anno Che 'l sole i crin sotto l'Aquario tempra, E già le notti al mezzo dì sen vanno; Quando la brina in su la terra assempra L'imagine di sua sorella bianca, Ma poco dura alla sua penna tempra, Lo villanello a cui la roba manca Si leva e guarda, e vede la campagna Biancheggiar tutta; ond'ei si batte l'anca; Ritorna a casa, e qua e là si lagna Come 'l tapin che non sa che si faccia: Poi riede e la speranza ringavagna Veggendo 'l mondo aver cangiata faccia In poco d'ora, e prende il suo vincastro E fuor le pecorelle a pascer caccia:--_Inf._ 24.[141] the manner in which sheep come out from the fold: Come le pecorelle escon del chiuso _A una a due a tre, e l'altre stanno, Timidette atterrando l'occhio e' l muso; E ciò che fa la prima, e l'altre fanno, Addossandosi a lei s'ella s'arresta_ Semplici e quete, e lo 'mperchè non sanno: Sì vid'io muover a venir la testa Di quella mandria fortunata allotta, Pudica in faccia e nell'andare onesta. Come color dinanzi vider rotta La luce.... Ristaro, e trasser sè indietro alquanto, E tutti gli altri che veniano appresso, Non sappiendo il perchè, fero altrettanto.--_Purg._ 3. [Footnote 141: In the new year, when Sol his tresses gay Dips in Aquarius, and the tardy night Divides her empire with the lengthening day-- When o'er the earth the hoar-frost pure and bright Assumes the image of her sister white, Then quickly melts before the genial light-- The rustic, now exhausted his supply, Rises betimes--looks out--and sees the land All white around, whereat he strikes his thigh-- Turns back--and grieving--wanders here and there, Like one disconsolate and at a stand; Then issues forth, forgetting his despair, For lo! the face of nature he beholds Changed on a sudden--takes his crook again, And drives his flock to pasture from the folds.--WRIGHT.] So with the beautiful picture of the goats upon the mountain, chewing the cud in the noontide heat and stillness, and the goatherd, resting on his staff and watching them--a picture which no traveller among the mountains of Italy or Greece can have missed, or have forgotten: Quali si fanno ruminando manse Le capre, _state rapide e proterve Sopra le cime_ avanti che sien pranse, _Tacite al ombra mentre che 'l sol ferve, Guardate dal pastor_ che 'n su la verga Poggiato s'è, e lor poggiato serve.--_Purg._ 27.[142] [Footnote 142: Like goats that having over the crags pursued Their wanton sports, now, quiet pass the time In ruminating--sated with their food, Beneath the shade, while glows the sun on high-- Watched by the goatherd with unceasing care, As on his staff he leans, with watchful eye.--_Ibid._] So again, with his recollections of cities: the crowd, running together to hear news (_Purg._ 2), or pressing after the winner of the game (_Purg._ 6); the blind men at the church doors, or following their guide through the throng (_Purg._ 13, 16); the friars walking along in silence, one behind another: Taciti, soli, e senza compagnia N'andavam, _l'un dinanzi, e l'altro dopo Come i frati minor vanno per via_.--_Inf._ 23. He turns to account in his poem, the pomp and clamour of the host taking the field (_Inf._ 22); the devices of heraldry; the answering chimes of morning bells over the city;[143] the inventions and appliances of art, the wheels within wheels of clocks (_Par._ 24), the many-coloured carpets of the East (_Inf._ 17); music and dancing--the organ and voice in church: --Voce mista al dolce suono Che or sì or no s'intendon le parole,--_Purg._ 9. the lute and voice in the chamber (_Par._ 20); the dancers preparing to begin,[144] or waiting to catch a new strain.[145] Or, again, the images of domestic life, the mother's ways to her child, reserved and reproving--"che al figlio par superba"--or cheering him with her voice, or watching him compassionately in the wandering of fever: Ond'ella, appresso d'un pio sospiro Gli occhi drizzò ver me, con quel sembiante Che madre fa sopra figliuol deliro.--_Parad._ 1. [Footnote 143: Indi come orologio che ne chiami Nell'ora che la sposa di Dio surge A mattinar lo sposo perchè l'ami, Che l'una parte e l'altra tira ed urge Tin tin sonando con sì dolce nota Che 'l ben disposto spirto d'amor turge; Così vid'io la gloriosa ruota Muoversi e render voce a voce, in tempra Ed in dolcezza ch'esser non può nota Se non colà dove 'l gioir s'insempra.--_Parad._ 10.] [Footnote 144: E come surge, e va, ed entra in ballo Vergine lieta, sol per farne onore Alla novizia, e non per alcun fallo.--_Ibid._ 25.] [Footnote 145: Donne mi parver, non da ballo sciolte, Ma che s'arrestin tacite ascoltando Fin che le nuove note hanno ricolte.--_Ibid._ 10.] Nor is he less observant of the more delicate phenomena of mind, in its inward workings, and its connexion with the body. The play of features, the involuntary gestures and attitudes of the passions, the power of eye over eye, of hand upon hand, the charm of voice and expression, of musical sounds even when not understood--feelings, sensations, and states of mind which have a name, and others, equally numerous and equally common, which have none--these, often so fugitive, so shifting, so baffling and intangible, are expressed with a directness, a simplicity, a sense of truth at once broad and refined, which seized at once on the congenial mind of his countrymen, and pointed out to them the road which they have followed in art, unapproached as yet by any competitors.[146] [Footnote 146: For instance:--_thoughts upon thoughts, ending in sleep and dreams_: Nuovo pensier dentro de me si mise, Dal qual più altri nacquero e diversi: _E tanto d'uno in altro vaneggiai Che gli occhi per vaghezza ricopersi, E 'l pensamento in sogno trasmutai_.--_Purg._ 18. _sleep stealing off when broken by light_: Come si frange il sonno, ove di butto Nuova luce percuote 'l viso chiuso, _Che fratto guizza pria che muoja tutto_.--_Ibid._ 17. _the shock of sudden awakening_: Come al lume acuto si disonna, * * * * _E lo svegliato ciò che vede abborre,_ Sì nescia è la subita vigilia, Finchè la stimativa nol soccorre.--_Parad._ 26. _uneasy feelings produced by sight or representation of something unnatural_: Come per sostentar solajo o tetto Per mensola talvolta una figura Si vede giunger le ginocchia al petto, _La qual fa del non ver vera rancura Nascer a chi la vede_; così fatti Vid'io color.--_Purg._ 10. _blushing in innocent sympathy for others_: E come donna onesta che permane Di sè sicura, e _per l'altrui fallanza Pure ascoltando timida si fane_: Così Beatrice trasmutò sembianza.--_Par._ 27. _asking and answering by looks only_: Volsi gli occhi agli occhi al signor mio; Ond'elli m'assentì con lieto cenno Ciò che chiedea la vista del disio.--_Purg._ 19. _watching the effect of words_: Posto avea fine al suo ragionamento L'alto dottore, ad attento guardava Nella mia vista s'io parea contento. Ed io, cui nuova sete ancor frugava, Di fuor taceva e dentro dicea: forse Lo troppo dimandar ch'io fo, li grava. Ma quel padre verace, che s'accorse Del timido voler che non s'apriva, Parlando, di parlare ardir mi porse.--_Ibid._ 18. _Dante betraying Virgil's presence to Statius, by his involuntary smile_: Volser Virgilio a me queste parole Con viso che tacendo dicea: "taci;" Ma non può tutto la virtù che vuole; Che riso e pianto son tanto seguaci Alla passion da che ciascun si spicca, _Che men segnon voler ne' più veraci. Io pur sorrisi, come l'uom ch'ammicca: Perchè l'ombra si tacque, e riguardommi Negli occhi ove 'l sembiante più si ficca._ E se tanto lavoro in bene assommi, Disse, perchè la faccia tua testeso _Un lampeggiar a' un riso_ dimostrommi?--_Purg._ 21. _smiles and words together_: Per le _sorrise parolette brevi_.--_Parad._ 1. _eye meeting eye_: Gli occhi ritorsi avanti Dritti nel lume della dolce guida Che sorridendo ardea negli occhi santi.--_Ibid._ 3. Come si vede qui alcuna volta L'affetto nella vista, s'ello è tanto Che da lui sia tutta l'anima tolta: Così nel fiammeggiar del fulgor santo A cui mi volsi, conobbi la voglia In lui di ragionarmi ancora alquanto.--_Ibid._ 18. _gentleness of voice_: E cominciommi a dir soave e piana Con angelica voce in sua favella.--_Inf._ 2. E come agli occhi miei si fe' più bella, Così con voce più dolce e soave, Ma non con questa moderna favella, Dissemi;--_Parad._ 16. _chanting_: _Te lucis ante_ sì divotamente Le uscì di bocca e con sì dolce note, Che fece me a me uscir di mente. E l'altre poi dolcemente e divote Seguitar lei per tutto l'inno intero, Avendo gli occhi alle superne ruote.--_Purg._ 8. _chanting blended with the sound of the organ_: Io mi rivolsi attento al primo tuono, E _Te Deum laudamus_ mi parea Udire in voce mista al dolce suono. Tale imagine appunto mi rendea Ciò ch'io udiva, qual prender si suole _Quando a cantar con organi si stea; Ch'or sì, or no, s'intendon le parole_.--_Purg._ 9. _voices in concert_: E come in voce voce si discerne _Quando una è ferma, e' l altra va e riede_.--_Parad._ 8. _attitudes and gestures: e.g. Beatrice addressing him_, Con atto e voce di spedito duce.--_Ibid._ 30. _Sordello eyeing the travellers_: Venimmo a lei: o anima Lombarda, Come ti stavi altera e disdegnosa, E nel muover degli occhi onesta e tarda. Ella non ci diceva alcuna cosa, Ma lasciavane gir, solo guardando, A guisa di leon quando si posa.--_Purg._ 6. _the angel moving "dry-shod" over the Stygian pool_: _Dal volto rimovea quell'aer grasso Menando la sinistra innanzi spesso_, E sol di quell'angoscia parea lasso. Ben m'accorsi ch'egli era del ciel messo, E volsimi al maestro; e quei fe' segno Ch'io stessi cheto ed inchinassi ed esso. Ahi quanto mi parea pien di disdegno. * * * * Poi si rivolse per la strada lorda, E non fe' motto a noi, ma fe' sembiante D'uomo cui altra cura stringa e morda Che quella di colui che gli è davante.--_Inf._ 9.] And he has anticipated the latest schools of modern poetry, by making not merely nature, but science tributary to a poetry with whose general aim and spirit it has little in common--tributary in its exact forms, even in its technicalities. He speaks of the Mediterranean Sea, not merely as a historian, or an observer of its storms or its smiles, but as a geologist;[147] of light, not merely in its beautiful appearances, but in its natural laws.[148] There is a charm, an imaginative charm to him, not merely in the sensible magnificence of the heavens, "in their silence, and light, and watchfulness," but in the system of Ptolemy and the theories of astrology; and he delights to interweave the poetry of feeling and of the outward sense with the grandeur--so far as he knew it--of order, proportion, measured magnitudes, the relations of abstract forces, displayed on such a scene as the material universe, as if he wished to show that imagination in its boldest flight was not afraid of the company of the clear and subtle intellect. [Footnote 147: _La maggior valle_, in che l'acqua si spandi.--_Parad._ 9.] [Footnote 148: _E.g._ _Purg._ 15.] Indeed the real never daunts him. It is his leading principle of poetic composition, to draw out of things the poetry which is latent in them, either essentially, or as they are portions, images, or reflexes of something greater--not to invest them with a poetical semblance, by means of words which bring with them poetical associations, and have received a general poetical stamp. Dante has few of those indirect charms which flow from the subtle structure and refined graces of language--none of that exquisitely-fitted and self-sustained mechanism of choice words of the Greeks--none of that tempered and majestic amplitude of diction, which clothes, like the folds of a royal robe, the thoughts of the Latins--none of that abundant play of fancy and sentiment, soft or grand, in which the later Italian poets delighted. Words with him are used sparingly, never in play--never because they carry with them poetical recollections--never for their own sake; but because they are instruments which will give the deepest, clearest, sharpest stamp of that image which the poet's mind, piercing to the very heart of his subject, or seizing the characteristic feature which to other men's eyes is confused and lost among others accidental and common, draws forth in severe and living truth. Words will not always bend themselves to his demands on them; they make him often uncouth, abrupt, obscure. But he is too much in earnest to heed uncouthness; and his power over language is too great to allow uncertainty as to what he means, to be other than occasional. Nor is he a stranger to the utmost sweetness and melody of language. But it appears, unsought for and unlaboured, the spontaneous and inevitable obedience of the tongue and pen to the impressions of the mind; as grace and beauty, of themselves, "command and guide the eye" of the painter, who thinks not of his hand but of them. All is in character with the absorbed and serious earnestness which pervades the poem; there is no toying, no ornament, that a man in earnest might not throw into his words;--whether in single images, or in pictures, like that of the Meadow of the Heroes (_Inf._ 4), or the angel appearing in hell to guide the poet through the burning city (_Inf._ 9)--or in histories, like those of Count Ugolino, or the life of S. Francis (_Parad._ 11)--or in the dramatic scenes like the meeting of the poets Sordello and Virgil (_Purgat._ 6), or that one, unequalled in beauty, where Dante himself, after years of forgetfulness and sin, sees Beatrice in glory, and hears his name, never but once pronounced during the vision, from her lips.[149] [Footnote 149: Io vidi già nel cominciar del giorno La parte oriental tutta rosata, E l'altro ciel di bel sereno adorno, E la faccia del sol nascere ombrata, Sì che per temperanza di vapori L'occhio lo sostenea lunga fiata; Così dentro una nuvola di fiori, Che dalle mani angeliche saliva, E ricadeva giù dentro e di fuori, Sovra candido vel cinta d'oliva Donna m'apparve sotto verde manto Vestita di color di fiamma viva. E lo spirito mio, che già cotanto Tempo era stato che alla sua presenza Non era di stupor, tremando, affranto. Senza degli occhi aver più conoscenza, Per occulta virtù, che da lei mosse, D'antico amor senti' la gran potenza. * * * * Volsimi alla sinistra col rispitto, Col quale il fantolin corre alla mamma, Quando ha paura, o quando egli è afflitto, Per dicere a Virgilio: Men che dramma Di sangue m'è rimasa, che non tremi: Conosco i segni dell'antica fiamma. Ma Virgilio n'avea lasciati scemi Di sè, Virgilio dolcissimo padre, Virgilio, a cui per mia salute diemi: * * * * Dante, perchè Virgilio se ne vada, Non piangere anche, non piangere ancora Chè pianger ti convien per altra spada. * * * * Regalmente nell'atto ancor proterva Continuò, come colui che dice, E il più caldo parlar dietro reserva, Guardami ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice: Come degnasti d'accedere al monte? Non sapei tu, che qui è l'uom felice?--_Purg._ 30. But extracts can give but an imperfect notion of this grand and touching canto.] But this, or any other array of scenes and images, might be matched from poets of a far lower order than Dante: and to specimens which might be brought together of his audacity and extravagance, no parallel could be found except among the lowest. We cannot, honestly, plead the barbarism of the time as his excuse. That, doubtless, contributed largely to them; but they were the faults of the man. In another age, their form might have been different; yet we cannot believe so much of time, that it would have tamed Dante. Nor can we wish it. It might have made him less great: and his greatness can well bear its own blemishes, and will not less meet its due honour among men, because they can detect its kindred to themselves. The greatness of his work is not in its details--to be made or marred by them. It is the greatness of a comprehensive and vast conception, sustaining without failure the trial of its long and hazardous execution, and fulfilling at its close the hope and promise of its beginning; like the greatness--which we watch in its course with anxious suspense, and look back upon when it is secured by death, with deep admiration--of a perfect life. Many a surprise, many a difficulty, many a disappointment, many a strange reverse and alternation of feelings, attend the progress of the most patient and admiring reader of the _Commedia_; as many as attend on one who follows the unfolding of a strong character in life. We are often shocked when we were prepared to admire--repelled, when we came with sympathy; the accustomed key fails at a critical moment--depths are revealed which we cannot sound, mysteries which baffle and confound us. But the check is for a time--the gap and chasm does not dissever. Haste is even an evidence of life--the brief word, the obscure hint, the unexplained, the unfinished, or even the unachieved, are the marks of human feebleness, but are also among those of human truth. The unity of the whole is unimpaired. The strength which is working it out, though it may have at times disappointed us, shows no hollowness or exhaustion. The surprise of disappointment is balanced--there is the surprise of unimagined excellence. Powers do more than they promised; and that spontaneous and living energy, without which neither man nor poet can be trusted, and which showed its strength even in its failures, shows it more abundantly in the novelties of success--by touching sympathies which have never been touched before, by the unconstrained freshness with which it meets the proverbial and familiar, by the freedom with which it adjusts itself to a new position or an altered task--by the completeness, unstudied and instinctive, with which it holds together dissimilar and uncongenial materials, and forces the most intractable, the most unaccustomed to submission, to receive the colour of the whole--by its orderly and unmistakable onward march, and its progress, as in height, so in what corresponds to height. It was one and the same man, who rose from the despair, the agony, the vivid and vulgar horrors of the _Inferno_, to the sense and imagination of certainty, sinlessness, and joy ineffable--the same man whose power and whose sympathies failed him not, whether discriminating and enumerating, as if he had gone through them all, the various forms of human suffering, from the dull, gnawing sense of the loss of happiness, to the infinite woes of the wrecked and ruined spirit, and the coarser pangs of the material flesh; or dwelling on the changeful lights and shades of earnest repentance, in its hard, but not unaided or ungladdened struggle, and on that restoration to liberty and peace, which can change even this life into paradise, and reverse the doom which made sorrow our condition, and laughter and joy unnatural and dangerous--the penalty of that first fault, which In pianto ed in affanno Cambiò onesto riso e dolce giuoco: or rising finally above mortal experience, to imagine the freedom of the saints and the peace of eternity. In this consists the greatness of his power. It is not necessary to read through the _Commedia_ to see it--open it where we please, we see that he is on his way, and whither he is going; episode and digression share in the solemnity of the general order. And his greatness was more than that of power. That reach and play of sympathy ministered to a noble wisdom, which used it thoughtfully and consciously for a purpose to which great poetry had never yet been applied, except in the mouth of prophets. Dante was a stern man, and more than stern, among his fellows. But he has left to those who never saw his face an inheritance the most precious; he has left them that which, reflecting and interpreting their minds, does so, not to amuse, not to bewilder, not to warp, not to turn them in upon themselves in distress or gloom or selfishness; not merely to hold up a mirror to nature; but to make them true and make them hopeful. Dark as are his words of individuals, his thoughts are not dark or one-sided about mankind; his is no cherished and perverse severity--his faith is too large, too real, for such a fault. He did not write only the _Inferno_. And the _Purgatorio_ and the _Paradiso_ are not an afterthought, a feebler appendix and compensation, conceived when too late, to a finished whole, which has taken up into itself the poet's real mind. Nowhere else in poetry of equal power is there the same balanced view of what man is, and may be; nowhere so wide a grasp shown of his various capacities, so strong a desire to find a due place and function for all his various dispositions. Where he stands contrasted in his idea of human life with other poets, who have been more powerful exponents of its separate sides, is in his large and truthful comprehensiveness. Fresh from the thought of man's condition as a whole, fresh from the thought of his goodness, his greatness, his power, as well as of his evil, his mind is equally in tune when rejoicing over his restoration, as when contemplating the ruins of his fall. He never lets go the recollection that human life, if it grovels at one end in corruption and sin, and has to pass through the sweat and dust and disfigurement of earthly toil, has throughout, compensations, remedies, functions, spheres innumerable of profitable activity, sources inexhaustible of delight and consolation--and at the other end a perfection which cannot be named. No one ever measured the greatness of man in all its forms with so true and yet with so admiring an eye, and with such glowing hope, as he who has also portrayed so awfully man's littleness and vileness. And he went farther--no one who could understand and do homage to greatness in man, ever drew the line so strongly between greatness and goodness, and so unhesitatingly placed the hero of this world only--placed him in all his magnificence, honoured with no timid or dissembling reverence--at the distance of worlds, below the place of the lowest saint. Those who know the _Divina Commedia_ best, will best know how hard it is to be the interpreter of such a mind; but they will sympathise with the wish to call attention to it. They know, and would wish others also to know, not by hearsay, but by experience, the power of that wonderful poem. They know its austere, yet subduing beauty; they know what force there is, in its free and earnest and solemn verse, to strengthen, to tranquillise, to console. It is a small thing that it has the secret of Nature and Man; that a few keen words have opened their eyes to new sights in earth, and sea, and sky; have taught them new mysteries of sound; have made them recognise, in distinct image or thought, fugitive feelings, or their unheeded expression, by look, or gesture, or motion; that it has enriched the public and collective memory of society with new instances, never to be lost, of human feeling and fortune; has charmed ear and mind by the music of its stately march, and the variety and completeness of its plan. But, besides this, they know how often its seriousness has put to shame their trifling, its magnanimity their faintheartedness, its living energy their indolence, its stern and sad grandeur rebuked low thoughts, its thrilling tenderness overcome sullenness and assuaged distress, its strong faith quelled despair and soothed perplexity, its vast grasp imparted the sense of harmony to the view of clashing truths. They know how often they have found, in times of trouble, if not light, at least that deep sense of reality, permanent, though unseen, which is more than light can always give--in the view which it has suggested to them of the judgments and the love of God.[150] [Footnote 150: It is necessary to state, that these remarks were written before we had seen the chapter on Dante in "Italy, past and present, by L. Mariotti." Had we become acquainted with it earlier, we should have had to refer to it often, in the way of acknowledgment, and as often in the way of strong protest.] DE MONARCHIA. BOOK I. I.--It very greatly concerns all men on whom a higher nature has impressed[151] the love of truth, that, as they have been enriched by the labour of those before them, so they also should labour for those that are to come after them, to the end that posterity may receive from them an addition to its wealth. For he is far astray from his duty--let him not doubt it--who, having been trained in the lessons of public business, cares not himself to contribute aught to the public good. He is no "tree planted by the water-side, that bringeth forth his fruit in due season." He is rather the devouring whirlpool, ever engulfing, but restoring nothing. Pondering, therefore, often on these things, lest some day I should have to answer the charge of the talent buried in the earth, I desire not only to show the budding promise, but also to bear fruit for the general good, and to set forth truths by others unattempted. For what fruit can he be said to bear who should go about to demonstrate again some theorem of Euclid? or when Aristotle has shown us what happiness is, should show it to us once more? or when Cicero has been the apologist of old age, should a second time undertake its defence? Such squandering of labour would only engender weariness and not profit. [Footnote 151: "_In quos veritatis amorem natura superior impressit._" On the ancient idea (Aug. _De Trin._ iii. 4; Aquin. _Summ._ 1, 66, 3) of the influence or impression of higher natures on lower, cf. _Parad._ i. 103, x. 29.] But seeing that among other truths, ill-understood yet profitable, the knowledge touching temporal monarchy is at once most profitable and most obscure, and that because it has no immediate reference to worldly gain it is left unexplored by all, therefore it is my purpose to draw it forth from its hiding-places, as well that I may spend my toil for the benefit of the world, as that I may be the first to win the prize of so great an achievement to my own glory. The work indeed is difficult, and I am attempting what is beyond my strength; but I trust not in my own powers, but in the light of that Bountiful Giver, "Who giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not." II.--First, therefore, we must see what is it that is called Temporal Monarchy, in its idea, so to speak, and according to its purpose. Temporal Monarchy, then, or, as men call it, the Empire, is the government of one prince above all men in time, or in those things and over those things which are measured by time. Three great questions are asked concerning it. First, there is the doubt and the question, is it necessary for the welfare of the world? Secondly, did the Roman people take to itself by right the office of Monarchy? And thirdly, does the authority of Monarchy come from God directly, or only from some other minister or vicar of God? Now, since every truth, which is not itself a first principle, becomes manifest from the truth of some first principle, it is therefore necessary in every inquiry to have a knowledge of the first principle involved, to which by analysis we may go back for the certainty of all the propositions which are afterwards accepted. And since this treatise is an inquiry, we must begin by examining the first principle on the strength of which deductions are to rest. It must be understood then that there are certain things which, since they are not subject to our power, are matters of speculation, but not of action: such are Mathematics and Physics, and things divine. But there are some things which, since they are subject to our power, are matters of action as well as of speculation, and in them we do not act for the sake of speculation, but contrariwise: for in such things action is the end. Now, since the matter which we have in hand has to do with states, nay, with the very origin and principle of good forms of government, and since all that concerns states is subject to our power, it is manifest that our subject is not in the first place speculation, but action. And again, since in matters of action the end sought is the first principle and cause of all (for that it is which first moves the agent to act), it follows that all our method concerning the means which are set to gain the end must be taken from the end. For there will be one way of cutting wood to build a house, and another to build a ship. That therefore, if it exists, which is the ultimate end for the universal civil order of mankind, will be the first principle from which all the truth of our future deductions will be sufficiently manifest. But it is folly to think that there is an end for this and for that particular civil order, and yet not one end for all. III.--Now, therefore, we must see what is the end of the whole civil order of men; and when we have found this, then, as the Philosopher[152] says in his book to Nicomachus,[153] the half of our labour will have been accomplished. And to render the question clearer, we must observe that as there is a certain end for which nature makes the thumb, and another, different from this, for which she makes the whole hand, and again another for which she makes the arm, and another different from all for which she makes the whole man; so there is one end for which she orders the individual man, and another for which she orders the family, and another end for the city, and another for the kingdom, and finally an ultimate one for which the Everlasting God, by His art which is nature, brings into being the whole human race. And this is what we seek as a first principle to guide our whole inquiry. [Footnote 152: The common title for Aristotle from the first half of the thirteenth century. _Vide_ Jourdain, _Recherches sur les traductions d'Aristote_, p. 212, note.] [Footnote 153: Arist. _Ethics_, i. 7.] Let it then be understood that God and nature make nothing to be idle. Whatever comes into being, exists for some operation or working. For no created essence is an ultimate end in the creator's purpose, so far as he is a creator, but rather the proper operation of that essence. Therefore it follows that the operation does not exist for the sake of the essence, but the essence for the sake of the operation. There is therefore a certain proper operation of the whole body of human kind, for which this whole body of men in all its multitudes is ordered and constituted, but to which no one man, nor single family, nor single neighbourhood, nor single city, nor particular kingdom can attain. What this is will be manifest, if we can find what is the final and characteristic capacity of humanity as a whole. I say then that no quality which is shared by different species of things is the distinguishing capacity of any one of them. For were it so, since this capacity is that which makes each species what it is, it would follow that one essence would be specifically distributed to many species, which is impossible. Therefore the ultimate quality of men is not existence, taken simply; for the elements share therein. Nor is it existence under certain conditions;[154] for we find this in minerals too. Nor is it existence with life; for plants too have life. Nor is it percipient existence; for brutes share in this power. It is to be percipient[155] with the possibility of understanding, for this quality falls to the lot of none but man, either above or below him. For though there are other beings which with him have understanding, yet this understanding is not, as man's, capable of development. For such beings are only certain intellectual natures, and not anything besides, and their being is nothing other than to understand; which is without interruption, otherwise they would not be eternal. It is plain, therefore, that the distinguishing quality of humanity is the faculty or the power of understanding. [Footnote 154: "_Esse complexionatum._"] [Footnote 155: "_Apprehensivum per intellectum possibilem._" _V. Aquin._ I. 79, 1, 2, 10.] And because this faculty cannot be realised in act in its entirety at one time by a single man, nor by any of the individual societies which we have marked, therefore there must be multitude in the human race, in order to realise it: just as it is necessary that there should be a multitude of things which can be brought into being,[156] so that the capacity of the primal matter for being acted on may be ever open to what acts on it. For if this were not so, we could speak of a capacity apart from its substance, which is impossible. And with this opinion Averroes, in his comment on [Aristotle's] treatise on the Soul, agrees. For the capacity for understanding, of which I speak, is concerned not only with universal forms or species, but also, by a kind of extension, with particular ones. Therefore it is commonly said that the speculative understanding becomes practical by extension; and then its end is to do and to make. This I say in reference to things which may be _done_, which are regulated by political wisdom, and in reference to things which may be _made_, which are regulated by art; all which things wait as handmaidens on the speculative intellect, as on that best good, for which the Primal Goodness created the human race. Hence the saying of the Politics[157] that those who are strong in understanding are the natural rulers of others. [Footnote 156: "_Generabilium._"] [Footnote 157: Arist. _Polit._ i. 5, 6.--(W.)] IV.--It has thus been sufficiently set forth that the proper work of the human race, taken as a whole, is to set in action the whole capacity of that understanding which is capable of development: first in the way of speculation, and then, by its extension, in the way of action. And seeing that what is true of a part is true also of the whole, and that it is by rest and quiet that the individual man becomes perfect in wisdom and prudence; so the human race, by living in the calm and tranquillity of peace, applies itself most freely and easily to its proper work; a work which, according to the saying; "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels," is almost divine. Whence it is manifest that of all things that are ordered to secure blessings to men, peace is the best. And hence the word which sounded to the shepherds from above was not riches, nor pleasure, nor honour, nor length of life, nor health, nor strength, nor beauty; but peace. For the heavenly host said: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace to men of goodwill." Therefore also, "Peace be with you," was the salutation of the Saviour of mankind. For it behoved Him, who was the greatest of saviours, to utter in His greeting the greatest of saving blessings. And this custom His disciples too chose to preserve; and Paul also did the same in his greetings, as may appear manifest to all. Now that we have declared these matters, it is plain what is the better, nay the best, way in which mankind may attain to do its proper work. And consequently we have seen the readiest means by which to arrive at the point, for which all our works are ordered, as their ultimate end; namely, the universal peace, which is to be assumed as the first principle for our deductions. As we said, this assumption was necessary, for it is as a sign-post to us, that into it we may resolve all that has to be proved, as into a most manifest truth. V.--As therefore we have already said, there are three doubts, and these doubts suggest three questions, concerning Temporal Monarchy, which in more common speech is called the Empire; and our purpose is, as we explained, to inquire concerning these questions in their given order, and starting from the first principle which we have just laid down. The first question, then, is whether Temporal Monarchy is necessary for the welfare of the world; and that it is necessary can, I think, be shown by the strongest and most manifest arguments; for nothing, either of reason or of authority, opposes me. Let us first take the authority of the Philosopher in his Politics.[158] There, on his venerable authority, it is said that where a number of things are arranged to attain an end, it behoves one of them to regulate or govern the others, and the others to submit. And it is not only the authority of his illustrious name which makes this worthy of belief, but also reason, instancing particulars. [Footnote 158: Arist. _Polit._ i. 5.] If we take the case of a single man, we shall see the same rule manifested in him: all his powers are ordered to gain happiness; but his understanding is what regulates and governs all the others; and otherwise he would never attain to happiness. Again, take a single household: its end is to fit the members thereof to live well; but there must be one to regulate and rule it, who is called the father of the family, or, it may be, one who holds his office. As the Philosopher says: "Every house is ruled by the oldest."[159] And, as Homer says, it is his duty to make rules and laws for the rest. Hence the proverbial curse: "Mayst thou have an equal at home."[160] Take a single village: its end is suitable assistance as regards persons and goods, but one in it must be the ruler of the rest, either set over them by another, or with their consent, the head man amongst them. If it be not so, not only do its inhabitants fail of this mutual assistance, but the whole neighbourhood is sometimes wholly ruined by the ambition of many, who each of them wish to rule. If, again, we take a single city: its end is to secure a good and sufficient life to the citizens; but one man must be ruler in imperfect[161] as well as in good forms of the state. If it is otherwise, not only is the end of civil life lost, but the city too ceases to be what it was. Lastly, if we take any one kingdom, of which the end is the same as that of a city, only with greater security for its tranquillity, there must be one king to rule and govern. For if this is not so, not only do his subjects miss their end, but the kingdom itself falls to destruction, according to that word of the infallible truth: "Every kingdom divided against itself shall be brought to desolation." If then this holds good in these cases, and in each individual thing which is ordered to one certain end, what we have laid down is true. [Footnote 159: _Ibid._ i. 2, 6, quoting Hom. _Od._ ix. 114.--(W.)] [Footnote 160: Ficinus translates: "Uno proverbio che quasi bestemmiando dice, _Abbi pari in casa_."] [Footnote 161: "_Obliqua_" = [Greek: parekbaseis]. _V._ Arist. _Eth._ viii. 10; _Pol._ iii. 7.--(W.)] Now it is plain that the whole human race is ordered to gain some end, as has been before shown. There must, therefore, be one to guide and govern, and the proper title for this office is Monarch or Emperor. And so it is plain that Monarchy or the Empire is necessary for the welfare of the world. VI.--And as the part is to the whole, so is the order of parts to the order of the whole. The part is to the whole, as to an end and highest good which is aimed at; and, therefore, the order in the parts is to the order in the whole, as it is to the end and highest good aimed at. Hence we have it that the goodness of the order of parts does not exceed the goodness of the order of the whole, but that the converse of this is true. Therefore we find a double order in the world, namely, the order of parts in relation to each other, and their order in relation to some one thing which is not a part (as there is in the order of the parts of an army in relation to each other, and then in relation to the general); and the order of the parts in relation to the one thing which is not a part is the higher, for it is the end of the other order, and the other exists for the sake of it. Therefore, if the form of this order is found in the units of the mass of mankind, much more may we argue by our syllogism that it is found in mankind considered as a whole; for this latter order, or its form, is better. But as was said in the preceding chapter, and it is sufficiently plain, this order is found in all the units of the mass of mankind. Therefore it is, or should be, found in the mass considered as a whole. And therefore all the parts that we have mentioned, which are comprised in kingdoms, and the kingdoms themselves ought to be ordered with reference to one Prince or Princedom, that is, with reference to a Monarch or Monarchy. VII.--Further, the whole human race is a whole with reference to certain parts, and, with reference to another whole, it is a part. For it is a whole with reference to particular kingdoms and nations, as we have shown; and it is a part with reference to the whole universe, as is manifest without argument. Therefore, as the lower portions of the whole system of humanity are well adapted to that whole, so that whole is said to be well adapted to the whole which is above it. It is only under the rule of one prince that the parts of humanity are well adapted to their whole, as may easily be collected from what we have said; therefore it is only by being under one Princedom, or the rule of a single Prince, that humanity as a whole is well adapted to the Universe, or its Prince, who is the One God. And it therefore follows that Monarchy is necessary for the welfare of the world. VIII.--And all is well and at its best which exists according to the will of the first agent, who is God. This is self-evident, except to those who deny that the divine goodness attains to absolute perfection. Now, it is the intention of God that all created things should represent the likeness of God, so far as their proper nature will admit. Therefore was it said: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." And though it could not be said that the lower part of creation was made in the image of God, yet all things may be said to be after His likeness, for what is the whole universe but the footprint of the divine goodness? The human race, therefore, is well, nay at its best state, when, so far as can be, it is made like unto God. But the human race is then most made like unto God when most it is one; for the true principle of oneness is in Him alone. Wherefore it is written: "Hear, O Israel; the Lord thy God is one God." But the race of man is most one when it is united wholly in one body, and it is evident that this cannot be, except when it is subject to one prince. Therefore in this subjection mankind is most made like unto God, and, in consequence, such a subjection is in accordance with the divine intention, and it is indeed well and best for man when this is so, as we showed at the beginning of this chapter. IX.--Again, things are well and at their best with every son when he follows, so far as by his proper nature he can, the footsteps of a perfect father. Mankind is the son of heaven, which is most perfect in all its works; for it is "man and the sun which produce man," according to the second book on Natural Learning.[162] The human race, therefore, is at its best when it imitates the movements of heaven, so far as human nature allows. And since the whole heaven is regulated with one motion, to wit, that of the _primum mobile_, and by one mover, who is God, in all its parts, movements, and movers (and this human reason readily seizes from science); therefore, if our argument be correct, the human race is at its best state when, both in its movements, and in regard to those who move it, it is regulated by a single Prince, as by the single movement of heaven, and by one law, as by the single motion. Therefore it is evidently necessary for the welfare of the world for there to be a Monarchy, or single Princedom, which men call the Empire. And this thought did Boethius breathe when he said: "Oh happy race of men, if your hearts are ruled by the love which rules the heaven."[163] [Footnote 162: Arist. _Phys. Ausc._ ii. 2.--(W.)] [Footnote 163: _De Consol. Phil._ ii. met. 8.--(W.)] X.--Wherever there is controversy, there ought to be judgment, otherwise there would be imperfection without its proper remedy,[164] which is impossible; for God and Nature, in things necessary, do not fail in their provisions. But it is manifest that there may be controversy between any two princes, where the one is not subject to the other, either from the fault of themselves, or even of their subjects. Therefore between them there should be means of judgment. And since, when one is not subject to the other, he cannot be judged by the other (for there is no rule of equals over equals), there must be a third prince of wider jurisdiction, within the circle of whose laws both may come. Either he will or he will not be a Monarch. If he is, we have what we sought; if not, then this one again will have an equal, who is not subject to his jurisdiction, and then again we have need of a third. And so we must either go on to infinity, which is impossible, or we must come to that judge who is first and highest; by whose judgment all controversies shall be either directly or indirectly decided; and he will be Monarch or Emperor. Monarchy is therefore necessary to the world, and this the Philosopher saw when he said: "The world is not intended to be disposed in evil order; 'in a multitude of rulers there is evil, therefore let there be one prince.'"[165] [Footnote 164: "_Sine proprio perfectivo._"] [Footnote 165: Arist. _Metaphys._ xii. 10, who quotes from Hom. _Il._ ii. 204.--(W.)] XI.--Further, the world is ordered best when justice is most paramount therein: whence Virgil, wishing to celebrate that age, which in his own time seemed to be arising, sang in his _Bucolics_:[166] "Now doth the Virgin return, and the kingdom of Saturn." For Justice was named "the Virgin," and also Astræa. The kingdom of Saturn was the good time, which they also called the Golden Age. But Justice is paramount only in a Monarchy, and therefore a Monarchy, that is, the Empire, is needed if the world is to be ordered for the best. For better proof of this assumption it must be recognised that Justice, considered in itself, and in its proper nature, is a certain rightness or rule of conduct, which rejects on either side all that deviates from it. It is like whiteness considered as an abstraction, not admitting of degrees. For there are certain forms of this sort which belong to things compounded, and exist themselves in a simple and unchanging essence, as[167] the Master of the Six Principles rightly says. Yet qualities of this sort admit of degrees on the part of their subjects with which they are connected, according as in their subjects more or less of their contraries is mingled. Justice, therefore, is strongest in man, both as a state of mind and in practice, where there is least admixture of its opposite; and then we may say of it, in the words of the Philosopher, that "neither the star of morning nor of evening is so admirable."[168] For then is it like Phoebe, when she looks across the heavens at her brother from the purple of the morning calm. [Footnote 166: _Ecl._ iv. 6.] [Footnote 167: Gilbert de la Porrée, [dagger symbol]1154. The "Six Principles" were the last six of the Ten Categories of Aristotle, and the book became one of the chief elementary logic-books of the Middle Ages. _Vide_ Hauréau, _Philosophie Scolastique_, 1e Partie, p. 452.] [Footnote 168: From Arist. _Ethics_, v. 1.--(W.)] Now Justice, as a state of mind,[169] has a force which opposes it in the will; for where the will of a man is not pure from all desire, then, though there be Justice, yet there is not Justice in all its ideal brightness; for there is in that man, however little, yet in some degree, an opposing force; and therefore they, who would work on the feelings[170] of a judge, are rightly repelled. But, in practice,[171] Justice finds an opposing force in what men are able to do. For, seeing that it is a virtue regulating our conduct towards other men, how shall any act according to Justice if he has not the power of rendering to all their due? Therefore it is plain that the operation of Justice will be wide in proportion to the power of the just man. [Footnote 169: "_Quantum ad habitum._"] [Footnote 170: "_Passionare._"] [Footnote 171: "_Quantum ad operationem._"] From this let us argue: Justice is strongest in the world when it is in one who is most willing and most powerful; only the Monarch is this; therefore, only when Justice is in the Monarch is it strongest in the world. This pro-syllogism goes on through the second figure, with an involved negative, and is like this: All B is A; only C is A; therefore only C is B: or all B is A; nothing but C is A; therefore nothing but C is B. Our previous explanation makes the first proposition apparent: the second is proved thus, first in regard to will, and secondly in regard to power. First it must be observed that the strongest opponent of Justice is Appetite, as Aristotle intimates in the fifth book to Nicomachus.[172] Remove Appetite altogether, and there remains nothing adverse to Justice; and therefore it is the opinion of the Philosopher that nothing should be left to the judge, if it can be decided by law;[173] and this ought to be done for fear of Appetite, which easily perverts men's minds. Where, then, there is nothing to be wished for, there can be no Appetite, for the passions cannot exist if their objects are destroyed. But the Monarch has nothing to desire, for his jurisdiction is bounded only by the ocean; and this is not the case with other princes, whose kingdoms are bounded by those of their neighbours; as, for instance, the kingdom of Castile is bounded by the kingdom of Aragon. From which it follows that the Monarch is able to be the purest embodiment of Justice among men. [Footnote 172: _Eth._ v. 2.--(W.)] [Footnote 173: _Rhetoric_, i. 1.--(W.)] Further, as Appetite in some degree, however small, clouds the habit of Justice, so does Charity, or rightly-directed affection, sharpen and enlighten it. In whomsoever, therefore, rightly-directed affection may chiefly dwell, in him may Justice best have place: and of this sort is the Monarch. Therefore where a Monarch reigns Justice is, or at least may be, strongest. That rightly-directed affections work as we have said, we may see thus: Appetite, scorning[174] what in itself belongs to man, seeks for other things outside him; but Charity sets aside all else, and seeks God and man, and consequently the good of man. And since of all the good things that men can have the greatest is to live in peace (as we have already said), and as it is Justice which most chiefly brings peace, therefore Charity will chiefly make Justice strong, and the more so in proportion to its own strength. [Footnote 174: "_Perseitas hominum_" = "_facultas per se subsistendi_."--DUCANGE.] And it is clear that right affections ought to exist in a Monarch more than in any other man for this reason: the object of love is the more loved the nearer it is to him that loves; but men are nearer to a Monarch than they are to other princes; therefore it is by a Monarch that they are, or ought to be, most loved. The first proposition is manifest if the nature of activity and passivity are considered. The second is manifest because men are brought near to a Monarch in their totality,[175] but to other princes only partially; and it is only by means of the Monarch that men are brought near other princes at all. Thus the Monarch cares for all primarily and directly, whereas other princes only care for their subjects through the Monarch, and because their care for their subjects descends from the supreme care of the Monarch. [Footnote 175: "_Secundum totum._"] Again, a cause has the nature of a cause in proportion as it is more universal; for the lower cause is such only on account of the higher one, as appears from the Treatise on Causes.[176] And, in proportion as a cause is really a cause, it loves what it effects; for such love follows the cause by itself. Now Monarchy is the most universal cause of men living well, for other princes work only through the Monarch, as we have said; and it therefore follows that it is the Monarch who will most chiefly love the good of men. But that in practice the Monarch is most disposed to work Justice, who can doubt, except indeed a man who understands not the meaning of the word? for if he be really a Monarch he cannot have enemies. [Footnote 176: A compilation from the Arabians, or perhaps Aristotle or Proclus, which, under various names, passed for a work of Aristotle, and is ascribed by Albert the Great to a certain David the Jew. It is quoted in the twelfth century, and was commented on by Albert and Thomas Aquinas. _Vide_ Jourdain, _Recherches sur les traductions d'Aristote_ (1842), pp. 114, 184, 193, 195, 445; _Philosophie de S. Thomas_ (1858), i. 94.] The principle assumed being therefore sufficiently explained, the conclusion is certain, to wit, that a Monarch is necessary that the world may be ordered for the best. XII.--Again, the human race is ordered best when it is most free. This will be manifest if we see what is the principle of freedom. It must be understood that the first principle of our freedom is freedom of will, which many have in their mouth, but few indeed understand. For they come so far as to say that the freedom of the will means a free judgment concerning will. And this is true. But what is meant by the words is far from them: and they do just as our logicians do all day long with certain propositions which are set as examples in the books of logic, as that, "the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles."[177] [Footnote 177: Cf. Arist. _Magna Moral._ i. 1: "It would be absurd if a man, wishing to prove that the angles of a triangle were equal to two right angles, assumed as his principle that the soul is immortal."--WITTE.] Therefore I say that Judgment is between Apprehension and Appetite. First, a man apprehends a thing; then he judges it to be good or bad; then he pursues or avoids it accordingly. If therefore the Judgment guides the Appetite wholly, and in no way is forestalled by the Appetite, then is the Judgment free. But if the Appetite in any way at all forestalls the Judgment and guides it, then the Judgment cannot be free: it is not its own: it is captive to another power. Therefore the brute beasts cannot have freedom of Judgment; for in them the Appetite always forestalls the Judgment. Therefore, too, it is that intellectual beings whose wills are unchangeable, and souls which are separate from the body, which have gone hence in peace, do not lose the freedom of their wills, because their wishes cannot change; nay, it is in full strength and completeness that their wills are free.[178] [Footnote 178: Cf. _Purgatorio_, xviii. 22.--WITTE.] It is therefore again manifest that this liberty, or this principle of all our liberty, is the greatest gift bestowed by God on mankind: by it alone we gain happiness[179] as men: by it alone we gain happiness elsewhere as gods.[180] But if this is so, who will say that human kind is not in its best state, when it can most use this principle? But he who lives under a Monarchy is most free. Therefore let it be understood that he is free who exists not for another's sake but for his own, as the Philosopher, in his Treatise of simple Being, thought.[181] For everything which exists for the sake of some other thing, is necessitated by that other thing, as a road has to run to its ordained end. Men exist for themselves, and not at the pleasure of others, only if a Monarch rules; for then only are the perverted forms of government set right, while democracies, oligarchies, and tyrannies, drive mankind into slavery, as is obvious to any who goes about among them all; and public power[182] is in the hands of kings and aristocracies, which they call the rule of the best, and champions of popular liberty. And because the Monarch loves his subjects much, as we have seen, he wishes all men to be good, which cannot be the case in perverted forms of government:[183] therefore the Philosopher says, in his _Politics_:[184] "In the bad state the good man is a bad citizen, but in a good state the two coincide." Good states in this way aim at liberty, that in them men may live for themselves. The citizens exist not for the good of consuls, nor the nation for the good of its king; but the consuls for the good of the citizens, and the king for the good of his nation. For as the laws are made to suit the state, and not the state to suit the laws, so those who live under the laws are not ordered for the legislator, but he for them;[185] as also the Philosopher holds, in what he has left us on the present subject. Hence, too, it is clear that although the king or the consul rule over the other citizens in respect of the means[186] of government, yet in respect of the end of government they are the servants of the citizens, and especially the Monarch, who, without doubt, must be held the servant of all. Thus it becomes clear that the Monarch is bound by the end appointed to himself in making his laws. Therefore mankind is best off under a Monarchy, and hence it follows that Monarchy is necessary for the welfare of the world. [Footnote 179: "_Felicitamur._"] [Footnote 180: "_Ut Dii_;" cf. _Paradiso_, v. 19.--WITTE.] [Footnote 181: _I.e._ _Metaphys._ 1, 2.--(W.)] [Footnote 182: "_Politizant reges._"] [Footnote 183: "_Oblique politizantes._"] [Footnote 184: _Polit._ iii. 4.] [Footnote 185: _Ibid._ iii. 16, 17.--(W.)] [Footnote 186: "_Respectu viæ ... respectu termini._"] XIII.--Further, he who can be best fitted to rule can best fit others. For in every action the main end of the agent, whether acting by necessity of nature or voluntarily, is to unfold his own likeness; and therefore every agent, so far as he is of this sort, delights in action. For since all that is desires its own existence, and since the agent in acting enlarges his own existence in some way, delight follows action of necessity; for delight is inseparable from gaining what is desired. Nothing therefore acts unless it is of such sort as that which is acted on ought to be; therefore the Philosopher said in his _Metaphysics_,[187] "Everything which becomes actual from being potential, becomes so by means of something actual of the same kind," and were anything to try to act in any other way it would fail. Hence we may overthrow the error of those who think to form the moral character of others by speaking well and doing ill; forgetting that the hands of Jacob were more persuasive with his father than his words, though his hands deceived and his voice spake truth. Hence the Philosopher, to Nicomachus: "In matters of feeling and action, words are less to be trusted than deeds."[188] And therefore God said to David in his sin, "What hast thou to do to declare my statutes?" as though He would say, "Thou speakest in vain, for thou art different from what thou speakest." Hence it may be gathered that he needs to be fitted for his work in the best way who wishes to fit others. [Footnote 187: _Metaphys._ ix. 8.--(W.)] [Footnote 188: Arist. _Eth._ x. 1.--(W.)] But the Monarch is the only one who can be fitted in the best possible way to govern. Which is thus proved: Each thing is the more easily and perfectly qualified for any habit, or actual work, the less there is in it of what is contrary to such a disposition. Therefore, they who have never even heard of philosophy, arrive at a habit of truth in philosophy more easily and completely than those who have listened to it at odd times, and are filled with false opinions. For which reason Galen well says: "Such as these require double time to acquire knowledge."[189] A Monarch then has nothing to tempt appetite, or, at least, less than any other man, as we have shown before; whereas other princes have much; and appetite is the only corrupter of righteousness, and the only impediment to justice. A Monarch therefore is wholly, or at least more than any other prince, disposed to govern well: for in him there may be judgment and justice more strongly than in any other. But these two things are the pre-eminent attributes of a maker of law, and of an executor of law, as that most holy king David testified when he asked of God the things which were befitting the king, and the king's son, saying: "Give the king thy judgment, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king's son."[190] [Footnote 189: _De cognosc. animi morbis_, c. 10.--WITTE.] [Footnote 190: Cf. _Parad._ xiii. 95.--(W.)] We were right then when we assumed that only the Monarch can be best fitted to rule. Therefore only the Monarch can in the best way fit other men. Therefore it follows that Monarchy is necessary for the best ordering of the world. XIV.--And where a thing can be done by one agent, it is better to do it by one than by several, for this reason: Let it be possible to do a certain thing by means of A, and also by means of A and B. If therefore what is done by A and B can be done by A alone, it is useless to add B; for nothing follows from the addition; for the same end which A and B produced is produced also by A. All additions of this kind are useless and superfluous: all that is superfluous is displeasing to God and Nature: and all that is displeasing to God and Nature is bad, as is manifest. It therefore follows not only that it is better that a thing should be done by one than by many agents, if it is possible to produce the effect by one; but also that to produce the effect by one is good, and to produce it by many is simply bad. Again, a thing is said to be better by being nearer to the best, and the end has the nature of the best. But for a thing to be done by one agent is better, for so it comes nearer to the end. And that so it comes nearer is manifest; for let C be the end which may be reached by A, or by A and B together: plainly it is longer to reach C by A and B together than by B alone. But mankind may be governed by one supreme prince, who is, the Monarch. But it must be carefully observed that when we say that mankind may be ruled by one supreme prince, we do not mean that the most trifling judgments for each particular town are to proceed immediately from him. For municipal laws sometimes fail, and need guidance, as the Philosopher shows in his fifth book to Nicomachus, when he praises equity.[191] For nations and kingdoms and states have, each of them, certain peculiarities which must be regulated by different laws. For law is the rule which directs life. Thus the Scythians need one rule, for they live beyond the seventh climate,[192] and suffer cold which is almost unbearable, from the great inequality of their days and nights. But the Garamantes need a different law, for their country is equinoctial, and they cannot wear many clothes, from the excessive heat of the air, because the day is as long as the darkness of the night. But our meaning is that it is in those matters which are common to all men, that men should be ruled by one Monarch, and be governed by a rule common to them all, with a view to their peace. And the individual princes must receive this rule of life or law from him, just as the practical intellect receives its major premiss from the speculative intellect, under which it places its own particular premiss, and then draws its particular conclusion, with a view to action. And it is not only possible for one man to act as we have described; it is necessary that it should proceed from one man only to avoid confusion in our first principles. Moses himself wrote in his law that he had acted thus. For he took the elders of the tribes of the children of Israel, and left to them the lesser judgments, reserving to himself such as were more important, and wider in their scope; and the elders carried these wider ones to their tribes, according as they were applicable to each separate tribe. [Footnote 191: _Eth._ v. 14.--(W.)] [Footnote 192: Ptolemy, the mediæval authority on geography, divided the known world into [Greek: klimata], zones of slope towards the pole, or belts of latitude, eight of which from the equinoctial to the mouths of the Tanais and the Riphæan mountains. The seventh "clima" passed over the mouths of the Borysthenes. See Mercator's map in Bertius' _Theatrum Geographiæ Veteris_ (1618), art. "Ptolemy" in Smith's _Dictionary of Biography_, p. 577. Dictionary of Antiquities, art. "Clima."] Therefore it is better for the human race to be ruled by one than by many, and therefore there should be a Monarch, who is a single prince; and if it is better, it is more acceptable to God, since God always wills what is best. And since of these two ways of government the one is not only the better, but the best of all, it follows not only that this one is more acceptable to God as between one and many, but that it is the most acceptable. Therefore it is best for the human race to be governed by one man; and Monarchy is necessary for the welfare of the world. XV.--I say also that Being, and Unity, and the Good come in order after the fifth mode of priority.[193] For Being comes by nature before Unity, and Unity before Good. Where Being is most, there Unity is greatest; and where Unity is greatest, there Good is also greatest; and in proportion as anything is far from Being in its highest form, is it far from Unity, and therefore from Good. Therefore in every kind of things, that which is most one is best, as the Philosopher holds in the treatise about simple Being. Therefore it appears that to be one is the root of Good, and to be many the root of Evil. Therefore, Pythagoras in his parallel tables placed the one, or Unity, under the line of good, and the many under the line of Evil; as appears from the first book of the _Metaphysics_.[194] Hence we may see that to sin is nothing else than to pass on from the one which we despise and to seek many things, as the Psalmist saw when he said: "By the fruit of their corn and wine and oil, are they multiplied."[195] [Footnote 193: Arist. _Categ._, _e.g._: Priority is said in five ways--1. First in _time_. 2. First in _pre-supposition_. 3. First in _order_. 4. First in _excellence_. 5. First in _logical sequence_.] [Footnote 194: _V._ Arist. _Metaph._ 1, 5; _Ethics_ i. 4; cf. Ritter and Preller, _Hist. Philos._ sec. 105.] [Footnote 195: Ps. iv. 8 (vulg.).] Hence it is plain that whatever is good, is good for this reason, that it consists in unity. And because concord is a good thing in so far as it is concord, it is manifest that it consists in a certain unity, as its proper root, the nature of which will appear if we find the real nature of concord. Concord then is the uniform motion of many wills; and hence it appears that a unity of wills, by which is meant their uniform motion, is the root of concord, nay, concord itself. For as we should say that many clods of earth are concordant, because that they all gravitate together towards the centre; and that many flames are concordant because that they all ascend together towards the circumference, if they did this of their own free will, so we say that many men are in concord because that they are all moved together, as regards their willing, to one thing, which one thing is formally in their wills just as there is one quality formally in the clods of earth, that is gravity, and one in the flame of fire, that is lightness. For the force of willing is a certain power; but the quality of good which it apprehends is its form; which form, like as others, being one is multiplied in itself, according to the multiplication of the matters which receive it, as the soul, and numbers, and other forms which belong to what is compound.[196] [Footnote 196: On the scholastic doctrine of forms, _v._ Thom. Aquin. _Summ._ I. 105, art. 4.] To explain our assumption as we proposed, let us argue thus: All concord depends on unity which is in wills; the human race, when it is at its best, is a kind of concord; for as one man at his best is a kind of concord, and as the like is true of the family, the city, and the kingdom; so is it of the whole human race. Therefore the human race at its best depends on the unity which is in will. But this cannot be unless there be one will to be the single mistress and regulating influence of all the rest. For the wills of men, on account of the blandishments of youth, require one to direct them, as Aristotle shows in the tenth book of his _Ethics_.[197] And this cannot be unless there is one prince over all, whose will shall be the mistress and regulating influence of all the others. But if all these conclusions be true, as they are, it is necessary for the highest welfare of the human race that there should be a Monarch in the world; and therefore Monarchy is necessary for the good of the world. [Footnote 197: Arist. _Eth._ x. 5.--(W.)] XVI.--To all these reasons alleged above a memorable experience adds its confirmation. I mean that condition of mankind which the Son of God, when, for the salvation of man, He was about to put on man, either waited for, or, at the moment when He willed, Himself so ordered. For if, from the fall of our first parents, which was the turning point at which all our going astray began, we carry our thoughts over the distribution of the human race and the order of its times, we shall find that never but under the divine Augustus, who was sole ruler, and under whom a perfect Monarchy existed, was the world everywhere quiet. And that then the human race was happy in the tranquillity of universal peace, this is the witness of all writers of history; this is the witness of famous poets; this, too, he who wrote the story of the "meekness and gentleness of Christ" has thought fit to attest. And last of all, Paul has called that most blessed condition "the fulness of the times." For then, indeed, time was full, and all the things of time; because no office belonging to our felicity wanted its minister. But how the world has fared since that "seamless robe" has suffered rending by the talons of ambition, we may read in books; would that we might not see it with our eyes. Oh, race of mankind! what storms must toss thee, what losses must thou endure, what shipwrecks must buffet thee, as long as thou, a beast of many heads, strivest after contrary things. Thou art sick in both thy faculties of understanding; thou art sick in thine affections. Unanswerable reasons fail to heal thy higher understanding; the very sight of experience convinces not thy lower understanding; not even the sweetness of divine persuasion charms thy affections, when it breathes into thee through the music of the Holy Ghost: "Behold, how good and how pleasant a thing it is, brethren, to dwell together in unity."[198] [Footnote 198: Ps. cxxxii. 1.--(W.)] BOOK II. I.--"Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His anointed, saying: 'Let us break their bonds asunder, and cast away their cords from us.'"[199] As we commonly wonder at a new effect, when we have never been face to face with its cause; so, as soon as we understand the cause, we look down with a kind of scorn on those who remain in wonder. I, myself, was once filled with wonder that the Roman people had become paramount throughout all the earth, without any to withstand them; for when I looked at the thing superficially I thought that this supremacy had been obtained, not by any right, but only by arms and violence. But after that I had carefully and thoroughly examined the matter, when I had recognised by the most effectual signs that it was divine providence that had wrought this, my wonder ceased, and a certain scornful contempt has taken its place, when I perceive the nations raging against the pre-eminence of the Roman people; when I see the people imagining a vain thing, as I of old imagined; when, above all, I grieve that kings and princes agree in this one matter only, in opposing their Lord, and His one only Roman Emperor. Wherefore in derision, yet not without a touch of sorrow, I can cry on behalf of the glorious people and for Cæsar, together with him who cried on behalf of the Prince of heaven: "Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His anointed." But the love which nature implants in us allows not scorn to last for long; but, like the summer sun that when it has dispersed the morning clouds shines with full brightness, this love prefers to put scorn aside, and to pour forth the light which shall set men right. So, then, to break the bonds of the ignorance of those kings and princes, and to show that mankind is free from _their_ yoke, I will comfort myself in company with that most holy prophet, whom I follow, taking the words which come after: "Let us break their bonds asunder, and cast away their yoke from us." [Footnote 199: Ps. ii. 1-3.--(W.)] These two things will be sufficiently performed, if I address myself to the second part of the argument, and manifest the truth of the question before us. For thus, if we show that the Roman Empire is _by right_, not only shall we disperse the clouds of ignorance from the eyes of those princes who have wrongly seized the helm of public government, falsely imputing this thing to the Roman people; but all men shall understand that they are free from the yoke of these usurpers. The truth of the question can be made clear not only by the light of human reason, but also by the ray of God's authority; and when these two coincide, then heaven and earth must agree together. Supported, therefore, by this conviction, and trusting in the testimony both of reason and of authority, I proceed to settle the second question. II.--Inquiry concerning the truth of the first doubt has been made as accurately as the nature of the subject permitted; we have now to inquire concerning the second, which is: Whether the Roman people assumed to itself _of right_ the dignity of the Empire? And the first thing in this question is to find the truth, to which the reasonings concerning it may be referred as to their proper first principle. It must be recognised, then, that as there are three degrees in every art, the mind of the artist, his instrument, and the material on which he works, so we may look upon nature in three degrees. For nature exists, first, in the mind of the First Agent, who is God; then in heaven; as in an instrument, by means of which the likeness of the Eternal Goodness unfolds itself on shapeless[200] matter. If an artist is perfect in his art, and his instrument is perfect, any fault in the form of his art must be laid to the badness of the material; and so, since God holds the summit of perfection, and since His instrument, which is heaven, admits of no failure of its due perfection (which is manifest from our philosophy touching heaven), it follows that whatever fault is to be found in the lower world is a fault on the part of the subject matter, and is contrary to the intention of God who makes nature,[201] and of heaven; and if in this lower world there is aught that is good, it must be ascribed first to the artist, who is God, and then to heaven, the instrument of God's art, which men call nature; for the material, being merely a possibility, can do nothing of itself.[202] [Footnote 200: "_Fluitantem._"] [Footnote 201: "_Dei naturantis._"] [Footnote 202: Witte refers to _Parad._ xiii. 67, xxix. 32, i. 127-130. Cf. Thom. Aquin. _Summ._ I., q. 66, art. 1-3; q. 110, art. 2; q. 115, art. 3-6. This view satisfied thinkers to the time of Hooker (_E.P._ I. iii.), but was criticised by Bacon, _Nov. Org._ i. 66.] Hence it is apparent that, since all Right[203] is good, it therefore exists first in the mind of God; and since all that is in the mind of God is God, according to the saying, "What was made, in Him was life;"[204] and as God chiefly wishes for what is Himself, it follows that Right is the wish of God, so far as it is in Him. And since in God the will and the wish are the same, it further follows that this Right is the will of God. Again it follows that Right in the world is nothing else than the likeness of the will of God, and therefore whatever does not agree with the divine will cannot be Right, and whatever does agree with the divine will is Right itself. Therefore to ask if a thing be by Right is only to ask in other words if it is what God wills. It may therefore be assumed that what God wills to see in mankind is to be held as real and true Right. [Footnote 203: "_Jus._"] [Footnote 204: St. John i. 3.--(W.)] Besides we must remember Aristotle's teaching in the first book of his _Ethics_, where he says: "We must not seek for certitude in every matter, but only as far as the nature of the subject admits."[205] Therefore our arguments from the first principle already found will be sufficient, if from manifest evidence and from the authority of the wise, we seek for the right of that glorious people. The will of God is an invisible thing, but "the invisible things of God are seen, being understood by the things which are made." For when the seal is out of sight, the wax, which has its impression, gives manifest evidence of it, though it be unseen; nor is it strange that the will of God must be sought by signs; for the human will, except to the person himself who wills, is only discerned by signs.[206] [Footnote 205: _Eth._ i. 7, from Thom. Aq. _Lect._ XI.--(W.)] [Footnote 206: The image of the wax and seal was a favourite one. V. _Parad._ vii. 68, viii. 127, xiii. 67-75, quoted by Witte, who also refers to the _Epist. ad Reges_, § 8, p. 444, ed. Fraticelli.] III.--My answer then to the question is, that it was by right, and not by usurpation, that the Roman people assumed to itself the office of Monarchy, or, as men call it, the Empire, over all mankind. For in the first place it is fitting that the noblest people should be preferred to all others; the Roman people was the noblest; therefore it is fitting that it should be preferred to all others. By this reasoning I make my proof; for since honour is the reward of goodness, and since to be preferred is always honour, therefore to be preferred is always the reward of goodness. It is plain that men are ennobled for their virtues; that is, for their own virtues or for those of their ancestors; for nobleness is virtue and ancestral wealth, according to Aristotle in his Politics; and according to Juvenal, "There is no nobleness of soul but virtue,"[207] which two statements refer to two sorts of nobleness, our own and that of our ancestors.[208] [Footnote 207: Arist. _Pol._ iii. 12; Juv. viii. 20.--(W.)] [Footnote 208: Witte refers to Dante's commentary on his own Canzone in the _Convito_ iv. 3, and the _Parad._ xvi. 1.] To be preferred, therefore, is, according to reason, the fitting reward of the noble. And since rewards must be measured by desert, according to that saying of the Gospel, "with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again;" therefore to the most noble the highest place should be given. The testimonies of the ancients confirm our opinion; for Virgil, our divine poet, testifies throughout his _Æneid_, that men may ever remember it, that the glorious king, Æneas, was the father of the Roman people. And this Titus Livius, the famous chronicler of the deeds of the Romans, confirms in the first part of his work, which takes its beginning from the capture of Troy. The nobleness of this most unconquerable and most pious ancestor not only in regard to his own great virtue, but also to that of his forefathers and of his wives, the nobleness of whom was combined in their descendant by the rightful law of descent, I cannot unfold at length; "I can but touch lightly on the outlines of the truth."[209] [Footnote 209: "Sed summa sequar vestigia rerum." Virg. _Æn._ i. 342 ("fastigia" in all good MSS. and edd.).] For the virtue then of Æneas himself, hear what our poet tells us when he introduces Ilioneus in the first _Æneid_, praying thus: "Æneas was our king; in justice and piety he has not left a peer, nor any to equal him in war." Hear Virgil in the sixth _Æneid_, when he speaks of the death of Misenus, who had been Hector's attendant in war, and, after Hector's death, had attached himself to Æneas; for there Virgil says that Misenus "followed as good a man;" thus comparing Æneas to Hector, whom[210] Homer ever praises above all men, as the Philosopher witnesses in his _Ethics_, in what he writes to Nicomachus on habits to be avoided. [Footnote 210: _Æn._ i. 544, vi. 170. _Il._ xxiv. 258, quoted in Aristotle, _Ethics_, vii. 1.--(W.)] But, as for hereditary virtue, he was ennobled from all three continents both by his forefathers and his wives. From Asia came his immediate ancestor, Assaracus, and others who reigned in Phrygia, which is a part of Asia. Therefore Virgil writes in the third _Æneid_: "After that it had seemed good to Heaven to overthrow the power of Asia, and the guiltless race of Priam." From Europe came the male founder of his race, who was Dardanus; from Africa his grandmother Electra, daughter of the great king Atlas, to both which things the poet testifies in the eighth _Æneid_, where Æneas says to Evander: "Dardanus, the father of our city, and its founder, whom the Greeks call the son of Atlas and Electra, came to the race of Teucer--Electra, whose sire was great Atlas, on whose shoulders rests the circle of heaven." But in the third _Æneid_ Virgil says that Dardanus drew his origin from Europe. "There is a land which the Greeks have named Hesperia, an ancient land, strong and wealthy, where the Ænotrians dwell; it is said that now their descendants have named the country Italy, from the name of their king. There is our rightful home; from that land did Dardanus come." That Atlas came from Africa, the mountain called by his name, which stands in that continent, bears witness; and Orosius says that it is in Africa in his description of the world, where he writes: "Its boundary is Mount Atlas, and the islands which are called 'the happy isles.'" "Its"--that is, "of Africa," of which he was speaking.[211] [Footnote 211: _Æn._ iii. 1, viii. 134, iii. 163; Oros. i. 2.--(W.)] Likewise I find that by marriage also Æneas was ennobled; his first wife, Creusa, the daughter of king Priam, was from Asia, as may be gathered from our previous quotations; and that she was his wife our poet testifies in the third _Æneid_, where Andromache asks Æneas: "What of the boy Ascanius, whom Creusa bore to thee, while the ruins of Troy were yet smoking? Lives he yet to breathe this air?"[212] The second wife was Dido, the queen and foundress of Carthage in Africa. That she was the wife of Æneas our poet sings in his fourth _Æneid_, where he says of Dido: "No more does Dido think of love in secret. She calls it marriage, and with this name she covers her sin." The third wife was Lavinia, the mother of Albans and Romans alike, the daughter of king Latinus and his heir, if we may trust the testimony of our poet in his last _Æneid_, where he introduces Turnus conquered, praying to Æneas thus: "Thou hast conquered, and the Ausonians have seen me lift my hands in prayer for mercy; Lavinia is thine."[213] This last wife was from Italy, the noblest region of Europe. [Footnote 212: III. 339. The best MSS. of Virgil omit "peperit fumante Creusa."] [Footnote 213: _Æn._ xii. 936.--(W.)] And now that we have marked these things for evidence of our assertion, who will not rest persuaded that the father of the Romans, and therefore the Romans themselves, were the noblest people under heaven? Who can fail to see the divine predestination shown forth by the double meeting of blood from every part of the world in the veins of one man? IV.--Again, that which is helped to its perfection by miracles is willed by God, and therefore it is of right. This is manifestly true, for as Thomas says in his third book against the Gentiles, "a miracle is something done by God beyond the commonly established order of things."[214] And so he proves that God alone can work miracles; and his proof is strengthened by the authority of Moses; for on the occasion of the plague of lice, when the magicians of Pharaoh used natural principles artfully, and then failed, they said: "This is the finger of God."[215] A miracle therefore being the immediate working of the first agent, without the co-operation of any secondary agents, as Thomas himself sufficiently proves in the book which we have mentioned, it is impious to say where a miracle is worked in aid of anything, that that thing is not of God, as something well pleasing to him, which he foresaw. Therefore it is religious to accept the contradictory of this. The Roman Empire has been helped to its perfection by miracles; therefore it was willed by God, and consequently was and is by right.[216] [Footnote 214: _Contra Gent._ iii. 101.--(W.)] [Footnote 215: Exod. vii. 12-15.--(W.)] [Footnote 216: Witte refers to the _Ep. ad Reges_, § 8, for the same thought.] It is proved by the testimony of illustrious authors that God stretched forth His hand to work miracles on behalf of the Roman Empire. For Livy, in the first part of his work, testifies that a shield fell from heaven into the city chosen of God in the time of Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, whilst he was sacrificing after the manner of the Gentiles. Lucan mentions this miracle in the ninth book of his Pharsalia, when he is describing the incredible force of the South wind. He says: "Surely it was thus, while Numa was offering sacrifices, that the shield fell with which the chosen patrician youth moves along. The South wind, or the North wind, had spoiled the people that bore our shields."[217] And when the Gauls had taken all the city, and, under cover of the darkness, were stealing on to attack the Capitol itself, the capture of which was all that remained to destroy the very name of Rome, then as Livy, and many other illustrious writers agree in testifying, a goose, which none had seen before, gave a warning note of the approach of the Gauls, and aroused the guards to defend the Capitol.[218] And our poet commemorates the event in his description of the shield of Æneas in the eighth book. "Higher, and in front of the temple stood Manlius, the watchman of the Tarpeian keep, guarding the rock of the Capitol. The palace stood out clear, rough with the thatch which Romulus had laid; here the goose, inlaid in silver, fluttered on the portico of gold, as it warned the Romans that the Gauls were even now on the threshold."[219] [Footnote 217: Luc. ix. 477.--(W.)] [Footnote 218: V. Liv. v. 47, and the _Convito_, iv. 5.--(W.)] [Footnote 219: _Æn._ viii. 652.--(W.)] And when the nobility of Rome had so fallen under the onset of Hannibal, that nothing remained for the final destruction of the Roman commonwealth, but the Carthaginian assault on the city, Livy tells us in the course of his history of the Punic war, that a sudden dreadful storm of hail fell upon them, so that the victors could not follow up their victory.[220] [Footnote 220: Liv. xxvi. 11; Oros. iv. 17.--(W.)] Was not the escape of Cloelia wonderful, a woman, and captive in the power of Porsenna, when she burst her bonds, and, by the marvellous help of God, swam across the Tiber, as almost all the historians of Rome tell us, to the glory of that city?[221] [Footnote 221: Liv. ii. 13; Oros. ii. 5.--(W.)] Thus was it fitting that He should work who foresaw all things from the beginning, and ordained them in the beauty of His order; so that He, who when made visible was to show forth miracles for the sake of things invisible, should, whilst invisible, also show forth miracles for the sake of things visible. V.--Further, whoever works for the good of the state, works with Right as his end. This may be shown as follows. Right is that proportion of man to man as to things, and as to persons, which, when it is preserved, preserves society, and when it is destroyed, destroys society.[222] The description of Right in the Digest does not give the essence of right, but only describes it for practical purposes.[223] If therefore our definition comprehends well the essence and reason of Right, and if the end of any society is the common good of its members, it is necessary that the end of all Right is the common good, and it is impossible that that can be Right, which does not aim at the common good. Therefore Cicero says well in the first book of his _Rhetoric_: "Laws must always be interpreted for the good of the state."[224] If laws do not aim at the good of those who live under them, they are laws only in name; in reality they cannot be laws. For it behoves them to bind men together for the common good; and Seneca therefore says well in his book "on the four virtues:" "Law is the bond of human society."[225] It is therefore plain that whoever aims at the good of the state, aims at the end of Right; and therefore, if the Romans aimed at the good of the state, we shall say truly that they aimed at the end of Right. [Footnote 222: Cf. Aristotle, _Ethics_, v. 6.] [Footnote 223: "Jus est ars boni et æqui." L. 1, fr. _Dig. De Justitia et Jure_, i. 1.--(W.)] [Footnote 224: _De Invent._ i. 38.--(W.)] [Footnote 225: Not Seneca, but Martin, Bp. of Braga, [dagger symbol]580.--(W.) V. _Biog. Univ._] That in bringing the whole world into subjection, they aimed at this good, their deeds declare. They renounced all selfishness, a thing always contrary to the public weal; they cherished universal peace and liberty; and that sacred, pious, and glorious people are seen to have neglected their own private interests that they might follow public objects for the good of all mankind. Therefore was it well written: "The Roman Empire springs from the fountain of piety."[226] [Footnote 226: "_Romanum imperium de fonte nascitur pietatis._"--(WITTE.) He has not been able to trace the saying.] But seeing that nothing is known of the intention of an agent who acts by free choice to any but the agent himself, save only by external signs, and since reasonings must be examined according to the subject matter (as has already been said), it will be sufficient on this point if we set forth proofs which none can doubt, of the intention of the Roman people, both in their public bodies and individually. Concerning those public bodies by which men seem in a way to be bound to the state, the authority of Cicero alone, in the second book of the _De Officiis_, will suffice. "So long," he says, "as the Empire of the republic was maintained not by injustice, but by the benefits which it conferred, we fought either for our allies or for the Empire. Our wars brought with them an ending which was either indulgent, or else was absolutely necessary. All kings, peoples, and nations found a port of refuge in the Senate. Our magistrates and generals alike sought renown by defending our provinces and our allies with good faith and with justice. Our government might have been called not so much Empire, as a Protectorate of the whole world." So wrote Cicero.[227] [Footnote 227: _De Off._ ii. 8.--(W.)] Of individuals I will speak shortly. Shall we not say that they intended the common good, who by hard toil, by poverty, by exile, by bereavement of their children, by loss of limb, by sacrifice of their lives, endeavoured to build up the public weal? Did not great Cincinnatus leave us a sacred example of freely laying down his office at its appointed end, when, as Livy tells us, he was taken from the plough and made dictator? And after his victory, after his triumph, he gave back his Imperator's sceptre to the consuls, and returned to the ploughshare to toil after his oxen.[228] Well did Cicero, arguing against Epicurus, in the volume _De Finibus_, speak in praise of him, mindful of this good deed.[229] "And so," he says, "our ancestors took Cincinnatus from the plough, and made him dictator." [Footnote 228: Liv. vi. 28, 29; Oros. ii. 12.--(W.)] [Footnote 229: II. 4.--(W.)] Has not Fabricius left us a lofty example of resisting avarice, when, poor man as he was, for the faith by which he was bound to the republic, he laughed to scorn the great weight of gold which was offered him, and refused it, scorning it with words which became him well. His story too is confirmed by our poet in the sixth _Æneid_,[230] where he speaks of "Fabricius strong in his poverty." [Footnote 230: VI. 844.--(W.)] Has not Camillus left us a memorable example of obeying the laws instead of seeking our private advantage? For according to Livy he was condemned to exile, and then, after that he had delivered his country from the invaders, and had restored to Rome her own Roman spoils, he yet turned to leave the sacred city, though the whole people bade him stay; nor did he return till leave was given him to come back by the authority of the Senate. This high-souled hero also is commended in the sixth _Æneid_, where our poet speaks of "Camillus, that restored to us our standards."[231] [Footnote 231: Liv. v. 46; _Æn._ vi. 826.--(W.)] Was not Brutus the first to teach that our sons, that all others, are second in importance to the liberty of our country? For Livy tells us how, when he was consul, he condemned his own sons to death, for that they had conspired with the enemy. His glory is made new in our poet's sixth book, where he sings how "The father shall summon the sons to die for the sake of fair liberty, when they seek to stir fresh wars."[232] [Footnote 232: _Æn._ vi. 821.--(W.)] Has not Mucius encouraged us to dare everything for our country's sake, when after attacking Porsenna unawares, he watched the hand which had missed its stroke being burnt, though it was his own, as if he were beholding the torment of a foe? This also Livy witnesses to with astonishment. Add to these those sacred victims the Decii, who laid down their lives by an act of devotion for the public safety, whom Livy glorifies in his narrative, not as they deserve, but as he was able. Add to these the self-sacrifice, which words cannot express, of Marcus Cato, that staunchest champion of true liberty. These were men of whom the one, that he might save his country, did not fear the shadow of death; while the other, that he might kindle in the world the passionate love of liberty, showed how dear was liberty, choosing to pass out of life a free man, rather than without liberty to abide in life.[233] The glory of all these heroes glows afresh in the words of Cicero in his book _De Finibus_; of the Decii he speaks thus: "Publius Decius, the head of the Decii, a consul, when he devoted himself for the state, and charged straight into the Latin host, was he thinking aught of his pleasure, where and when he should take it;--when he knew that he had to die at once, and sought that death with more eager desire than, according to Epicurus, we should seek pleasure? And were it not that his deed had justly received its praise, his son would not have done the like in his fourth consulship; nor would his grandson, again, in the war with Pyrrhus, have fallen, a consul, in battle; and, a third time in continuous succession in that family, have offered himself a victim for the commonwealth." But in the _De Officiis_,[234] Cicero says of Cato: "Marcus Cato was in no different position from his comrades who in Africa surrendered to Cæsar. The others, had they slain themselves, would perhaps have been blamed for the act, for their life was of less consequence,[235] and their principles were not so strict. But for Cato, to whom nature had given incredible firmness and who had strengthened this severity by his unremitting constancy to his principles, and who never formed a resolution by which he did not abide, he was indeed bound to die rather than to look on the face of a tyrant." [Footnote 233: Witte quotes the _Convito_, iv. 5, where all these examples are recounted, almost in the same language. He compares _Parad._ vi. 46 (Cincinnatus), _Purgat._ xx. 25 (Fabricius), _Parad._ vi. 47 (Decii), _Purg._ i. where Cato guards the approach to Purgatory.] [Footnote 234: I. 31 (W.), carelessly quoted.] [Footnote 235: "_Levior_" al. "_lenior_."] VI.--Two things therefore have been made clear: first, that whoever aims at the good of the state aims at right;[236] and secondly, that the Roman people in bringing the world into subjection, aimed at the public weal. Therefore let us argue thus: Whoever aims at right, walks according to right; the Roman people in bringing the world into subjection aimed at right, as we have made manifest in the preceding chapter. Therefore in bringing the world into subjection the Roman people acted according to right, consequently it was by right that they assumed the dignity of Empire. [Footnote 236: "_Finem juris intendit._"] We reach this conclusion on grounds which are manifest to all. It is manifest from this, that whosoever aims at right, walks according to right. To make this clear, we must mark that everything is made to gain a certain end, otherwise it would be in vain, and as we said before this cannot be. And as everything has its proper end, so every end has some distinct thing of which it is the end. And therefore it is impossible that any two things, spoken of as separate things,[237] and in so far as they are two, should have the same end as their aim, for so the same absurdity[238] would follow, that one of them would exist in vain. Since, then, there is a certain end of right, as we have explained, it necessarily follows that when we have decided what that end is, we have also decided what right is; for it is the natural and proper effect of right. And since in any sequence it is impossible to have an antecedent without its consequent, for instance, to have "man" without "animal," as is evident by putting together and taking to pieces the idea,[239] so also it is impossible to seek for the end of right without right, for each thing stands in the same relation to its proper end, as the consequent does to its antecedent; as without health it is impossible to attain to a good condition of the body. Wherefore, it is most evidently clear that he who aims at the end of right must aim in accordance with right; nor does the contradictory instance which is commonly drawn from Aristotle's treatment of "good counsel" avail anything.[240] He there says: "It is possible to obtain what is the right result from a syllogism, which is incorrect, but not by an argument which is right, for the middle term is wrong." For if sometimes a right conclusion is obtained from false principles, this is only by accident, and happens only in so far as the true conclusion is imported in the words of the inference. Truth never really follows from falsehood; but the signs of truth may easily follow from the signs of falsehood. So also it is in matters of conduct. If a thief helps a poor man out of the spoils of his thieving, we must not call that charity; but it is an action which would have the form of charity, if it had been done out of the man's own substance. And so of the end of right. If anything, such as the end of right, were gained without right, it would only be the end of right, that is, the common good, in the same sense that the gift, made from evil gains, is charity. And so the example proves nothing, for in our proposition we speak, not of the apparent but of the real end of right. What was sought, therefore, is clear. [Footnote 237: "_Per se loquendo._"] [Footnote 238: "_Inconveniens._"] [Footnote 239: "_Construendo et destruendo._" Technical terms of the conditional syllogism, _constructive_ and _destructive_.] [Footnote 240: [Greek: Euboulia]. _Ethics_, vi. 10.] VII.--What nature has ordained is maintained of right. For nature in its providence does not come short of men's providence; for if it were to come short, the effect would excel the cause in goodness, which is impossible. But we see that when public bodies are founded, not only are the relations of the members to each other considered, but also their capacities for exercising offices; and this is to consider the end of right in the society or order which is founded, for right is not extended beyond what is possible. Nature then, in her ordinances, does not come short in this foresight. Therefore it is clear that nature, in ordaining a thing, has regard to its capacities; and this regard is the fundamental principle of right which nature lays down. From this it follows that the natural order of things cannot be maintained without right; for this fundamental principle of right is inseparably joined to the natural order of things. It is necessary, therefore, that it is of right that this order is preserved. The Roman people was ordained for empire, by nature, and this may be shown as follows: The man would come short of perfection in his art, who aimed only to produce his ultimate form, and neglected the means of reaching it; in the same way, if nature only aimed at reproducing in the world the universal form of the divine likeness, and neglected the means of doing so, she would be imperfect. But nature, which is the work of the divine intelligence, is wholly perfect; she therefore aims at all the means by which her final end is arrived at. Since then mankind has a certain end, and since there is a certain means necessary for the universal end of nature, it necessarily follows that nature aims at obtaining that means. And therefore the Philosopher, in the second book of _Natural Learning_,[241] well shows that nature always acts for the end. And since nature cannot reach this end through one man, because that there are many actions necessary to it, which need many to act, therefore nature must produce many men and set them to act. And besides the higher influence,[242] the powers and properties of inferior spheres contribute much to this. And therefore we see not only that individual men, but also that certain races are born to govern, and certain others to be governed and to serve, as the Philosopher argues in the _Politics_;[243] and for the latter, as he himself says, subjection is not only expedient, but just, even though they be forced into subjection. [Footnote 241: Arist. _Phys. Ausc._ ii. 1.--(W.)] [Footnote 242: _I.e._ of the heavens. Witte quotes _Parad._ viii. 97, _Purg._ xiv. 38.] [Footnote 243: I. 5, 11; 6, 9.--(W.)] And if this is so, it cannot be doubted that nature ordained in the world a country and a nation for universal sovereignty; if this were not so, she would have been untrue to herself, which is impossible. But as to where that country is, and which is that nation, it is sufficiently manifest, both from what we have said and from what we shall say, that it was Rome and her citizens or people; and this our poet very skilfully touches on in the sixth _Æneid_, where he introduces Anchises prophesying to Æneas, the ancestor of the Romans: "Others may mould the breathing bronze more delicately--I doubt it not; they may chisel from marble the living countenance; they may surpass thee in pleading causes; they may track the course of the heavens with the rod, and tell when the stars will rise; but thou, Roman, remember to rule the nations with thy sway. These shall be thy endowments--to make peace to be the custom of the world; to spare thy foes when they submit, and to crush the proud."[244] And again, Virgil skilfully notes the appointment of the _place_, in the fourth _Æneid_, when he brings in Jupiter speaking to Mercury concerning Æneas: "His fair mother did not promise him to us to be such as this: it was not for this that twice she rescues him from Grecian arms; but that there should be one to rule over Italy, teeming with empires, tempestuous with wars." It has, therefore, sufficiently been shown that the Roman people was by nature ordained to empire. Therefore it was of right that they gained empire, by subduing to themselves the world. [Footnote 244: _Æn._ vi. 848, iv. 227.--(W.)] VIII.--But in order properly to discover the truth in our inquiry, we must recognise that the judgment of God is sometimes made manifest to men, and sometimes hidden from them. It may be made manifest in two ways, namely, by reason and by faith. There are some judgments of God to which the human reason, by its own paths, can arrive; as, that a man should risk death to save his country. For a part should always risk itself to save its whole, and each man is a part of his State, as is clear from the Philosopher in his _Politics_.[245] Therefore every man ought to risk himself for his country, as the less good for the better; whence the Philosopher says to Nicomachus: "The end is desirable, indeed, even for an individual, but it is better and more divine for a nation and State."[246] And this is the judgment of God, for if it were not so, right reason in men would miss the intention of nature, which is impossible. [Footnote 245: Arist. _Pol._ i. 2, 12.--(W.)] [Footnote 246: _Ethics_, i. 1.] There are also some judgments of God to which, though human reason cannot reach them by its own powers, yet, by the aid of faith in those things which are told us in Holy Scripture it can be lifted up: as, for instance, that no one, however perfect he may be in moral and intellectual virtues, both in habit and in action, can be saved without faith; it being supposed that he never heard aught of Christ. For human reason cannot of itself see this to be just, yet by faith it can. For in the Epistle to the Hebrews it is written, "without faith it is impossible to please God;"[247] and in Leviticus, "what man soever there be of the House of Israel that killeth an ox, or lamb, or goat in the camp, or that killeth it out of the camp, and bringeth it not to the door of the tabernacle to offer an offering unto the Lord, blood shall be imputed to that man."[248] The door of the tabernacle stands for Christ, who is the door of the kingdom of heaven, as may be proved from the Gospel: the killing of animals represents men's actions.[249] [Footnote 247: Cf. _Parad._ xix. 70.--(W.)] [Footnote 248: Heb. ii. 6; Levit. xvii. 3, 4.--(W.).] [Footnote 249: Witte quotes from Isidore of Seville, a writer much used in the middle ages, the following: "In a moral sense, we offer a calf when we conquer the pride of the flesh; a lamb, when we correct our irrational impulses; a kid, when we master impurity; a dove, when we are simple; a turtle-dove, when we observe chastity; unleavened bread, 'when we keep the feast not in the leaven of malice, but in the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.'"] But the judgment of God is a hidden one, when man cannot arrive at the knowledge of it either by the law of nature or by the written law, but only occasionally by a special grace. This grace comes in several ways: sometimes by simple revelation, sometimes by revelation assisted by a certain kind of trial or debate. Simple revelation, too, is of two kinds: either God gives it of his own accord, or it is gained by prayer. God gives it of his own accord in two ways, either plainly, or by a sign. His judgment against Saul was revealed to Samuel plainly; but it was by a sign that it was revealed to Pharaoh what God had judged touching the setting free of the children of Israel. The judgment of God is also given in answer to prayer, as he knew who spoke in the second book of Chronicles:[250] "When we know not what we ought to do, this only have we left, to direct our eyes to Thee." [Footnote 250: 2 Chron. xx. 12 (Vulg.).] Revelation by means of trial is also of two kinds. It is given either by casting lots, or by combat; for "to strive" (_certare_), is derived from a phrase which means "to make certain" (_certum facere_). It is clear that the judgment of God is sometimes revealed to men by casting lots, as in the substitution of Matthias in the Acts of the Apostles. Again the judgment of God is revealed to men by combat in two ways: either it is by a trial of strength, as in the duels of champions who are called "_duelliones_," or it is by the contention of many men, each striving to reach a certain mark first, as happens in the contests of athletes who run for a prize. The first of these methods was prefigured among the Gentiles by the contests between Hercules and Antæus, which Lucan mentions in the fourth book of his _Pharsalia_, and Ovid in the ninth book of his _Metamorphoses_. The second is prefigured by the contest between Atalanta and Hippomenes, described in the tenth book of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_.[251] [Footnote 251: _Phars._ iv. 593; _Metam._ ix. 183, x. 569.--(W.).] Moreover, it ought not to pass unnoticed concerning these two kinds of strife, that while in the first each champion may fairly hinder his antagonist, in the second this is not so; for athletes must not hinder one another in their strife, though our poet seems to have thought differently in the fifth _Æneid_ where Euryalus so receives the prize.[252] But Cicero has done better in forbidding this practice in the third book of the _De Officiis_, following the opinion of Chrysippus.[253] He there says: "Chrysippus is right here, as he often is, for he says that he who runs in a race should strive with all his might to win, but in no way should he try to trip up his competitor." [Footnote 252: V. 335--(W.)] [Footnote 253: III. 10.--(W.)] With these distinctions, then, we may assume that there are two ways in which men may learn the judgment of God, as we have on this point stated; first by the contests of athletes, and secondly by the contests of champions. These ways of discovering the judgment of God I will treat of in the chapter following. IX.--That people then, which conquered when all were striving hard for the Empire of the world, conquered by the will of God. For God cares more to settle a universal strife than a particular one; and even in particular contests the athletes sometimes throw themselves on the judgment of God, according to the common proverb: "To whom God makes the grant, him let Peter also bless."[254] It cannot, then, be doubted that the victory in the strife for the Empire of the world followed the judgment of God. The Roman people, when all were striving for the Empire of the world, conquered; it will be plain that so it was, if we consider the prize or goal, and those who strove for it. The prize or goal was the supremacy over all men; for it is this that we call the Empire. None reached this but the Roman people. Not only were they the first, they were the only ones to reach the goal, as we shall shortly see. [Footnote 254: Witte only gives a query (?). The saying expresses the Ghibelline view of the relation of the Empire to the Pope; it may have originated with the coronation of Charles the Great.] The first man who panted for the prize was Ninus, King of the Assyrians; but although for more than ninety years (as Orosius tells[255]) he, with his royal consort Semiramis, strove for the Empire of the world and made all Asia subject to himself, nevertheless he never subdued the West. Ovid mentions both him and his queen in the fourth book of the _Metamorphoses_, when he says, in the story of Pyramus:[256] "Semiramis girdled the round space with brick-built walls;" and, "let them come to Ninus' tomb and hide beneath in its shade." [Footnote 255: I. 4.--(W.)] [Footnote 256: _Metam._ iv. 58, 88.--(W.)] Secondly, Vesoges, King of Egypt, aspired to this prize; but though he vexed the North and South of Asia, as Orosius relates,[257] yet he never gained for himself one-half of the world; nay, when, as it were, between the judges[258] and the goal, the Scythians drove him back from his rash enterprise. [Footnote 257: Oros. i. 14.--(W.)] [Footnote 258: "Athlothetæ." The judges or umpires in the Greek games, whose seats were opposite to the goal at the side of the stadium. _Vide_ Smith's _Dictionary of Antiquities_, s.v. "stadium."] Then Cyrus, King of the Persians, made the same attempt; but after the destruction of Babylon, and the transference of its Empire to Persia, he did not even reach the regions of the West, but lost his life and his object in one day at the hands of Tamiris, Queen of the Scythians.[259] [Footnote 259: Oros. ii. 7.--(W.)] But after that these had failed, Xerxes, the son of Darius and king among the Persians, assailed the world with so great a multitude of nations, with so great a power, that he bridged the channel of the sea which separates Asia from Europe, between Sestos and Abydos. And of this wonderful work Lucan makes mention in the second book of his _Pharsalia_:[260] "Such paths across the seas, made by Xerxes in his pride, fame tells of." But finally he was miserably repulsed from his enterprise, and could not attain the goal. [Footnote 260: _Phars._ ii. 692.--(W.)] Besides these kings, and after their times, Alexander, King of Macedon, came nearest of all to the prize of monarchy; he sent ambassadors to the Romans to demand their submission, but before the Roman answer came, he fell in Egypt, as Livy[261] tells us, as it were in the middle of the course. Of his burial there, Lucan speaks in the eighth book of his _Pharsalia_,[262] where he is inveighing against Ptolemy, King of Egypt: "Thou last of the Lagæan race, soon to perish in thy degeneracy, and to yield thy kingdom to an incestuous sister; while for thee the Macedonian is kept in the sacred cave...." [Footnote 261: Not Livy. Cf. ix. 18, 3, where, speaking of Alexander and the Romans, he says: "Quem ne famâ quidem illis notum arbitror fuisse." The story is Greek in origin, coming from Cleitarchus (according to Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ iii. 9), who accompanied Alexander on his Asiatic expedition. Cf. Niebuhr, _Lectures on the History of Rome_, lect. 52, Grote, _History of Greece_, vol. xii. p. 70, note, who argue for its truth, and Mommsen, _History of Rome_, vol. i. p. 394, who argues against it. Dante, says Witte, used legends about Alexander now lost. Cf. _Inf._ xiv. 31.] [Footnote 262: VIII. 692.] "Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!" Who will not marvel at thee here? For when Alexander was trying to hinder his Roman competitor in the race, thou didst suddenly snatch him away from the contest that his rashness might proceed no further. But that Rome has won the crown of so great a victory is proved on the testimony of many. Our poet in his first _Æneid_ says:[263] "Hence, surely, shall one day the Romans come, as the years roll on, to be the leaders of the world, from the blood of Teucer renewed; over the sea and over the land they shall hold full sway."[264] And Lucan, in his first book, writes: "The sword assigns the kingdom; and the fortune of that mighty people that rules o'er sea and land and the whole earth, admitted not two to rule." And Boethius, in his second book,[265] speaking of the Roman prince says: "With his sceptre he ruled the nations, those whom Phoebus beholds, from his rising afar to where he sinks his beams beneath the waves; those who are benumbed by the frosty Seven Stars of the north, those whom the fierce south wind scorches with his heat, parching the burning sands." And Luke, the Scribe of Christ, bears the same testimony, whose every word is true, where he says: "There went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus that all the world should be taxed;" from which words we must plainly understand that the Romans had jurisdiction over the whole world. [Footnote 263: I. 234.--(W.)] [Footnote 264: I. 109.--(W.)] [Footnote 265: _De Consol. Phil._ ii. 6.--(W.)] From all this evidence it is manifest that the Roman people prevailed when all were striving to gain the Empire of the world. Therefore it was by the judgment of God that it prevailed; consequently its Empire was gained by the judgment of God, which is to say, that it was gained by right. X.--And what is gained as the result of single combat or duel is gained of right. For whenever human judgment fails, either because it is involved in the clouds of ignorance, or because it has not the assistance of a judge, then, lest justice should be left deserted, we must have recourse to Him who loved justice so much that He died to fulfil what it required by shedding His own blood. Therefore the Psalmist wrote: "The righteous Lord loveth righteousness." This result is gained when, by the free consent of the parties, not from hatred but from love of justice, men inquire of the judgment of God by a trial of strength as well of soul as of body. And this trial of strength is called a duel, because in the first instance it was between two combatants, man to man. But when two nations quarrel they are bound to try in every possible way to arrange the quarrel by means of discussion; it is only when this is hopeless that they may declare war. Cicero and Vegetius agree on this point, the former in his _De Officiis_,[266] the latter in his book on war. In the practice of medicine recourse may only be had to amputation and cauterising when every other means of cure have been tried. So in the same way, it is only when we have sought in vain for all other modes of deciding a quarrel that we may resort to the remedy of a single combat, forced thereto by a necessity of justice. [Footnote 266: _De Off._ i. 12; _De Re Milit._ iii. _prol._--(W.)] Two formal rules, then, of the single combat are clear, one which we have just mentioned, the other, which we touched on before, that the combatants or champions must enter the lists by common consent, not animated by private hatred or love, but simply by an eager desire for justice. Therefore Cicero, in touching on this matter, spoke well when he said: "Wars, which are waged for the crown of empire, must be waged without bitterness."[267] [Footnote 267: "Imperii _gloria_," not "_corona_," in _Cic. de Off._ i. 12.--(W.)] But, if the rules of single combat be kept when men are driven by justice to meet together by common consent, in their zeal for justice (and if they are not, the contest ceases to be a single combat), do not they meet together in the name of God? And if it is so, is not God in the midst of them, for He Himself promises us this in the Gospel? And if God is there, is it not impious to suppose that justice can fail?--that justice which He loved so much, as we have just seen. And if single combat cannot fail to secure justice, is not what is gained in single combat gained as of right? This truth the Gentiles, too, recognised before the trumpet of the Gospel was sounded, when they sought for a judgment in the fortune of single combat. So Pyrrhus, noble both in the manners and in the blood of Æacidæ, gave a worthy answer when the Roman envoys were sent to him to treat for the ransom of prisoners. "I ask not for gold; ye shall pay me no price, being not war-mongers, but true men of war. Let each decide his fate with steel, and not with gold. Whether it be you or I that our mistress wills to reign, or what chance she may bring to each, let us try by valour. Hear ye also this word: those whose valour the fortune of war has spared, their liberty will I too spare. Take ye them as my gift."[268] So spoke Pyrrhus. By "mistress" he meant Fortune, which we better and more rightly call the Providence of God. Therefore, let the combatants beware that they fight not for money; then it would be no true single combat in which they fought, for they would strive in a court of blood and injustice; and let it not be thought that God would then be present to judge; nay, for it would be that ancient enemy who had been the instigator of the strife. If they wish to be true combatants, and not dealers in blood and injustice, let them keep Pyrrhus before their eyes when they enter the arena, the man who, when he was striving for empire, so scorned gold, as we have said. [Footnote 268: Ennius in _Cic. de Off._ i. 12 (W.) "War-monger" is Spenser's word. _F.Q._ 3, 10, 29.] But, if men will not receive the truth which we have proved, and object, as they are wont, that all men are not equal in strength, we will refute them with the instance of the victory of David over Goliath; and if the Gentiles seek for aught more, let them repel the objection by the victory of Hercules over Antæus. For it is mere folly to fear that the strength which God makes strong should be weaker than a human champion. It is, therefore, now sufficiently clear that what is acquired by single combat is acquired by right. XI.--But the Roman people gained their empire by duel between man and man; and this is proved by testimonies that are worthy of all credence; and in proving this, we shall also show that where any question had to be decided from the beginning of the Roman Empire, it was tried by single combat. For first of all, when a quarrel arose about the settling in Italy of Father Æneas, the earliest ancestor of this people, and when Turnus, King of the Rutuli, withstood Æneas, it was at last agreed between the two kings to discover the good pleasure of God by a single combat, which is sung in the last book of the _Æneid_. And in this combat Æneas was so merciful in his victory, that he would have granted life and peace to the conquered foe, had he not seen the belt which Turnus had taken on slaying Pallas, as the last verses of our poet describe. Again, when two peoples had grown up in Italy, both sprung from the Trojan stem, namely, the Romans and the Albans, and they had long striven whose should be the sign of the eagle,[269] and the Penates of Troy, and the honours of empire; at last by mutual consent, in order to have certain knowledge of the case in hand, the three Horatii, who were brethren, and the three Curatii, who were also brethren, fought together before the kings and all the people anxiously waiting on either side; and since the three Alban champions were killed, while one Roman survived, the palm of victory fell to the Romans, in the reign of Hostilius the king. This story has been diligently put together by Livy, in the first part of his history, and Orosius also gives similar testimony.[270] [Footnote 269: "_Il sacrosanto segno._" V. _Parad._ vi. 32.] [Footnote 270: Liv. i. 24; Oros. ii. 4.] Next they fought for empire with their neighbours the Sabines and Samnites, as Livy tells us; all the laws of war were kept; and though those who fought were very many in number, the war was in the form of a combat between man and man. In the contest with the Samnites, Fortune nearly repented her of what she had begun, as Lucan instances in the second book of his _Pharsalia_:[271] "How many companies lay dead by the Colline gate then, when the headship of the world and universal empire well-nigh were transferred to other seats, and the Samnite heaped the corpses of Rome beyond the numbers[272] of the Caudine Forks." [Footnote 271: II. 135.] [Footnote 272: "Romanaque Samnis Ultra Caudinas superavit vulnera furcas." Another reading is "speravit."] But after that the intestine quarrels of Italy had ceased, and while the issue of the strife with Greece and Carthage was not yet made certain by the judgment of God--for both Greece and Carthage aimed at empire--then Fabricius for Rome, and Pyrrhus for Greece, fought with vast hosts for the glory of empire, and Rome gained the day. And when Scipio for Rome, and Hannibal for Carthage, fought man to man, the Africans fell before the Italians, as Livy and all the other Roman historians strive to tell. Who then is so dull of understanding as not to see that this glorious people has won the crown of all the world, by the decision of combat? Surely the Roman may repeat Paul's words to Timothy: "There is laid up for me a crown of righteousness," laid up, that is, in the eternal providence of God. Let, then, the presumptuous Jurists see how far they stand below that watch-tower of reason whence the mind of man regards these principles: and let them be silent, content to show forth counsel and judgment according to the meaning of the law. It has now become manifest that it was by combat of man against man that the Romans gained their empire: therefore it was by right that they gained it, and this is the principal thesis of the present book. Up to this point we have proved our thesis by arguments which mostly rest on principles of reason; we must now make our point clear by arguments based on the principles of the Christian faith. XII.--For it is they who profess to be zealous for the faith of Christ who have chiefly "raged together," and "imagined a vain thing" against the Roman empire; men who have no compassion on the poor of Christ, whom they not only defraud as to the revenues of the Church; but the very patrimonies of the Church are daily seized upon; and the Church is made poor, while making a show of justice they yet refuse to allow the minister of justice to fulfil his office. Nor does this impoverishment happen without the judgment of God. For their possessions do not afford help to the poor, to whom belongs as their patrimony the wealth of the Church; and these possessions are held without gratitude to the empire which gives them. Let these possessions go back to whence they came. They came well; their return is evil: for they were well given, and they are mischievously held. What shall we say to shepherds like these? What shall we say when the substance of the Church is wasted, while the private estates of their own kindred are enlarged? But perchance it is better to proceed with what is set before us; and in religious silence to wait for our Saviour's help. I say, then, that if the Roman empire did not exist by right, Christ in being born presupposed and sanctioned an unjust thing. But the consequent is false; therefore the contradictory of the antecedent is true; for it is always true of contradictory propositions, that if one is false the other is true. It is not needful to prove the falsity of the consequent to a true believer: for, if he be faithful, he will grant it to be false; and if he be not faithful, then this reasoning is not for him. I prove the consequence thus: wherever a man of his own free choice carries out a public order, he countenances and persuades by his act the justice of that order; and seeing that acts are more forcible to persuade than words (as Aristotle holds in the tenth book of his _Ethics_),[273] therefore by this he persuades us more than if it were merely an approval in words. But Christ, as Luke who writes His story, says, willed to be born of the Virgin Mary under an edict of Roman authority, so that in that unexampled census of mankind, the Son of God, made man, might be counted as man: and this was to carry out that edict. Perhaps it is even more religious to suppose that it was of God that the decree issued through Cæsar, so that He who had been such long years expected among men should Himself enroll himself with mortal man. [Footnote 273: _Eth._ x. 1.] Therefore Christ, by His action, enforced the justice of the edict of Augustus, who then wielded the Roman power. And since to issue a just edict implies jurisdiction, it necessarily follows that He who showed that He thought an edict just, must also have showed that He thought the jurisdiction under which it was issued just; but unless it existed by right it were unjust. And it must be noted that the force of the argument taken to destroy the consequent, though the argument partly holds from its form, shows its force in the second figure, if it be reduced as a syllogism, just as the argument based on the assumption of the antecedent is in the first figure. The reduction is made thus: all that is unjust is persuaded to men unjustly; Christ did not persuade us unjustly; therefore He did not persuade us to do unjust things. From the assumption of the antecedent thus: all injustice is persuaded to men unjustly: Christ persuaded a certain injustice to man, therefore He persuaded unjustly. XIII.--And if the Roman empire did not exist by right, the sin of Adam was not punished in Christ. This is false, therefore its contradictory is true. The falsehood of the consequent is seen thus. Since by the sin of Adam we were all sinners, as the Apostle says:--"Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned,"--then, if Christ had not made satisfaction for Adam's sin by his death, we should still by our depraved nature be the children of wrath. But this is not so, for Paul, speaking of the Father in his Epistle to the Ephesians, says: "Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, wherein He hath made us accepted in the beloved, in whom we have redemption by His blood, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of His grace, wherein He has abounded towards us." And Christ Himself, suffering in Himself the punishment, says in St. John: "It is finished;" for where a thing is finished, naught remains to be done. It is convenient that it should be understood that punishment is not merely penalty inflicted on him who has done wrong, but that penalty inflicted by one who has penal jurisdiction. And therefore a penalty should not be called punishment, but rather injury, except where it is inflicted by the sentence of a regular judge.[274] Therefore the Israelites said unto Moses: "Who made thee a judge over us?" [Footnote 274: "_Ab ordinario judice._"] If, therefore, Christ had not suffered by the sentence of a regular judge, the penalty would not properly have been punishment; and none could be a regular judge who had not jurisdiction over all mankind; for all mankind was punished in the flesh of Christ, who "hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows," as saith the Prophet Isaiah. And if the Roman empire had not existed by right, Tiberius Cæsar, whose vicar was Pontius Pilate, would not have had jurisdiction over all mankind. It was for this reason that Herod, not knowing what he did, like Caiaphas, when he spoke truly of the decree of heaven, sent Christ to Pilate to be judged, as Luke relates in his gospel. For Herod was not the vicegerent of Tiberius, under the standard of the eagle, or the standard of the Senate; but only a king, with one particular kingdom given him by Tiberius, and ruling the kingdom committed to his charge under Tiberius. Let them cease, then, to insult the Roman empire, who pretend that they are the sons of the Church; when they see that Christ, the bridegroom of the Church, sanctioned the Roman empire at the beginning and at the end of His warfare on earth. And now I think that I have made it sufficiently clear that it was by right that the Romans acquired to themselves the empire of the world. Oh happy people, oh Ausonia, how glorious hadst thou been, if either he, that weakener of thine empire, had never been born, or if his own pious intention had never deceived him?[275] [Footnote 275: Constantine the Great.--(W.)] BOOK III. I.--"He hath shut the lions' mouths and they have not hurt me, forasmuch as before Him justice was found in me."[276] At the beginning of this work I proposed to examine into three questions, according as the subject-matter would permit me. Concerning the two first questions our inquiry, as I think, has been sufficiently accomplished in the preceding books. It remains to treat of the third question; and, perchance, it may arouse a certain amount of indignation against me, for the truth of it cannot appear without causing shame to certain men. But seeing that truth from its changeless throne appeals to me--that Solomon too, entering on the forest of his proverbs, teaches me in his own person "to meditate on truth, to hate the wicked;"[277] seeing that the Philosopher, my instructor in morals, bids me, for the sake of truth, to put aside what is dearest;[278] I will, therefore, take confidence from the words of Daniel in which the power of God, the shield of the defenders of truth, is set forth, and, according to the exhortation of St. Paul, "putting on the breast-plate of faith," and in the heat of that coal which one of the seraphim had taken from off the altar, and laid on the lips of Isaiah, I will enter on the present contest, and, by the arm of Him who delivered us by His blood from the powers of darkness, drive out from the lists the wicked and the liar, in the sight of all the world. Why should I fear, when the Spirit, which is co-eternal with the Father and the Son, saith by the mouth of David: "The righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance, he shall not be afraid of evil tidings"?[279] [Footnote 276: Dan. vi. 22. Vulg.--(W.)] [Footnote 277: Prov. vii. 7. Vulg.--(W.)] [Footnote 278: Arist. _Eth._ i. 4.--(W.)] [Footnote 279: Ps. cxii. 7.--(W.)] The present question, then, concerning which we have to inquire, is between two great luminaries, the Roman Pontiff and the Roman Prince: and the question is, does the authority of the Roman Monarch, who, as we have proved in the second book, is the monarch of the world, depend immediately on God, or on some minister or vicar of God; by whom I understand the successor of Peter, who truly has the keys of the kingdom of heaven? II.--For this, as for the former questions, we must take some principle, on the strength of which we may fashion the arguments of the truth which is to be expounded. For what does it profit to labour, even in speaking truth, unless we start from a principle? For the principle alone is the root of all the propositions which are the means of proof. Let us, therefore, start from the irrefragable truth that that which is repugnant to the intention of nature, is against the will of God. For if this were not true its contradictory would not be false; namely, that what is repugnant to the intention of nature is not against God's will, and if this be not false neither are the consequences thereof false. For it is impossible in consequences which are necessary, that the consequent should be false, unless the antecedent were false also. But if a thing is not "_against the will_" it must either be willed or simply "not willed," just as "not to hate" means "to love," or "not to love;" for "not to love" does not mean "to hate," and "not to will" does not mean "to will not," as is self-evident. But if this is not false, neither will this proposition be false; "God wills what He does not will," than which a greater contradiction does not exist. I prove that what I say is true as follows: It is manifest that God wills the end of nature; otherwise the motions of heaven would be of none effect, and this we may not say. If God willed that the end should be hindered, He would will also that the hindering power should gain its end, otherwise His will would be of none effect. And since the end of the hindering power is the non-existence of what it hinders, it would follow that God wills the non-existence of the end of nature which He is said to will. For if God did not will that the end should be hindered, in so far as He did not will it, it would follow as a consequence to His not willing it, that He cared nought about the hindering power, neither whether it existed, nor whether it did not. But he who cares not for the hindering power, cares not for the thing which can be hindered, and consequently has no wish for it; and when a man has no wish for a thing he wills it not. Therefore, if the end of nature can be hindered, as it can, it follows of necessity that God wills not the end of nature, and we reach our previous conclusion, that God wills what He does not will. Our principle is therefore most true, seeing that from its contradictions such absurd results follow. III.--At the outset we must note in reference to this third question, that the truth of the first question had to be made manifest rather to remove ignorance than to end a dispute. In the second question we sought equally to remove ignorance and to end a dispute. For there are many things of which we are ignorant, but concerning which we do not quarrel. In geometry we know not how to square the circle, but we do not quarrel on that point. The theologian does not know the number of the angels, but he does not quarrel about the number. The Egyptian is ignorant of the political system of the Scythians, but he does not therefore quarrel concerning it.[280] But the truth in this third question provokes so much quarrelling that, whereas in other matters ignorance is commonly the cause of quarrelling, here quarrelling is the cause of ignorance. For this always happens where men are hurried by their wishes past what they see by their reason; in this evil bias they lay aside the light of reason, and being dragged on blindly by their desires, they obstinately deny that they are blind. And, therefore, it often follows not only that falsehood has its own inheritance, but that many men issue forth from their own bounds and stray through the foreign camp, where they understand nothing, and no man understands them; and so they provoke some to anger, and some to scorn, and not a few to laughter. [Footnote 280: "_Scytharum Civilitatem._" Cf. Arist. _Ethics_, iii. 5, where [Greek: to bouleuton] is discussed, and thence come the first and the third example, a little altered, the Egyptian being substituted for the Spartan.] Now three classes of men chiefly strive against the truth which we are trying to prove. First, the Chief Pontiff, Vicar of our Lord Jesus Christ and the successor of Peter, to whom we owe, not indeed all that we owe to Christ, but all that we owe to Peter, contradicts this truth, urged it may be by zeal for the keys; and also other pastors of the Christian sheepfolds, and others whom I believe to be only led by zeal for our mother, the Church. These all, perchance from zeal and not from pride, withstand the truth which I am about to prove. But there are certain others in whom obstinate greed has extinguished the light of reason, who are of their father the devil, and yet pretend to be sons of the Church. They not only stir up quarrels in this question, but they hate the name of the most sacred office of Prince, and would shamelessly deny the principles which we have laid down for this and the previous questions. There is also a third class called Decretalists,[281] utterly without knowledge or skill in philosophy or theology, who, relying entirely on their Decretals (which doubtless, I think, should be venerated), and hoping, I believe, that these Decretals will prevail, disparage the power of the Empire. And no wonder, for I have heard one of them, speaking of these Decretals, assert shamelessly that the traditions of the Church are the foundation of the faith. May this wickedness be taken away from the thoughts of men by those who, antecedently to the traditions of the Church, have believed in Christ the Son of God, whether to come, or present, or as having already suffered; and who from their faith have hoped, and from their hope have kindled into love, and who, burning with love, will, the world doubts not, be made co-heirs with Him. [Footnote 281: _Parad._ ix. 133.--(W.)] And that such arguers may be excluded once for all from the present debate, it must be noted that part of Scripture was _before_ the Church, that part of it came _with_ the Church, and part _after_ the Church. _Before_ the Church were the Old and the New Testament--the covenant which the Psalmist says was "commanded for ever," of which the Church speaks to her Bridegroom, saying: "Draw me after thee."[282] [Footnote 282: Ps. cxi. 9. Cant. i. 3.--(W.)] _With_ the Church came those venerable chief Councils, with which no faithful Christian doubts but that Christ was present. For we have His own words to His disciples when He was about to ascend into heaven: "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world," to which Matthew testifies. There are also the writings[283] of the doctors, Augustine and others, of whom, if any doubt that they were aided by the Holy Spirit, either he has never beheld their fruit, or if he has beheld, he has never tasted thereof. [Footnote 283: "_Scripturæ._"] _After_ the Church are the traditions which they call Decretals, which, although they are to be venerated for their apostolical authority, yet we must not doubt that they are to be held inferior to fundamental Scripture, seeing that Christ rebuked the Pharisees for this very thing; for when they had asked: "Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders?" (for they neglected the washing of hands), He answered them, as Matthew testifies: "Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?" Thus He intimates plainly that tradition was to have a lower place. But if the traditions of the Church are _after_ the Church, it follows that the Church had not its authority from traditions, but rather traditions from the Church; and, therefore, the men of whom we speak, seeing that they have nought but traditions, must be excluded from the debate. For those who seek after this truth must proceed in their inquiry from those things from which flows the authority of the Church. Further, we must exclude others who boast themselves to be white sheep in the flock of the Lord, when they have the plumage of crows. These are the children of wickedness, who, that they may be able to follow their evil ways, put shame on their mother, drive out their brethren, and when they have done all will allow none to judge them. Why should we seek to reason with these, when they are led astray by their evil desires, and so cannot see even our first principle? Therefore there remains the controversy only with the other sort of men who are influenced by a certain kind of zeal for their mother the Church, and yet know not the truth which is sought for. With these men, therefore--strong in the reverence which a dutiful son owes to his father, which a dutiful son owes to his mother, dutiful to Christ, dutiful to the Church, dutiful to the Chief Shepherd, dutiful to all who profess the religion of Christ--I begin in this book the contest for the maintenance of the truth. IV.--Those men to whom all our subsequent reasoning is addressed, when they assert that the authority of the Empire depends on the authority of the Church, as the inferior workman depends on the architect, are moved to take this view by many arguments, some of which they draw from Holy Scripture, and some also from the acts of the Supreme Pontiff and of the Emperor himself. Moreover, they strive to have some proof of reason. For in the first place they say that God, according to the book of Genesis, made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; this they understand to be an allegory, for that the lights are the two powers,[284] the spiritual and the temporal. And then they maintain that as the moon, which is the lesser light, only has light so far as she receives it from the sun, so the temporal power only has authority as it receives authority from the spiritual power. [Footnote 284: "_Regimina._"] For the disposing of these, and of other like arguments, we must remember the Philosopher's words in his book on Sophistry, "the overthrow of an argument is the pointing out of the mistake."[285] [Footnote 285: _Soph. El._ ii. 3.--(W.)] Error may arise in two ways, either in the matter, or in the form of an argument; either, that is, by assuming to be true what is false, or by transgressing the laws of the syllogism. The Philosopher raised objections to the arguments of Parmenides and Melissus on both of these grounds, saying that they accepted what was false, and that they did not argue correctly.[286] I use "false" in a large sense, as including the inconceivable,[287] that which in matters admitting only of probability has the nature of falseness. If the error is in the form of an argument, he who wishes to destroy the error must do so by showing that the laws of the syllogism have been transgressed. If the error is in the matter, it is because something has been assumed which is either false in itself, or false in relation to that particular instance. If the assumption is false in itself, the argument must be destroyed by destroying the assumption; if it is false only in that particular instance, we must draw a distinction between the falseness in that particular instance and its general truth. [Footnote 286: Aristotle, _Phys._ i. 2.--(W.)] [Footnote 287: "_Inopinabili._"] Having noted these things, to make it more clear how we destroy this and the further fallacies of our adversaries, we must remark that there are two ways in which error may arise concerning the mystical sense, either by seeking it where it is not, or by accepting it in a sense other than its real sense. On account of the first of these ways, Augustine says, in his work _Of the City of God_,[288] that we must not think that all things, of which we are told, have a special meaning; for it is on account of that which means something, that that also which means nothing is woven into a story. It is only with the ploughshare that we turn up the earth; but the other parts of the plough are also necessary. [Footnote 288: Dante does not quote St. Augustine's words, but gives his meaning, xvii. 2.--(W.)] On account of the second way in which error touching the interpretation of mysteries may arise, Augustine, in his book "_concerning Christian doctrine_," speaking of those who wish to find in Scripture something other than he who wrote the Scripture meant,[289] says, that such "are misled in the same way as a man who leaves the straight path, and then arrives at the end of the path by a long circuit." And he adds: "It ought to be shown that this is a mistake, lest through the habit of going out of the way, the man be driven to going into cross or wrong ways." And then he intimates why such precautions must be taken in interpreting Scripture. "Faith will falter, if the authority of Scripture be not sure." But I say that if these things happen from ignorance, we must pardon those who do them, when we have carefully reproved them, as we pardon those who imagine a lion in the clouds, and are afraid. But if they are done purposely, we must deal with those who err thus, as we do with tyrants, who instead of following the laws of the state for the public good, try to pervert them for their own advantage. [Footnote 289: I. 36, 37. Dante writes: "per gyrum." The Benedictine text has: "per agrum."] Oh worst of crimes, even though a man commit it in his dreams, to turn to ill use the purpose of the Eternal Spirit. Such an one does not sin against Moses, or David, or Job, or Matthew, or Paul, but against the Eternal Spirit that speaketh in them. For though the reporters of the words of God are many, yet there is one only that tells them what to write, even God, who has deigned to unfold to us His will through the pens of many writers. Having thus first noted these things, I will proceed, as I said above, to destroy the argument of those who say that the two great lights are typical of the two great powers on earth: for on this type rests the whole strength of their argument. It can be shown in two ways that this interpretation cannot be upheld. First, seeing that these two kinds of power are, in a sense, accidents of men, God would thus appear to have used a perverted order, by producing the accidents, before the essence to which they belong existed; and it is ridiculous to say this of God. For the two great lights were created on the fourth day, while man was not created till the sixth day, as is evident in the text of Scripture. Secondly, seeing that these two kinds of rule are to guide men to certain ends, as we shall see, it follows that if man had remained in the state of innocence in which God created him, he would not have needed such means of guidance. These kinds of rule, then, are remedies against the weakness of sin. Since, then, man was not a sinner on the fourth day, for he did not then even exist, it would have been idle to make remedies for his sin, and this would be contrary to the goodness of God. For he would be a sorry physician who would make a plaster for an abscess which was to be, before the man was born. It cannot, therefore, be said that God made these two kinds of rule on the fourth day, and therefore the meaning of Moses cannot have been what these men pretend. We may also be more tolerant, and overthrow this falsehood by drawing a distinction. This way of distinction is a gentler way of treating an adversary, for so his arguments are not made to appear consciously false, as is the case when we utterly overthrow him. I say then that, although the moon has not light of its own abundantly, unless it receives it from the sun, yet it does not therefore follow that the moon is from the sun. Therefore be it known that the being, and the power, and the working of the moon are all different things. For its being, the moon in no way depends on the sun, nor for its power, nor for its working, considered in itself. Its motion comes from its proper mover, its influence is from its own rays. For it has a certain light of its own, which is manifest at the time of an eclipse; though for its better and more powerful working it receives from the sun an abundant light, which enables it to work more powerfully. Therefore I say that the temporal power does not receive its being from the spiritual power, nor its power which is its authority, nor its working considered in itself. Yet it is good that the temporal power should receive from the spiritual the means of working more effectively by the light of the grace which the benediction of the Supreme Pontiff bestows on it both in heaven and on earth. Therefore we may see that the argument of these men erred in its form, because the predicate of the conclusion is not the predicate of the major premiss. The argument runs thus: The moon receives her light from the sun, which is the spiritual power. The temporal power is the moon. Therefore the temporal power receives authority from the spiritual power. "Light" is the predicate of the major premiss, "authority" the predicate of the conclusion; which two things we have seen to be very different in their subject and in their idea. V.--They draw another argument from the text of Moses, saying that the types of these two powers sprang from the loins of Jacob, for that they are prefigured in Levi and Judah, whereof one was founder of the spiritual power, and the other of the temporal. From this they argue: the Church has the same relation to the Empire that Levi had to Judah. Levi preceded Judah in his birth, therefore the Church precedes the Empire in authority. This error is easily overthrown. For when they say that Levi and Judah, the sons of Jacob, are the types of spiritual and temporal power, I could show this argument, too, to be wholly false; but I will grant it to be true. Then they infer, as Levi came first in birth, so does the Church come first in authority. But, as in the previous argument, the predicates of the conclusion and of the major premiss are different: authority and birth are different things, both in their subject and in their idea; and therefore there is an error in the form of the argument. The argument is as follows: A precedes B in C; D and E stand in the same relation as A and B; therefore D precedes E in F. But then F and C are different things. And if it is objected that F follows from C, that is, authority from priority of birth, and that the effect is properly substituted for the cause, as if "animal" were used in an argument for men, the objection is bad. For there are many men, who were born before others, who not only do not precede those others in authority, but even come after them: as is plain where we find a bishop younger than his archpresbyters. Therefore their objection appears to err in that it assumes as a cause that which is none. VI.--Again, from the first book of Kings they take the election and the deposition of Saul; and they say that Saul, an enthroned king, was deposed by Samuel, who, by God's command, acted in the stead of God, as appears from the text of Scripture. From this they argue that, as that Vicar of God had authority to give temporal power, and to take it away and bestow it on another, so now the Vicar of God, the bishop of the universal Church, has authority to give the sceptre of temporal power, and to take it away, and even to give it to another. And if this were so, it would follow without doubt that the authority of the Empire is dependent on the Church, as they say. But we may answer and destroy this argument, by which they say that Samuel was the Vicar of God: for it was not as Vicar of God that he acted, but as a special delegate for this purpose, or as a messenger bearing the express command of his Lord. For it is clear that what God commanded him, that only he did, and that only he said. Therefore we must recognise that it is one thing to be another's vicar, and that it is another to be his messenger or minister, just as it is one thing to be a doctor, and another to be an interpreter. For a vicar is one to whom is committed jurisdiction with law or with arbitrary power, and therefore within the bounds of the jurisdiction which is committed to him, he may act by law or by his arbitrary power without the knowledge of his lord. It is not so with a mere messenger, in so far as he is a messenger; but as the mallet acts only by the strength of the smith, so the messenger acts only by the authority of him that sent him. Although, then, God did this by His messenger Samuel, it does not follow that the Vicar of God may do the same. For there are many things which God has done and still does, and yet will do through angels, which the Vicar of God, the successor of Peter, might not do. Therefore we may see that they argue from the whole to a part, thus: Men can hear and see, therefore the eye can hear and see: which does not hold. Were the argument negative, it would be good: for instance, man cannot fly, therefore man's arm cannot fly. And, in the same way, God cannot, by his messenger, cause what is not to have been,[290] as Agathon says; therefore neither can his Vicar. [Footnote 290: As quoted by Aristotle, _Ethics_, vi. 3.--(W.)] VII.--Further, they use the offering of the wise men from the text of Matthew, saying that Christ accepted from them both frankincense and gold, to signify that He was lord and ruler both of things temporal and of things spiritual; and from this they infer that the Vicar of Christ is also lord and ruler both of things temporal and of things spiritual; and that consequently he has authority over both. To this I answer, that I acknowledge that Matthew's words and meaning are both as they say, but that the inference which they attempt to draw therefrom fails, because it fails in the terms of the argument. Their syllogism runs thus: God is the lord both of things temporal and of things spiritual, the holy Pontiff is the Vicar of God; therefore he is lord both of things temporal and of things spiritual. Both of these propositions are true, but the middle term in them is different, and _four_ terms are introduced, by which the form of the syllogism is not kept, as is plain from what is said of "the syllogism simply."[291] For "God" is the subject of the major premiss, and "the Vicar of God" is the predicate of the minor; and these are not the same. [Footnote 291: Arist. _Anal. Prior._, or rather, the _Summulæ Logicæ_, l. iv., of Petrus Hispanus.--(W.)] And if anyone raises the objection that the Vicar of God is equal in power to God, his objection is idle; for no vicar, whether human or divine, can be equal in power to the master whose vicar he is, which is at once obvious. We know that the successor of Peter had not equal authority with God, at least in the works of nature; he could not make a clod of earth fall upwards, nor fire to burn in a downward direction, by virtue of the office committed to him. Nor could all things be committed to him by God; for God could not commit to any the power of creation, and of baptism, as is clearly proved, notwithstanding what[292] the Master says in his fourth book. [Footnote 292: Peter Lombard, "magister sententiarum," iv. dist. 5, f. 2.--(W.)] We know also that the vicar of a mortal man is not equal in authority to the man whose vicar he is, so far as he is his vicar; for none can give away what is not his. The authority of a prince does not belong to a prince, except for him to use it; for no prince can give to himself authority. He can indeed receive authority, and give it up, but he cannot create it in another man, for it does not belong to a prince to create another prince. And if this is so, it is manifest that no prince can substitute for himself a vicar equal to himself in authority respecting all things, and therefore the objection to our argument has no weight. VIII.--They also bring forward that saying in Matthew of Christ to Peter: "Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven;" which also, from the text of Matthew and John, they allow to have been in like manner said to all the Apostles. From this they argue that it has been granted by God to the successor of Peter to be able to bind and to loose all things; hence they infer that he can loose the laws and decrees of the Empire, and also bind laws and decrees for the temporal power; and, if this were so, this conclusion would rightly follow. But we must draw a distinction touching their major premiss. Their syllogism is in this form. Peter could loose and bind all things; the successor of Peter can do whatever Peter could do; therefore the successor of Peter can bind and can loose all things: whence they conclude that he can bind and can loose the decrees and the authority of the Empire. Now I admit the minor premiss; but touching the major premiss I draw a distinction. The universal "everything" which is included in "whatever" is not distributed beyond the extent of the distributed term. If I say "all animals run," "all" is distributed so as to include everything which comes under the class "animal." But if I say "all men run," then "all" is only distributed so as to include every individual in the class "man;" and when I say "every grammarian runs," then is the distribution even more limited. Therefore we must always look to see what it is that is to be included in the word "all," and when we know the nature and extent of the distributed term, it will easily be seen how far the distribution extends. Therefore, when it is said "whatsoever thou shalt bind," if "whatsoever" bore an unlimited sense, they would speak truly, and the power of the Pope would extend even beyond what they say; for he might then divorce a wife from her husband, and marry her to another while her first husband was yet alive, which he can in no wise do. He might even absolve me when impenitent, which God Himself cannot do. Therefore it is manifest that the distribution of the term in question is not absolute, but in reference to something. What this is will be sufficiently clear if we consider what power was granted to Peter. Christ said to Peter: "To thee will I give the keys of the kingdom of heaven"--that is, "I will make thee the doorkeeper of the kingdom of heaven." And then He adds: "Whatsoever," which is to say "all that"--to wit, all that has reference to this duty--"thou shalt have power to bind and to loose." And thus the universal which is implied in "whatsoever" has only a limited distribution, referring to the office of the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And in this sense the proposition of our opponents is true, but, taken absolutely, it is manifestly false. I say, then, that although the successor of Peter has power to bind and to loose, as belongs to him to whom the office of Peter was committed, yet it does not therefore follow that he has power to bind and to loose the decrees of the Empire, as our opponents say, unless they further prove that to do so belongs to the office of the keys, which we shall shortly show is not the case. IX.--They further take the words in Luke which Peter spake to Christ, saying: "Behold, here are two swords;" and they understood that by these two swords the two kinds of rule were foretold. And since Peter said "here," where he was, which is to say, "with him," they argue that the authority of the two kinds of rule rests with the successor of Peter. We must answer by showing that the interpretation, on which the argument rests, is wrong. They say that the two swords of which Peter spake mean the two kinds of rule which we have spoken of; but this we wholly deny, for then Peter's answer would not be according to the meaning of the words of Christ; and also we say that Peter made, as was his wont, a hasty answer, touching only the outside of things. It will be manifest that such an answer as our opponents allege would not be according to the meaning of the words of Christ, if the preceding words, and the reason of them, be considered. Observe, then, that these words were spoken on the day of the feast, for a little before Luke writes thus: "Then came the day of unleavened bread, when the Passover must be killed;" and at this feast Christ had spoken of His Passion, which was at hand, in which it was necessary for Him to be separated from His disciples. Observe, too, that when these words were spoken the twelve were assembled together, and therefore, shortly after the words which we have just quoted, Luke says: "And when the hour was come He sat down, and the twelve Apostles with Him." And continuing His discourse with them, He came to this: "When I sent you, without purse, and scrip, and shoes, lacked ye anything? And they said, Nothing. Then said He unto them: But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip; and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one." From these words the purpose of Christ is sufficiently manifest; for He did not say: "Buy, or get for yourselves, two swords," but rather "twelve swords," seeing that He spake unto twelve disciples: "He that hath not, let him buy," so that each should have one. And He said this to admonish them of the persecution and scorn that they should suffer, as though He would say: "As long as I was with you men received you gladly, but now you will be driven away; therefore of necessity ye must prepare for yourselves those things which formerly I forbade you to have." And therefore if the answer of Peter bore the meaning which our opponents assign to it, it would have been no answer to the words of Christ; and Christ would have rebuked him for answering foolishly, as He often did rebuke him. But Christ did not rebuke him, but was satisfied, saying unto him: "It is enough," as though He would say: "I speak because of the necessity; but if each one of you cannot possess a sword, two are enough." And that it was Peter's wont to speak in a shallow manner is proved by his hasty and thoughtless forwardness, to which he was led not only by the sincerity of his faith, but also, I believe, by the natural purity and simplicity of his character. All the Evangelists bear testimony to this forwardness. Matthew writes that when Jesus had asked His disciples: "Whom say ye that I am?" Peter answered before them all and said: "Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God." He writes also that when Christ was saying to His disciples that he must go up to Jerusalem and suffer many things, Peter took Him and began to rebuke Him, saying: "Be it far from Thee, Lord; this shall not be unto Thee." But Christ turned and rebuked him, and said: "Get thee behind me, Satan." Matthew also writes that in the Mount of Transfiguration, on the sight of Christ, and of Moses and Elias, and of the two sons of Zebedee, Peter said: "Lord, it is good for us to be here; if Thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles, one for Thee, one for Moses, and one for Elias." He also writes that when the disciples were in a ship, in the night, and Christ went unto them walking on the sea, then Peter said unto Him: "Lord, if it be Thou, bid me come unto Thee on the water." And when Christ foretold that all His disciples should be offended because of Him, Peter answered and said: "Though all men shall be offended because of Thee, yet will I never be offended;" and then: "Though I should die with Thee, yet will I not deny Thee." And to this saying Mark bears witness also. And Luke writes that Peter had said to Christ, a little before the words touching the swords which we have quoted: "Lord, I am ready to go with Thee, both into prison and to death." And John says of him, that, when Christ wished to wash his feet, Peter answered and said: "Lord, dost Thou wash my feet?" and then: "Thou shalt never wash my feet." The same Evangelist tells us that it was Peter who smote the High Priest's servant with a sword, and the other Evangelists also bear witness to this thing. He tells us also how Peter entered the sepulchre at once, when he saw the other disciple waiting outside, and how, when Christ was on the shore after the resurrection, when Peter had heard that it was the Lord, he girt his fisher's coat unto him (for he was naked) and did cast himself into the sea. Lastly, John tells that when Peter saw John, he said unto Jesus: "Lord, and what shall this man do?" It is a pleasure to have pursued this point about our Chief Shepherd,[293] in praise of his purity of spirit; but from what I have said it is plain that when he spake of the two swords, he answered the words of Christ with no second meaning. [Footnote 293: "Archimandrita nostro." Cf. _Parad._ xi. 99, of St. Francis.--(W.)] But if we are to receive these words of Christ and of Peter typically, they must not be explained as our adversaries explain them; but they must be referred to that sword of which Matthew writes: "Think not that I am come to send peace on the earth; I come not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father," &c. And this comes to pass not only in words, but also in fact. And therefore Luke speaks to Theophilus of all "that Jesus began both to do and to teach." It was a sword of that kind that Christ commanded them to buy; and Peter said that it was already doubly there. For they were ready both for words and for deeds, by which they should accomplish what Christ said that He had come to do by the sword. X.--Certain persons say further that the Emperor Constantine, having been cleansed from leprosy by the intercession of Sylvester, then the Supreme Pontiff, gave unto the Church the seat of Empire which was Rome, together with many other dignities belonging to the Empire.[294] Hence they argue that no man can take unto himself these dignities unless he receive them from the Church, whose they are said to be. From this it would rightly follow, that one authority depends on the other, as they maintain. [Footnote 294: On the Donation of Constantine, Witte refers to _Inf._ xxxviii. 94; xix. 115; _Purg._ xxxii. 124; _Parad._ xx. 35; _suprà_ ii. 12.] The arguments which seemed to have their roots in the Divine words, have been stated and disproved. It remains to state and disprove those which are grounded on Roman history and in the reason of mankind. The first of these is the one which we have mentioned, in which the syllogism runs as follows: No one has a right to those things which belong to the Church, unless he has them from the Church; and this we grant. The government of Rome belongs to the Church; therefore no one has a right to it unless it be given him by the Church. The minor premiss is proved by the facts concerning Constantine, which we have touched on. This minor premiss then will I destroy; and as for their proof, I say that it proves nothing. For the dignity of the Empire was what Constantine could not alienate, nor the Church receive. And when they insist, I prove my words as follows: No man on the strength of the office which is committed to him, may do aught that is contrary to that office; for so one and the same man, viewed as one man, would be contrary to himself, which is impossible. But to divide the Empire is contrary to the office committed to the Emperor; for his office is to hold mankind in all things subject to one will: as may be easily seen from the first book of this treatise. Therefore it is not permitted to the Emperor to divide the Empire. If, therefore, as they say, any dignities had been alienated by Constantine, and had passed to the Church, the "coat without seam"--which even they, who pierced Christ, the true God, with a spear, dared not rend--would have been rent.[295] [Footnote 295: Each side in the controversy used the type of the "seamless robe," one of the Empire (_suprà_ i. 16), the other of the Church; _e.g._, in the Bull of Boniface VIII., "_Unam Sanctam_."] Further, just as the Church has its foundation, so has the Empire its foundation. The foundation of the Church is Christ, as Paul says in his first Epistle to the Corinthians: "For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ."[296] He is the rock on which the Church is built; but the foundation of the Empire is human right. Now I say that, as the Church may not go contrary to its foundation--but must always rest on its foundation, as the words of the Canticles say: "Who is she that cometh up from the desert, abounding in delights, leaning on her beloved?"[297]--in the same way I say that the Empire may not do aught that transgresses human right. But were the Empire to destroy itself, it would so transgress human right. Therefore the Empire may not destroy itself. Since then to divide the Empire would be to destroy it, because the Empire consists in one single universal Monarchy, it is manifest that he who exercises the authority of the Empire may not destroy it, and from what we have said before, it is manifest that to destroy the Empire is contrary to human right. [Footnote 296: 1 Cor. iii. 11.--(W.)] [Footnote 297: Cant. viii. 5.--(W.)] Moreover, all jurisdiction is prior in time to the judge who has it; for it is the judge who is ordained for the jurisdiction, not the jurisdiction for the judge. But the Empire is a jurisdiction, comprehending within itself all temporal jurisdiction: therefore it is prior to the judge who has it, who is the Emperor. For it is the Emperor who is ordained for the Empire, and not contrariwise. Therefore it is clear that the Emperor, in so far as he is Emperor, cannot alter the Empire; for it is to the Empire that he owes his being. I say then that he who is said to have conferred on the Church the authority in question either was Emperor, or he was not. If he was not, it is plain that he had no power to give away any part of the Empire. Nor could he, if he was Emperor, in so far as he was Emperor, for such a gift would be a diminishing of his jurisdiction. Further, if one Emperor were able to cut off a certain portion of the jurisdiction of the Empire, so could another; and since temporal jurisdiction is finite, and since all that is finite is taken away by finite diminutions, it would follow that it is possible for the first of all jurisdictions to be annihilated, which is absurd. Further, since he that gives is in the position of an agent, and he to whom a thing is given in that of a patient, as the Philosopher holds in the fourth book to Nicomachus,[298] therefore, that a gift may be given, we require not only the fit qualification of the giver, but also of the receiver; for the acts of the agent are completed in a patient who is qualified.[299] But the Church was altogether unqualified to receive temporal things; for there is an express command, forbidding her so to do, which Matthew gives thus: "Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses." For though we find in Luke a relaxation of the command in regard to certain matters, yet I have not anywhere been able to find that the Church after that prohibition had licence given her to possess gold and silver. If therefore the Church was unable to receive temporal power, even granting that Constantine was able to give it, yet the gift was impossible; for the receiver was disqualified. It is therefore plain that neither could the Church receive in the way of possession, nor could Constantine give in the way of alienation; though it is true that the Emperor, as protector of the Church, could allot to the Church a patrimony and other things, if he did not impair his supreme lordship, the unity of which does not allow division. And the Vicar of God could receive such things, not to possess them, but as a steward to dispense the fruits of them to the poor of Christ, on behalf of the Church, as we know the Apostles did. [Footnote 298: _Eth._ iv. 1.--(W.)] [Footnote 299: "_Dispositio; dispositus; indisposita._"] XI.--Our adversaries further say that the Pope Hadrian[300] summoned Charles the Great to his own assistance[301] and to that of the Church, on account of the wrongs suffered from the Lombards in the time of their king Desiderius, and that Charles received from that Pope the imperial dignity, notwithstanding that Michael was emperor at Constantinople. And therefore they say that all the Roman emperors who succeeded Charles were themselves the "advocates" of the Church, and ought by the Church to be called to their office. From which would follow that dependence of the Empire on the Church which they wish to prove. [Footnote 300: A.D. 773.--(W.)] [Footnote 301: "_Advocavit._"] But to overset their argument, I reply that what they say is nought; for a usurpation of right does not make right; and if it were so, it might be proved in the same way that the Church is dependent on the Empire; for the Emperor Otto restored the Pope Leo, and deposed Benedict, leading him into exile to Saxony.[302] [Footnote 302: Otto I. (964) deposed Benedict V. and restored Leo VIII.] XII.--But from _reason_ they thus argue: they take the principle laid down in the tenth book of "_Philosophia Prima_,"[303] saying that all things which belong to one genus are to be brought under one head, which is the standard and measure of all that come under that genus. But all men belong to one genus: therefore they are to be brought under one head, as the standard and measure of them all. But the Supreme Pontiff and the Emperor are men; therefore if the preceding reasoning be true, they must be brought under one head. And since the Pope cannot come under any other man, the result is that the Emperor, together with all other men, must be brought under the Pope, as the measure and rule of all; and then, what those who argue thus desire follows. [Footnote 303: Arist. _Metaph._ x. 1.--(W.)] To overset this argument, I answer that they are right when they say that all the individuals of one genus ought to be brought under one head, as their measure; and that they are again right when they say that all men belong to one genus, and that they are also right when they argue from these truths that all men should be brought under one head, taken from the genus man, as their measure and type. But when they obtain the further conclusion concerning the Pope and the Emperor, they fall into a fallacy touching accidental attributes. That this thing may be understood, it must be clearly known that to be a man is one thing, and to be a pope or an emperor is another; just as to be a man is different from being a father or a ruler. A man is that which exists by its essential form, which gives it its genus and species, and by which it comes under the category of substance. But a father is that which exists by an accidental form, that is, one which stands in a certain relation which gives it a certain genus and species, and through which it comes under the category of relation. If this were not so, all things would come under the category of substance, seeing that no accidental form can exist by itself, without the support of an existing substance; and this is not so. Seeing, therefore, that the Pope and the Emperor are what they are by virtue of certain relations: for they owe their existence to the Papacy and the Empire, which are both relations, one coming within the sphere of fatherhood, and the other within that of rule; it manifestly follows that both the Pope and the Emperor, in so far as they are Pope and Emperor, must come under the category of relation; and therefore that they must be brought under some head of that genus. I say then that there is one standard under which they are to be brought, as men; and another under which they come, as Pope and Emperor. For in so far as they are men, they have to be brought under the best man, whoever he be, who is the measure and the ideal of all mankind; under him, that is, who is most one in his kind,[304] as may be gathered from the last book to Nicomachus.[305] When, however, two things are relative, it is evident that they must either be reciprocally brought under each other, if they are alternately superior, or if by the nature of their relation they belong to connected species; or else they must be brought under some third thing, as their common unity. But the first of these suppositions is impossible: for then both would be predicable of both, which cannot be. We cannot say that the Emperor is the Pope, or the Pope the Emperor. Nor again can it be said that they are connected in species, for the idea of the Pope is quite other than the idea of the Emperor, in so far as they are Pope and Emperor. Therefore they must be reduced to some single thing above them. [Footnote 304: "_Ad existentem maxime unum in genere suo._"] [Footnote 305: _Eth._ x. 5, 7.--(W.)] Now it must be understood that the relative is to the relative as the relation to the relation. If, therefore, the Papacy and the Empire, seeing that they are relations of paramount superiority, have to be carried back to some higher point of superiority from which they, with the features which make them different,[306] branch off, the Pope and Emperor, being relative to one another, must be brought back to some one unity in which the higher point of superiority, without this characteristic difference, is found. And this will be either God, to whom all things unite in looking up, or something below God, which is higher in the scale of superiority, while differing from the simple and absolute superiority of God. Thus it is evident that the Pope and the Emperor, in so far as they are men, have to be brought under some one head; while, in so far as they are Pope and Emperor, they have to be brought under another head, and so far is clear, as regards the argument from reason. [Footnote 306: "_Cum differentialibus suis._"] XIII.--We have now stated and put on one side those erroneous reasonings on which they, who assert that the authority of the Roman Emperor depends on the Pope of Rome, do most chiefly rely. We have now to go back and show forth the truth in this third question, which we proposed in the beginning to examine. The truth will appear plainly enough if I start in my inquiry from the principle which I laid down, and then show that the authority of the Empire springs immediately from the head of all being, who is God. This truth will be made manifest, either if it be shown that the authority of the Empire does not spring from the authority of the Church; for there is no argument concerning any other authority. Or again, if it be shown by direct proof that the authority of the Empire springs immediately from God. We prove that the authority of the Church is not the cause of the authority of the Empire in the following manner. Nothing can be the cause of power in another thing when that other thing has all its power, while the first either does not exist, or else has no power of action.[307] But the Empire had its power while the Church was either not existing at all, or else had no power of acting. Therefore the Church is not the cause of the power of the Empire, and therefore not of its authority either, for power and authority mean the same thing. Let A be the Church, B the Empire, C the authority or power of the Empire. If C is in B while A does not exist, A cannot be the cause of C being in B, for it is impossible for an effect to exist before its cause. Further, if C is in B while A does not act, it cannot be that A is the cause of C being in B; for, to produce an effect, it is necessary that the cause, especially the efficient cause of which we are speaking, should have been at work first. The major premiss of this argument is self-evident, and the minor premiss is confirmed by Christ and the Church. Christ confirms it by His birth and His death, as we have said; the Church confirms it in the words which Paul spake to Festus in the Acts of the Apostles: "I stand at Cæsar's judgment-seat, where I ought to be judged," and by the words which an angel of God spake to Paul a little afterwards: "Fear not, Paul; thou must be brought before Cæsar;" and again by Paul's words to the Jews of Italy: "But when the Jews spake against it, I was constrained to appeal unto Cæsar; not that I had aught to accuse my nation of," but "to deliver my soul from death." But if Cæsar had not at that time had the authority to judge in temporal matters, Christ would not have argued thus; nor would the angel have brought these words; nor would he, who spake of himself as "having a desire to depart and to be with Christ," have made an appeal to a judge not having authority.[308] [Footnote 307: "_Non virtuante._"] [Footnote 308: "_Incompetentem._" Acts xxv. 10; xxvii. 24; xxviii. 19. Phil. i. 23.--(W.)] And if Constantine had not had the authority over the patronage of the Church, those things which he allotted from the Empire he could not have had the right to allot; and so the Church would be using this gift against right; whereas God wills that offerings should be pure, as is commanded in Leviticus: "No meat offering that ye shall bring unto the Lord shall be made with leaven." And though this command appears to regard those who offer, nevertheless it also regards those who receive an offering. For it is folly to suppose that God wishes to be received that which He forbids to be offered, for in the same book there is a command to the Levites: "Ye shall not make yourselves abominable with any creeping thing that creepeth; neither shall ye make yourselves unclean with them, that ye shall be defiled thereby."[309] But to say that the Church so misuses the patrimony assigned to her is very unseemly; therefore the premiss from which this conclusion followed is false. [Footnote 309: Levit. ii. 11; xi. 43.--(W.)] XIV.--Again, if the Church had power to bestow authority on the Roman Prince, she would have it either from God, or from herself, or from some Emperor, or from the universal consent of mankind, or at least of the majority of mankind. There is no other crevice by which this power could flow down to the Church. But she has it not from any of these sources; therefore she has it not at all. It is manifest that she has it from none of these sources; for if she had received it from God, she would have received it either by the divine or by the natural law: because what is received from nature is received from God; though the converse of this is not true. But this power is not received by the natural law; for nature lays down no law, save for the effects of nature, for God cannot fail in power, where he brings anything into being without the aid of secondary agents. Since therefore the Church is not an effect of nature, but of God who said: "Upon this rock I will build my Church," and elsewhere: "I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do," it is manifest that nature did not give the Church this law. Nor was this power bestowed by the divine law; for the whole of the divine law is contained in the bosom of the Old or of the New Testament, and I cannot find therein that any thought or care for worldly matters was commanded, either to the early or to the latter priesthood. Nay, I find rather such care taken away from the priests of the Old Testament by the express command of God to Moses,[310] and from the priests of the New Testament by the express command of Christ to His disciples.[311] But it could not be that this care was taken away from them, if the authority of the temporal power flowed from the priesthood; for at least in giving the authority there would be an anxious watchfulness of forethought, and afterwards continued precaution, lest he to whom authority had been given should leave the straight way. [Footnote 310: Numbers xviii. 20. Cf. _Purg._ xvi. 131.--(W.)] [Footnote 311: Matt. x. 9.--(W.)] Then it is quite plain that the Church did not receive this power from herself; for nothing can give what it has not. Therefore all that does anything, must be such in its doing, as that which it intends to do, as is stated in the book "of Simple Being."[312] But it is plain that if the Church gave to herself this power, she had it not before she gave it. Thus she would have given what she had not, which is impossible. [Footnote 312: Arist. _Metaph._ ix. 8.--(W.)] But it is sufficiently manifest from what we have previously made evident that the Church has received not this power from any Emperor. And further, that she had it not from the consent of all, or even of the greater part of mankind, who can doubt? seeing that not only all the inhabitants of Asia and Africa, but even the greater number of Europeans, hold the thought in abhorrence. It is mere weariness to adduce proofs in matters which are so plain. XV.--Again, that which is contrary to the nature of a thing cannot be counted as one of its essential powers; for the essential powers of each individual follow on its nature, in order to gain its end. But the power to grant authority in that which is the realm of our mortal state is contrary to the nature of the Church.[313] Therefore it is not in the number of its essential powers. For the proof of the minor premiss we must know that the nature of the Church means the form [or essence][314] of the Church. For although men use the word nature not only of the form of a thing, but also of its matter, nevertheless, it is of the form that they use it more properly, as is proved in the book "of Natural Learning."[315] But the [essence or] form of the Church is nothing else than the life of Christ, as it is contained both in His sayings and in His deeds. For His life was the example and ideal of the militant Church, especially of its pastors, and above all of its chief pastor, to whom it belongs to feed the sheep and the lambs of Christ. And therefore when Christ left His life unto men for an example He said in John's Gospel: "I have given you an example that ye should do as I have done to you." And He said unto Peter specially, after that He had committed unto him the office of shepherd, the words which John also reports: "Peter, follow me." But Christ denied before Pilate that His rule was of this sort, saying: "My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now is my kingdom not from hence."[316] [Footnote 313: "_Virtus auctorizandi regnum nostræ mortalitatis est contra naturam Ecclesiæ._"] [Footnote 314: "_Forma._"] [Footnote 315: Arist. _Phys. Ausc._ ii. 1.--(W.)] [Footnote 316: John xiii. 15; xxi. 22; xviii. 36.--(W.)] But this saying must not be understood to mean that Christ, who is God, is not the lord of this kingdom, for the Psalmist says: "The sea is His, and He made it, and His hands formed the dry land."[317] We must understand it to mean that, as _the pattern of the Church_, He had not the care of this kingdom. It is as if a golden seal were to speak of itself, and say: "I am not the standard for such and such a class of things;" for in so far as it is gold, this saying is untrue, seeing that gold is the standard of all metals; but it is true in so far as it is a sign capable of being received by impression. [Footnote 317: Ps. xcv. 5.--(W.)] It belongs, then, to the very form of the Church always to speak the same, always to think the same; and to do the opposite of this is evidently contrary to its essential form--that is to say, to its nature. And from this it may be collected that the power of bestowing authority on this kingdom is contrary to the nature of the Church; for contrariety which is in thought or word follows from contrariety which is in the thing thought and the thing said; just as truth and falsehood in speech come from the being or the not-being of the thing, as we learn from the doctrine of the _Categories_. It has then become manifest enough by means of the preceding arguments, by which the contention of our opponents has been shown to lead to an absurd result, that the authority of the Empire is not in any way dependent on the authority of the Church. XVI.--Although it has been proved in the preceding chapter that the authority of the Empire has not its cause in the authority of the Supreme Pontiff; for we have shown that this argument led to absurd results; yet it has not been entirely shown that the authority of the Empire depends directly upon God, except as a result from our argument. For it is a consequence that, if the authority comes not from the vicar of God, it must come from God Himself. And therefore, for the complete determination of the question proposed, we have to prove directly that the emperor or monarch of the world stands in an immediate relation to the King of the universe, who is God. For the better comprehending of this, it must be recognised that man alone, of all created things, holds a position midway between things corruptible and things incorruptible; and therefore[318] philosophers rightly liken him to a dividing line between two hemispheres. For man consists of two essential parts, namely, the soul and the body. If he be considered in relation to his body only, he is corruptible; but if he be considered in relation to his soul only, he is incorruptible. And therefore the Philosopher spoke well concerning the incorruptible soul when he said in the second book "of the Soul:" "It is this alone which may be separated, as being eternal, from the corruptible."[319] [Footnote 318: In the _De Causis_ (_v._ above, i. 11), Propos. 9: "Intelligentia comprehendit generata et naturam, et horizontem naturæ, scilicet animam; nam ipsa est supra naturam."--(W.)] [Footnote 319: Arist. _De Anim._ ii. 2.--(W.)] If, therefore, man holds this position midway between the corruptible and the incorruptible, since every middle nature partakes of both extremes, man must share something of each nature. And since every nature is ordained to gain some final end, it follows that for man there is a double end. For as he alone of all beings participates both in the corruptible and the incorruptible, so he alone of all beings is ordained to gain two ends, whereby one is his end in so far as he is corruptible, and the other in so far as he is incorruptible. Two ends, therefore, have been laid down by the ineffable providence of God for man to aim at: the blessedness of this life, which consists in the exercise of his natural powers, and which is prefigured in[320] the earthly Paradise; and next, the blessedness of the life eternal, which consists in the fruition of the sight of God's countenance, and to which man by his own natural powers cannot rise, if he be not aided by the divine light; and this blessedness is understood by the heavenly Paradise. [Footnote 320: See _Purg._ xxviii.: and Mr. Longfellow's note ad loc.] But to these different kinds of blessedness, as to different conclusions, we must come by different means. For at the first we may arrive by the lessons of philosophy, if only we will follow them, by acting in accordance with the moral and intellectual virtues. But at the second we can only arrive by spiritual lessons, transcending human reason, so that we follow them in accordance with the theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity. The truth of the first of these conclusions and of these means is made manifest by human reason, which by the philosophers has been all laid open to us. The other conclusions and means are made manifest by the Holy Spirit, who by the mouth of the Prophets and holy writers, and by Jesus Christ, the co-eternal Son of God, and His disciples, has revealed to us supernatural truth of which we have great need. Nevertheless human passion would cast them all behind its back, if it were not that men, going astray like the beasts that perish,[321] were restrained in their course by bit and bridle, like horses and mules. [Footnote 321: "_Sua bestialitate vagantes._" _V._ Ps. xxxii. 10.] Therefore man had need of two guides for his life, as he had a twofold end in life; whereof one is the Supreme Pontiff, to lead mankind to eternal life, according to the things revealed to us; and the other is the Emperor, to guide mankind to happiness in this world, in accordance with the teaching of philosophy. And since none, or but a few only, and even they with sore difficulty, could arrive at this harbour of happiness, unless the waves and blandishments of human desires were set at rest, and the human race were free to live in peace and quiet, this therefore is the mark at which he who is to care for the world, and whom we call the Roman Prince, must most chiefly aim at: I mean, that in this little plot of earth[322] belonging to mortal men, life may pass in freedom and with peace. And since the order of this world follows the order of the heavens, as they run their course, it is necessary, to the end that the learning which brings liberty and peace may be duly applied by this guardian of the world in fitting season and place, that this power should be dispensed by Him who is ever present to behold the whole order of the heavens. And this is He who alone has preordained this, that by it in His providence He might bind all things together, each in their own order. [Footnote 322: Cf. _Parad._ xxii. 151. "_L'ajuola che ci fa tanto feroci._"] But if this is so, God alone elects, God alone confirms: for there is none higher than God. And hence there is the further conclusion, that neither those who now are, nor any others who may, in whatsoever way, have been called "Electors," ought to have that name; rather they are to be held as declarers and announcers of the providence of God. And, therefore, it is that they to whom is granted the privilege of announcing God's will sometimes fall into disagreement; because that, all of them or some of them have been blinded by their evil desires, and have not discerned the face of God's appointment.[323] [Footnote 323: _V._ Hallam, _Middle Ages_, c. v. Bryce, _Roman Empire_, c. xiv. Witte, _Præf._ p. xxxiv. xlv.] It is therefore clear that the authority of temporal Monarchy comes down, with no intermediate will, from the fountain of universal authority; and this fountain, one in its unity, flows through many channels out of the abundance of the goodness of God. And now, methinks, I have reached the goal which I set before me. I have unravelled the truth of the questions which I asked: whether the office of Monarchy was necessary to the welfare of the world; whether it was by right that the Roman people assumed to themselves the office of Monarchy; and, further, that last question, whether the authority of the Monarch springs immediately from God, or from some other. Yet the truth of this latter question must not be received so narrowly as to deny that in certain matters the Roman Prince is subject to the Roman Pontiff. For that happiness, which is subject to mortality, in a sense is ordered with a view to the happiness which shall not taste of death. Let, therefore, Cæsar be reverent to Peter, as the first-born son should be reverent to his father, that he may be illuminated with the light of his father's grace, and so may be stronger to lighten the world over which he has been placed by Him alone, who is the ruler of all things spiritual as well as temporal. THE END. CONTENTS OF DE MONARCHIA. BOOK I. WHETHER A TEMPORAL MONARCHY IS NECESSARY FOR THE WELL-BEING OF THE WORLD? CHAP. PAGE I.--Introduction 177 II.--What is the end of the civil order of mankind? 178 III.--It is to cause the whole power of the human intellect to act in speculation and operation 180 IV.--To attain this end, mankind needs universal peace 184 V.--When several means are ordained to gain an end, one of them must be supreme over the others 185 VI.--The order which is found in the parts of mankind ought to be found in mankind as a whole 188 VII.--Kingdoms and nations ought to stand in the same relation to the monarch as mankind to God 189 VIII.--Men were made in the image of God; but God is one _ib._ IX.--Men are the children of Heaven, and they ought to imitate the footprints of Heaven 190 X.--There is need of a Supreme Judge for the decision of all quarrels 191 XI.--The world is best ordered when justice is strongest therein 192 XII.--Men are at their best in freedom 198 XIII.--He who is best qualified to rule can best order others 201 XIV.--When it is possible, it is better to gain an end by one agent than by many 203 XV.--That which is most one is everywhere best 206 XVI.--Christ willed to be born in the fulness of time, when Augustus was monarch 209 BOOK II. WHETHER THE ROMAN PEOPLE ASSUMED TO ITSELF BY RIGHT THE DIGNITY OF EMPIRE? CHAP. PAGE I.--Introduction 211 II.--That which God wills in human society is to be held as Right 213 III.--It was fitting for the Romans, as being the noblest nation, to be preferred before all others 216 IV.--The Roman Empire was helped by miracles, and therefore was willed by God 220 V.--The Romans, in bringing the world into subjection, aimed at the good of the state, and therefore at the end of Right 223 VI.--All men, who aim at Right, walk according to Right 229 VII.--The Romans were ordained for empire by Nature 232 VIII.--The judgment of God showed that empire fell to the lot of the Romans 235 IX.--The Romans prevailed when all nations were striving for empire 239 X.--What is acquired by single combat is acquired as of Right 243 XI.--The single combats of Rome 247 XII.--Christ, by being born, proves to us that the authority of the Roman Empire was just 250 XIII.--Christ, by dying, confirmed the jurisdiction of the Roman Empire over all mankind 253 BOOK III. WHETHER THE AUTHORITY OF THE MONARCH COMES DIRECTLY FROM GOD, OR FROM SOME VICAR OF GOD? CHAP. PAGE I.--Introduction 256 II.--God wills not that which is repugnant to the intention of Nature 257 III.--Of the three classes of our opponents, and of the too great authority which many ascribe to tradition 259 IV.--The argument drawn by our opponents from the sun and the moon 264 V.--The argument drawn from the precedence of Levi over Judah 270 VI.--The argument drawn from the crowning and deposition of Saul by Samuel 271 VII.--The argument drawn from the oblation of the Magi 273 VIII.--The argument drawn from the power of the keys given to Peter 275 IX.--The argument drawn from the two swords 278 X.--The argument drawn from the donation of Constantine 282 XI.--The argument drawn from the summoning of Charles the Great by Pope Hadrian 287 XII.--The argument drawn from reason 288 XIII.--The authority of the Church is not the cause of the authority of the Empire 291 XIV.--The Church has power to bestow such authority neither from God, nor from itself, nor from any emperor 294 XV.--The power of giving authority to the Empire is against the nature of the Church 297 XVI.--The authority of the Empire comes directly from God 299 * * * * * CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. 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8509	----	Proofreading Team AMONG MY BOOKS Second Series by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL To R.W. EMERSON. A love and honor which more than thirty years have deepened, though priceless to him they enrich, are of little import to one capable of inspiring them. Yet I cannot deny myself the pleasure of so far intruding on your reserve as at least to make public acknowledgment of the debt I can never repay. CONTENTS. DANTE SPENSER WORDSWORTH MILTON KEATS DANTE.[1] On the banks of a little river so shrunken by the suns of summer that it seems fast passing into a tradition, but swollen by the autumnal rains with an Italian suddenness of passion till the massy bridge shudders under the impatient heap of waters behind it, stands a city which, in its period of bloom not so large as Boston, may well rank next to Athens in the history which teaches _come l' uom s' eterna_. Originally only a convenient spot in the valley where the fairs of the neighboring Etruscan city of Fiesole were held, it gradually grew from a huddle of booths to a town, and then to a city, which absorbed its ancestral neighbor and became a cradle for the arts, the letters, the science, and the commerce[2] of modern Europe. For her Cimabue wrought, who infused Byzantine formalism with a suggestion of nature and feeling; for her the Pisani, who divined at least, if they could not conjure with it, the secret of Greek supremacy in sculpture; for her the marvellous boy Ghiberti proved that unity of composition and grace of figure and drapery were never beyond the reach of genius;[3] for her Brunelleschi curved the dome which Michel Angelo hung in air on St. Peter's; for her Giotto reared the bell-tower graceful as an Horatian ode in marble; and the great triumvirate of Italian poetry, good sense, and culture called her mother. There is no modern city about which cluster so many elevating associations, none in which the past is so contemporary with us in unchanged buildings and undisturbed monuments. The house of Dante is still shown; children still receive baptism at the font (_il mio bel San Giovanni_) where he was christened before the acorn dropped that was to grow into a keel for Columbus; and an inscribed stone marks the spot where he used to sit and watch the slow blocks swing up to complete the master-thought of Arnolfo. In the convent of St. Mark hard by lived and labored Beato Angelico, the saint of Christian art, and Fra Bartolommeo, who taught Raphael dignity. From the same walls Savonarola went forth to his triumphs, short-lived almost as the crackle of his martyrdom. The plain little chamber of Michel Angelo seems still to expect his return; his last sketches lie upon the table, his staff leans in the corner, and his slippers wait before the empty chair. On one of the vine-clad hills, just without the city walls, one's feet may press the same stairs that Milton climbed to visit Galileo. To an American there is something supremely impressive in this cumulative influence of the past full of inspiration and rebuke, something saddening in this repeated proof that moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments and not ruins behind it. Time, who with us obliterates the labor and often the names of yesterday, seems here to have spared almost the prints of the _care piante_ that shunned the sordid paths of worldly honor. Around the courtyard of the great Museum of Florence stand statues of her illustrious dead, her poets, painters, sculptors, architects, inventors, and statesmen; and as the traveller feels the ennobling lift of such society, and reads the names or recognizes the features familiar to him as his own threshold, he is startled to find Fame as commonplace here as Notoriety everywhere else, and that this fifth-rate city should have the privilege thus to commemorate so many famous men her sons, whose claim to pre-eminence the whole world would concede. Among them is one figure before which every scholar, every man who has been touched by the tragedy of life, lingers with reverential pity. The haggard cheeks, the lips clamped together in unfaltering resolve, the scars of lifelong battle, and the brow whose sharp outline seems the monument of final victory,-- this, at least, is a face that needs no name beneath it. This is he who among literary fames finds only two that for growth and immutability can parallel his own. The suffrages of highest authority would now place him second in that company where he with proud humility took the sixth place.[4] Dante (Durante, by contraction Dante) degli Alighieri was born at Florence in 1265, probably during the month of May.[5] This is the date given by Boccaccio, who is generally followed, though he makes a blunder in saying, _sedendo Urbano quarto nella cattedra di San Pietro_, for Urban died in October, 1264. Some, misled by an error in a few of the early manuscript copies of the _Divina Commedia_, would have him born five years earlier, in 1260. According to Arrivabene,[6] Sansovino was the first to confirm Boccaccio's statement by the authority of the poet himself, basing his argument on the first verse of the _Inferno_,-- "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita"; the average age of man having been declared by the Psalmist to be seventy years, and the period of the poet's supposed vision being unequivocally fixed at 1300.[7] Leonardo Aretino and Manetti add their testimony to that of Boccaccio, and 1265 is now universally assumed as the true date. Voltaire,[8] nevertheless, places the poet's birth in 1260, and jauntily forgives Bayle (who, he says, _écrivait à Rotterdam_ currente calamo _pour son libraire_) for having been right, declaring that he esteems him neither more nor less for having made a mistake of five years. Oddly enough, Voltaire adopts this alleged blunder of five years on the next page in saying that Dante died at the age of 56, though he still more oddly omits the undisputed date of his death (1321), which would have shown Bayle to be right. The poet's descent is said to have been derived from a younger son of the great Roman family of the Frangipani, classed by the popular rhyme with the Orsini and Colonna:-- "Colonna, Orsini, e Frangipani, Prendono oggi e pagano domani." That his ancestors had been long established in Florence is an inference from some expressions of the poet, and from their dwelling having been situated in the more ancient part of the city. The most important fact of the poet's genealogy is, that he was of mixed race, the Alighieri being of Teutonic origin. Dante was born, as he himself tells us,[9] when the sun was in the constellation Gemini, and it has been absurdly inferred, from a passage in the _Inferno_,[10] that his horoscope was drawn and a great destiny predicted for him by his teacher, Brunetto Latini. The _Ottimo Comento_ tells us that the Twins are the house of Mercury, who induces in men the faculty of writing, science, and of acquiring knowledge. This is worth mentioning as characteristic of the age and of Dante himself, with whom the influence of the stars took the place of the old notion of destiny.[11] It is supposed, from a passage in Boccaccio's life of Dante, that Alighiero the father was still living when the poet was nine years old. If so, he must have died soon after, for Leonardo Aretino, who wrote with original documents before him, tells us that Dante lost his father while yet a child. This circumstance may have been not without influence in muscularizing his nature to that character of self-reliance which shows itself so constantly and sharply during his after-life. His tutor was Brunetto Latini, a very superior man (for that age), says Aretino parenthetically. Like Alexander Gill, he is now remembered only as the schoolmaster of a great poet, and that he did his duty well may be inferred from Dante's speaking of him gratefully as one who by times "taught him how man eternizes himself." This, and what Villani says of his refining the Tuscan idiom (for so we understand his _farli scorti in bene parlare_),[12] are to be noted as of probable influence on the career of his pupil. Of the order of Dante's studies nothing can be certainly affirmed. His biographers send him to Bologna, Padua, Paris, Naples, and even Oxford. All are doubtful, Paris and Oxford most of all, and the dates utterly undeterminable. Yet all are possible, nay, perhaps probable. Bologna and Padua we should be inclined to place before his exile; Paris and Oxford, if at all, after it. If no argument in favor of Paris is to be drawn from his _Pape Satan_[13] and the corresponding _paix, paix, Sathan,_ in the autobiography of Cellini, nor from the very definite allusion to Doctor Siger,[14] we may yet infer from some passages in the _Commedia_ that his wanderings had extended even farther;[15] for it would not be hard to show that his comparisons and illustrations from outward things are almost invariably drawn from actual eyesight. As to the nature of his studies, there can be no doubt that he went through the _trivium_ (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the _quadrivium_ (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) of the then ordinary university course. To these he afterward added painting (or at least drawing,--_designavo un angelo sopra certe tavolette_),[16] theology, and medicine. He is said to have been the pupil of Cimabue, and was certainly the friend of Giotto, the designs for some of whose frescos at Assisi and elsewhere have been wrongly attributed to him, though we may safely believe in his helpful comment and suggestion. To prove his love of music, the episode of Casella were enough, even without Boccaccio's testimony. The range of Dante's study and acquirement would be encyclopedic in any age, but at that time it was literally possible to master the _omne scibile_, and he seems to have accomplished it. How lofty his theory of science was, is plain from this passage in the _Convito_: "He is not to be called a true lover of wisdom (_filosofo_) who loves it for the sake of gain, as do lawyers, physicians, and almost all churchmen (_li religiosi_), who study, not in order to know, but to acquire riches or advancement, and who would not persevere in study should you give them what they desire to gain by it.... And it may be said that (as true friendship between men consists in each wholly loving the other) the true philosopher loves every part of wisdom, and wisdom every part of the philosopher, inasmuch as she draws all to herself, and allows no one of his thoughts to wander to other things."[17] The _Convito_ gives us a glance into Dante's library. We find Aristotle (whom he calls the philosopher, the master) cited seventy-six times; Cicero, eighteen; Albertus Magnus, seven; Boethius, six; Plato (at second-hand), four; Aquinas, Avicenna, Ptolemy, the Digest, Lucan, and Ovid, three each; Virgil, Juvenal, Statius, Seneca, and Horace, twice each; and Algazzali, Alfrogan, Augustine, Livy, Orosius, and Homer (at second-hand), once. Of Greek he seems to have understood little; of Hebrew and Arabic, a few words. But it was not only in the closet and from books that Dante received his education. He acquired, perhaps, the better part of it in the streets of Florence, and later, in those homeless wanderings which led him (as he says) wherever the Italian tongue was spoken. His were the only open eyes of that century, and, as nothing escaped them, so there is nothing that was not photographed upon his sensitive brain, to be afterward fixed forever in the _Commedia_. What Florence was during his youth and manhood, with its Guelphs and Ghibellines, its nobles and trades, its Bianchi and Neri, its kaleidoscopic revolutions, "all parties loving liberty and doing their best to destroy her," as Voltaire says, it would be beyond our province to tell even if we could. Foreshortened as events are when we look back on them across so many ages, only the upheavals of party conflict catching the eye, while the spaces of peace between sink out of the view of history, a whole century seems like a mere wild chaos. Yet during a couple of such centuries the cathedrals of Florence, Pisa, and Siena got built; Cimabue, Giotto, Arnolfo, the Pisani, Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti gave the impulse to modern art, or brought it in some of its branches to its culminating point; modern literature took its rise; commerce became a science, and the middle class came into being. It was a time of fierce passions and sudden tragedies, of picturesque transitions and contrasts. It found Dante, shaped him by every experience that life is capable of,--rank, ease, love, study, affairs, statecraft, hope, exile, hunger, dependence, despair,--until he became endowed with a sense of the nothingness of this world's goods possible only to the rich, and a knowledge of man possible only to the poor. The few well-ascertained facts of Dante's life may be briefly stated. In 1274 occurred what we may call his spiritual birth, the awakening in him of the imaginative faculty, and of that profounder and more intense consciousness which springs from the recognition of beauty through the antithesis of sex. It was in that year that he first saw Beatrice Portinari. In 1289 he was present at the battle of Campaldino, fighting on the side of the Guelphs, who there utterly routed the Ghibellines, and where, he says characteristically enough, "I was present, not a boy in arms, and where I felt much fear, but in the end the greatest pleasure, from the various changes of the fight."[18] In the same year he assisted at the siege and capture of Caprona.[19] In 1290 died Beatrice, married to Simone dei Bardi, precisely when is uncertain, but before 1287, as appears by a mention of her in her father's will, bearing date January 15 of that year. Dante's own marriage is assigned to various years, ranging from 1291 to 1294; but the earlier date seems the more probable, as he was the father of seven children (the youngest, a daughter, named Beatrice) in 1301. His wife was Gemma dei Donati, and through her Dante, whose family, though noble, was of the lesser nobility, became nearly connected with Corso Donati, the head of a powerful clan of the _grandi_, or greater nobles. In 1293 occurred what is called the revolution of Gian Della Bella, in which the priors of the trades took the power into their own hands, and made nobility a disqualification for office. A noble was defined to be any one who counted a knight among his ancestors, and thus the descendant of Cacciaguida was excluded. Della Bella was exiled in 1295, but the nobles did not regain their power. On the contrary, the citizens, having all their own way, proceeded to quarrel among themselves, and subdivided into the _popolani grossi_ and _popolani minuti_, or greater and lesser trades,--a distinction of gentility somewhat like that between wholesale and retail tradesmen. The _grandi_ continuing turbulent, many of the lesser nobility, among them Dante, drew over to the side of the citizens, and between 1297 and 1300 there is found inscribed in the book of the physicians and apothecaries, _Dante d' Aldighiero, degli Aldighieri, poeta Fiorentino_[20] Professor de Vericour[21] thinks it necessary to apologize for this lapse on the part of the poet, and gravely bids us take courage, nor think that Dante was ever an apothecary. In 1300 we find him elected one of the priors of the city. In order to a perfect misunderstanding of everything connected with the Florentine politics of this period, one has only to study the various histories. The result is a spectrum on the mind's eye, which looks definite and brilliant, but really hinders all accurate vision, as if from too steady inspection of a Catharine-wheel in full whirl. A few words, however, are necessary, if only to make the confusion palpable. The rival German families of Welfs and Weiblingens had given their names, softened into Guelfi and Ghibellini,--from which Gabriel Harvey[22] ingeniously, but mistakenly, derives elves and goblins,--to two parties in Northern Italy, representing respectively the adherents of the pope and of the emperor, but serving very well as rallying-points in all manner of intercalary and subsidiary quarrels. The nobles, especially the greater ones,--perhaps from instinct, perhaps in part from hereditary tradition, as being more or less Teutonic by descent,--were commonly Ghibellines, or Imperialists; the bourgeoisie were very commonly Guelphs, or supporters of the pope, partly from natural antipathy to the nobles, and partly, perhaps, because they believed themselves to be espousing the more purely Italian side. Sometimes, however, the party relation of nobles and burghers to each other was reversed, but the names of Guelph and Ghibelline always substantially represented the same things. The family of Dante had been Guelphic, and we have seen him already as a young man serving two campaigns against the other party. But no immediate question as between pope and emperor seems then to have been pending; and while there is no evidence that he was ever a mere partisan, the reverse would be the inference from his habits and character. Just before his assumption of the priorate, however, a new complication had arisen. A family feud, beginning at the neighboring city of Pistoja, between the Cancellieri Neri and Cancellieri Bianchi,[23] had extended to Florence, where the Guelphs took the part of the Neri and the Ghibellines of the Bianchi.[24] The city was instantly in a ferment of street brawls, as actors in one of which some of the Medici are incidentally named,--the first appearance of that family in history. Both parties appealed at different times to the pope, who sent two ambassadors, first a bishop and then a cardinal. Both pacificators soon flung out again in a rage, after adding the new element of excommunication to the causes of confusion. It was in the midst of these things that Dante became one of the six priors (June, 1300),--an office which the Florentines had made bimestrial in its tenure, in order apparently to secure at least six constitutional chances of revolution in the year. He advised that the leaders of both parties should be banished to the frontiers, which was forthwith done; the ostracism including his relative Corso Donati among the Neri, and his most intimate friend the poet Guido Cavalcanti among the Bianchi. They were all permitted to return before long (but after Dante's term of office was over), and came accordingly, bringing at least the Scriptural allowance of "seven other" motives of mischief with them. Affairs getting worse (1301), the Neri, with the connivance of the pope (Boniface VIII.), entered into an arrangement with Charles of Valois, who was preparing an expedition to Italy. Dante was meanwhile sent on an embassy to Rome (September, 1301, according to Arrivabene,[25] but probably earlier) by the Bianchi, who still retained all the offices at Florence. It is the tradition that he said in setting forth: "If I go, who remains? and if I stay, who goes?" Whether true or not, the story implies what was certainly true, that the council and influence of Dante were of great weight with the more moderate of both parties. On October 31, 1301, Charles took possession of Florence in the interest of the Neri. Dante being still at Rome (January 27, 1302), sentence of exile was pronounced against him and others, with a heavy fine to be paid within two months; if not paid, the entire confiscation of goods, and, whether paid or no, exile; the charge against him being pecuniary malversation in office. The fine not paid (as it could not be without admitting the justice of the charges, which Dante scorned even to deny), in less than two months (March 10, 1302) a second sentence was registered, by which he with others was condemned to be burned alive if taken within the boundaries of the republic.[26] From this time the life of Dante becomes semi-mythical, and for nearly every date we are reduced to the "as they say" of Herodotus. He became now necessarily identified with his fellow-exiles (fragments of all parties united by common wrongs in a practical, if not theoretic, Ghibellinism), and shared in their attempts to reinstate themselves by force of arms. He was one of their council of twelve, but withdrew from it on account of the unwisdom of their measures. Whether he was present at their futile assault on Florence (July 22, 1304) is doubtful, but probably he was not. From the _Ottimo Comento_, written at least in part[27] by a contemporary as early as 1333, we learn that Dante soon separated himself from his companions in misfortune with mutual discontents and recriminations.[28] During the nineteen years of Dante's exile, it would be hard to say where he was not. In certain districts of Northern Italy there is scarce a village that has not its tradition of him, its _sedia, rocca, spelonca,_ or _torre di Dante_; and what between the patriotic complaisance of some biographers overwilling to gratify as many provincial vanities as possible, and the pettishness of others anxious only to snub them, the confusion becomes hopeless.[29] After his banishment we find some definite trace of him first at Arezzo with Uguccione della Faggiuola; then at Siena; then at Verona with the Scaligeri. He himself says: "Through almost all parts where this language [Italian] is spoken, a wanderer, wellnigh a beggar, I have gone, showing against my will the wound of fortune. Truly I have been a vessel without sail or rudder, driven to diverse ports, estuaries, and shores by that hot blast, the breath of grievous poverty; and I have shown myself to the eyes of many who perhaps, through some fame of me, had imagined me in quite other guise, in whose view not only was my person debased, but every work of mine, whether done or yet to do, became of less account."[30] By the election of the emperor Henry VII. (of Luxemburg, November, 1308), and the news of his proposed expedition into Italy, the hopes of Dante were raised to the highest pitch. Henry entered Italy, October, 1310, and received the iron crown of Lombardy at Milan, on the day of Epiphany, 1311. His movements being slow, and his policy undecided, Dante addressed him that famous letter, urging him to crush first the "Hydra and Myrrha" Florence, as the root of all the evils of Italy (April 16, 1311). To this year we must probably assign the new decree by which the seigniory of Florence recalled a portion of the exiles, excepting Dante, however, among others, by name.[31] The undertaking of Henry, after an ill-directed dawdling of two years, at last ended in his death at Buonconvento (August 24, 1313; Carlyle says wrongly September); poisoned, it was said, in the sacramental bread, by a Dominican friar, bribed thereto by Florence.[32] The story is doubtful, the more as Dante nowhere alludes to it, as he certainly would have done had he heard of it. According to Balbo, Dante spent the time from August, 1313, to November, 1314, in Pisa and Lucca, and then took refuge at Verona, with Can Grande della Scala (whom Voltaire calls, drolly enough, _le grand can de Vérone_, as if he had been a Tartar), where he remained till 1318. Foscolo with equal positiveness sends him, immediately after the death of Henry, to Guido da Polenta[33] at Ravenna, and makes him join Can Grande only after the latter became captain of the Ghibelline league in December, 1318. In 1316 the government of Florence set forth a new decree allowing the exiles to return on conditions of fine and penance. Dante rejected the offer (by accepting which his guilt would have been admitted), in a letter still hot, after these five centuries, with indignant scorn. "Is this then the glorious return of Dante Alighieri to his country after nearly three lustres of suffering and exile? Did an innocence, patent to all, merit this?--this, the perpetual sweat and toil of study? Far from a man, the housemate of philosophy, be so rash and earthen hearted a humility as to allow himself to be offered up bound like a school-boy or a criminal! Far from a man, the preacher of justice, to pay those who have done him wrong as for a favor! This is not the way of retaining to my country; but if another can be found that shall not derogate from the fame and honor of Dante, that I will enter on with no lagging steps. For if by none such Florence may be entered, by me then never! Can I not everywhere behold the mirrors of the sun and stars? speculate on sweetest truths under any sky without first giving myself up inglorious, nay, ignominious, to the populace and city of Florence? Nor shall I want for bread." Dionisi puts the date of this letter in 1315.[34] He is certainly wrong, for the decree is dated December 11, 1316. Foscolo places it in 1316, Troya early in 1317, and both may be right, as the year began March 25. Whatever the date of Dante's visit to Voltaire's great Khan[35] of Verona, or the length of his stay with him, may have been, it is certain that he was in Ravenna in 1320, and that, on his return thither from an embassy to Venice (concerning which a curious letter, forged probably by Doni, is extant), he died on September 14, 1321 (13th, according to others). He was buried at Ravenna under a monument built by his friend, Guido Novello.[36] Dante is said to have dictated the following inscription for it on his death-bed:-- JVRA MONARCHIAE SVPEROS PHLEGETHONTA LACVSQVE LVSTRANDO CECINI VOLVERVNT FATA QVOVSQVE SED QVIA PARS CESSIT MELIORIBVS HOSPITA CASTRIS AVCTOREMQVE SVVM PETIIT FELICIOR ASTRIS HIC CLAVDOR DANTES PATRIIS EXTORRIS AB ORIS QVEM GENVIT PARVI FLORENTIA MATER AMORIS. Of which this rude paraphrase may serve as a translation:-- The rights of Monarchy, the Heavens, the Stream of Fire, the Pit, In vision seen, I sang as far as to the Fates seemed fit; But since my soul, an alien here, hath flown to nobler wars, And, happier now, hath gone to seek its Maker 'mid the stars, Here am I Dante shut, exiled from the ancestral shore, Whom Florence, the of all least-loving mother, bore.[37] If these be not the words of Dante, what is internal evidence worth? The indomitably self-reliant man, loyal first of all to his most unpopular convictions (his very host, Guido, being a Guelph), puts his Ghibellinism (_jura monarchiae_) in the front. The man whose whole life, like that of selected souls always, had been a war fare, calls heaven another camp,--a better one, thank God! The wanderer of so many years speaks of his soul as a guest,--glad to be gone, doubtless. The exile, whose sharpest reproaches of Florence are always those of an outraged lover, finds it bitter that even his unconscious bones should lie in alien soil. Giovanni Villani, the earliest authority, and a contemporary, thus sketches him: "This man was a great scholar in almost every science, though a layman; was a most excellent poet, philosopher, and rhetorician; perfect, as well in composing and versifying as in haranguing; a most noble speaker.... This Dante, on account of his learning, was a little haughty, and shy, and disdainful, and like a philosopher almost ungracious, knew not well how to deal with unlettered folk." Benvenuto da Imola tells us that he was very abstracted, as we may well believe of a man who carried the _Commedia_ in his brain. Boccaccio paints him in this wise: "Our poet was of middle height; his face was long, his nose aquiline, his jaw large, and the lower lip protruding somewhat beyond the upper; a little stooping in the shoulders; his eyes rather large than small; dark of complexion; his hair and beard thick, crisp, and black; and his countenance always sad and thoughtful. His garments were always dignified; the style such as suited ripeness of years; his gait was grave and gentlemanlike; and his bearing, whether public or private, wonderfully composed and polished. In meat and drink he was most temperate, nor was ever any more zealous in study or whatever other pursuit. Seldom spake he, save when spoken to, though a most eloquent person. In his youth he delighted especially in music and singing, and was intimate with almost all the singers and musicians of his day. He was much inclined to solitude, and familiar with few, and most assiduous in study as far as he could find time for it. Dante was also of marvellous capacity and the most tenacious memory." Various anecdotes of him are related by Boccaccio, Sacchetti, and others, none of them verisimilar, and some of them at least fifteen centuries old when revamped. Most of them are neither _veri_ nor _ben trovati_. One clear glimpse we get of him from the _Ottimo Comento_, the author of which says:[38] "I, the writer, heard Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to say other than he would, but that many a time and oft (_molte e spesse volte_) he had made words say for him what they were not wont to express for other poets." That is the only sincere glimpse we get of the living, breathing, word-compelling Dante. Looked at outwardly, the life of Dante seems to have been an utter and disastrous failure. What its inward satisfactions must have been, we, with the _Paradiso_ open before us, can form some faint conception. To him, longing with an intensity which only the word _Dantesque_ will express to realize an ideal upon earth, and continually baffled and misunderstood, the far greater part of his mature life must have been labor and sorrow. We can see how essential all that sad experience was to him, can understand why all the fairy stories hide the luck in the ugly black casket; but to him, then and there, how seemed it? Thou shalt relinquish everything of thee, Beloved most dearly; this that arrow is Shot from the bow of exile first of all; And thou shalt prove how salt a savor hath The bread of others, and how hard a path To climb and to descend the stranger's stairs![39] _Come sa di sale!_ Who never wet his bread with tears, says Goethe, knows ye not, ye heavenly powers! Our nineteenth century made an idol of the noble lord who broke his heart in verse once every six months, but the fourteenth was lucky enough to produce and not to make an idol of that rarest earthly phenomenon, a man of genius who could hold heartbreak at bay for twenty years, and would not let himself die till he had done his task. At the end of the _Vita Nuova_, his first work, Dante wrote down that remarkable aspiration that God would take him to himself after he had written of Beatrice such things as were never yet written of woman. It was literally fulfilled when the _Commedia_ was finished twenty-five years later. Scarce was Dante at rest in his grave when Italy felt instinctively that this was her great man. Boccaccio tells us that in 1329[40] Cardinal Poggetto (du Poiet) caused Dante's treatise _De Monarchiâ_, to be publicly burned at Bologna, and proposed further to dig up and burn the bones of the poet at Ravenna, as having been a heretic; but so much opposition was roused that he thought better of it. Yet this was during the pontificate of the Frenchman, John XXII., the reproof of whose simony Dante puts in the mouth of St. Peter, who declares his seat vacant,[41] whose damnation the poet himself seems to prophesy,[42] and against whose election he had endeavored to persuade the cardinals, in a vehement letter. In 1350 the republic of Florence voted the sum of ten golden florins to be paid by the hands of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio to Dante's daughter Beatrice, a nun in the convent of Santa Chiara at Ravenna. In 1396 Florence voted a monument, and begged in vain for the metaphorical ashes of the man of whom she had threatened to make literal cinders if she could catch him alive. In 1429[43] she begged again, but Ravenna, a dead city, was tenacious of the dead poet. In 1519 Michel Angelo would have built the monument, but Leo X. refused to allow the sacred dust to be removed. Finally, in 1829, five hundred and eight years after the death of Dante, Florence got a cenotaph fairly built in Santa Croce (by Ricci), ugly beyond even the usual lot of such, with three colossal figures on it, Dante in the middle, with Italy on one side and Poesy on the other. The tomb at Ravenna, built originally in 1483, by Cardinal Bembo, was restored by Cardinal Corsi in 1692, and finally rebuilt in its present form by Cardinal Gonzaga, in 1780, all three of whom commemorated themselves in Latin inscriptions. It is a little shrine covered with a dome, not unlike the tomb of a Mohammedan saint, and is now the chief magnet which draws foreigners and their gold to Ravenna. The _valet de place_ says that Dante is not buried under it, but beneath the pavement of the street in front of it, where also, he says, he saw my Lord Byron kneel and weep. Like everything in Ravenna, it is dirty and neglected. In 1373 (August 9) Florence instituted a chair of the _Divina Commedia_, and Boccaccio was named first professor. He accordingly began his lectures on Sunday, October 3, following, but his comment was broken off abruptly at the 17th verse of the 17th canto of the _Inferno_ by the illness which ended in his death, December 21, 1375. Among his successors were Filippo Villani and Filelfo. Bologna was the first to follow the example of Florence, Benvenuto da Imola having begun his lectures, according to Tiraboschi, so early as 1375. Chairs were established also at Pisa, Venice, Piacenza, and Milan before the close of the century. The lectures were delivered in the churches and on feast-days, which shows their popular character. Balbo reckons (but this is guess-work) that the MS. copies of the _Divina Commedia_ made during the fourteenth century, and now existing in the libraries of Europe, are more numerous than those of all other works, ancient and modern, made during the same period. Between the invention of printing and the year 1500 more than twenty editions were published in Italy, the earliest in 1472. During the sixteenth century there were forty editions; during the seventeenth,--a period, for Italy, of sceptical dilettanteism,--only three; during the eighteenth, thirty-four; and already, during the first half of the nineteenth, at least eighty. The first translation was into Spanish, in 1428.[44] M. St. René Taillandier says that the _Commedia_ was condemned by the inquisition in Spain; but this seems too general a statement, for, according to Foscolo,[45] it was the commentary of Landino and Vellutello, and a few verses in the _Inferno_ and _Paradiso_, which were condemned. The first French translation was that of Grangier, 1596, but the study of Dante struck no root there till the present century. Rivarol, who translated the _Inferno_ in 1783, was the first Frenchman who divined the wonderful force and vitality of the _Commedia_.[46] The expressions of Voltaire represent very well the average opinion of cultivated persons in respect of Dante in the middle of the eighteenth century. He says: "The Italians call him divine; but it is a hidden divinity; few people understand his oracles. He has commentators, which, perhaps, is another reason for his not being understood. His reputation will go on increasing, because scarce anybody reads him."[47] To Father Bettinelli he writes: "I estimate highly the courage with which you have dared to say that Dante was a madman and his work a monster." But he adds, what shows that Dante had his admirers even in that flippant century: "There are found among us, and in the eighteenth century, people who strive to admire imaginations so stupidly extravagant and barbarous."[48] Elsewhere he says that the _Commedia_ was "an odd poem, but gleaming with natural beauties, a work in which the author rose in parts above the bad taste of his age and his subject, and full of passages written as purely as if they had been of the time of Ariosto and Tasso."[49] It is curious to see this antipathetic fascination which Dante exercised over a nature so opposite to his own. At the beginning of this century Châteaubriand speaks of Dante with vague commendation, evidently from a very superficial acquaintance, and that only with the _Inferno_, probably from Rivarol's version.[50] Since then there have been four or five French versions in prose or verse, including one by Lamennais. But the austerity of Dante will not condescend to the conventional elegance which makes the charm of French, and the most virile of poets cannot be adequately rendered in the most feminine of languages. Yet in the works of Fauriel, Ozanam, Ampère, and Villemain, France has given a greater impulse to the study of Dante than any other country except Germany. Into Germany the _Commedia_ penetrated later. How utterly Dante was unknown there in the sixteenth century is plain from a passage in the "Vanity of the Arts and Sciences" of Cornelius Agrippa, where he is spoken of among the authors of lascivious stories: "There have been many of these historical pandars, of which some of obscure fame, as Aeneas Sylvius, Dantes, and Petrarch, Boccace, Pontanus," etc.[51] The first German translation was that of Kannegiesser (1809). Versions by Streckfuss, Kopisch, and Prince John (late king) of Saxony followed. Goethe seems never to have given that attention to Dante which his ever-alert intelligence might have been expected to bestow on so imposing a moral and aesthetic phenomenon. Unless the conclusion of the second part of "Faust" be an inspiration of the _Paradiso_, we remember no adequate word from him on this theme. His remarks on one of the German translations are brief, dry, and without that breadth which comes only of thorough knowledge and sympathy. But German scholarship and constructive criticism, through Witte, Kopisch, Wegele, Ruth, and others, have been of pre-eminent service in deepening the understanding and facilitating the study of the poet. In England the first recognition of Dante is by Chaucer in the "Hugelin of Pisa" of the "Monkes Tale,"[52] and an imitation of the opening verses of the third canto of the _Inferno_ ("Assembly of Foules"). In 1417 Giovanni da Serravalle, bishop of Fermo, completed a Latin prose translation of the _Commedia_, a copy of which, as he made it at the request of two English bishops whom he met at the council of Constance, was doubtless sent to England. Later we find Dante now and then mentioned, but evidently from hearsay only,[53] till the time of Spenser, who, like Milton fifty years later, shows that he had read his works closely. Thenceforward for more than a century Dante became a mere name, used without meaning by literary sciolists. Lord Chesterfield echoes Voltaire, and Dr. Drake in his "Literary Hours"[54] could speak of Darwin's "Botanic Garden" as showing the "wild and terrible sublimity of Dante"! The first complete English translation was by Boyd,--of the _Inferno_ in 1785, of the whole poem in 1802. There have been eight other complete translations, beginning with Cary's in 1814, six since 1850, beside several of the _Inferno_ singly. Of these that of Longfellow is the best. It is only within the last twenty years, however, that the study of Dante, in any true sense, became at all general. Even Coleridge seems to have been familiar only with the _Inferno_. In America Professor Ticknor was the first to devote a special course of illustrative lectures to Dante; he was followed by Longfellow, whose lectures, illustrated by admirable translations, are remembered with grateful pleasure by many who were thus led to learn the full significance of the great Christian poet. A translation of the _Inferno_ into quatrains by T.W. Parsons ranks with the best for spirit, faithfulness, and elegance. In Denmark and Russia translations of the _Inferno_ have been published, beside separate volumes of comment and illustration. We have thus sketched the steady growth of Dante's fame and influence to a universality unparalleled except in the case of Shakespeare, perhaps more remarkable if we consider the abstruse and mystical nature of his poetry. It is to be noted as characteristic that the veneration of Dantophilists for their master is that of disciples for their saint. Perhaps no other man could have called forth such an expression as that of Ruskin, that "the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante." The first remark to be made upon the writings of Dante is that they are all (with the possible exception of the treatise _De Vulgari Eloquio_) autobiographic, and that all of them, including that, are parts of a mutually related system, of which the central point is the individuality and experience of the poet. In the _Vita Nuova_ he recounts the story of his love for Beatrice Portinari, showing how his grief for her loss turned his thoughts first inward upon his own consciousness, and, failing all help there, gradually upward through philosophy to religion, and so from a world of shadows to one of eternal substances. It traces with exquisite unconsciousness the gradual but certain steps by which memory and imagination transubstantiated the woman of flesh and blood into a holy ideal, combining in one radiant symbol of sorrow and hope that faith which is the instinctive refuge of unavailing regret, that grace of God which higher natures learn to find in the trial which passeth all understanding, and that perfect womanhood, the dream of youth and the memory of maturity, which beckons toward the forever unattainable. As a contribution to the physiology of genius, no other book is to be compared with the _Vita Nuova_. It is more important to the understanding of Dante as a poet than any other of his works. It shows him (and that in the midst of affairs demanding practical ability and presence of mind) capable of a depth of contemplative abstraction, equalling that of a Soofi who has passed the fourth step of initiation. It enables us in some sort to see how, from being the slave of his imaginative faculty, he rose by self-culture and force of will to that mastery of it which is art. We comprehend the _Commedia_ better when we know that Dante could be an active, clear-headed politician and a mystic at the same time. Various dates have been assigned to the composition of the _Vita Nuova_. The earliest limit is fixed by the death of Beatrice in 1290 (though some of the poems are of even earlier date), and the book is commonly assumed to have been finished by 1295; Foscolo says 1294. But Professor Karl Witte, a high authority, extends the term as far as 1300.[55] The title of the book also, _Vita Nuova_, has been diversely interpreted. Mr. Garrow, who published an English version of it at Florence in 1846, entitles it the "Early Life of Dante." Balbo understands it in the same way.[56] But we are strongly of the opinion that "New Life" is the interpretation sustained by the entire significance of the book itself. His next work in order of date is the treatise _De Monarchiâ_. It has been generally taken for granted that Dante was a Guelph in politics up to the time of his banishment, and that out of resentment he then became a violent Ghibelline. Not to speak of the consideration that there is no author whose life and works present so remarkable a unity and logical sequence as those of Dante, Professor Witte has drawn attention to a fact which alone is enough to demonstrate that the _De Monarchiâ_ was written before 1300. That and the _Vita Nuova_ are the only works of Dante in which no allusion whatever is made to his exile. That bitter thought was continually present to him. In the _Convito_ it betrays itself often, and with touching unexpectedness. Even in the treatise _De Vulgari Eloquio_, he takes as one of his examples of style: "I have most pity for those, whosoever they are, that languish in exile, and revisit their country only in dreams." We have seen that the one decisive act of Dante's priorate was to expel from Florence the chiefs of both parties as the sowers of strife, and he tells us (_Paradiso_, XVII.) that he had formed a party by himself. The king of Saxony has well defined his political theory as being "an ideal Ghibellinism"[57] and he has been accused of want of patriotism only by those short-sighted persons who cannot see beyond their own parish. Dante's want of faith in freedom was of the same kind with Milton's refusing (as Tacitus had done before) to confound license with liberty. The argument of the _De Monarchiâ_ is briefly this: As the object of the individual man is the highest development of his faculties, so is it also with men united in societies. But the individual can only attain the highest development when all his powers are in absolute subjection to the intellect, and society only when it subjects its individual caprices to an intelligent head. This is the order of nature, as in families, and men have followed it in the organization of villages, towns, cities. Again, since God made man in his own image, men and societies most nearly resemble him in proportion as they approach unity. But as in all societies questions must arise, so there is need of a monarch for supreme arbiter. And only a universal monarch can be impartial enough for this, since kings of limited territories would always be liable to the temptation of private ends. With the internal policy of municipalities, commonwealths, and kingdoms, the monarch would have nothing to do, only interfering when there was danger of an infraction of the general peace. This is the doctrine of the first book, enforced sometimes eloquently, always logically, and with great fertility of illustration. It is an enlargement of some of the _obiter dicta_ of the _Convito_. The earnestness with which peace is insisted on as a necessary postulate of civic well-being shows what the experience had been out of which Dante had constructed his theory. It is to be looked on as a purely scholastic demonstration of a speculative thesis, in which the manifold exceptions and modifications essential in practical application are necessarily left aside. Dante almost forestalls the famous proposition of Calvin, "that it is possible to conceive a people without a prince, but not a prince without a people," when he says, _Non enim gens propter regem, sed e converso rex propter gentem_.[58] And in his letter to the princes and peoples of Italy on the coming of Henry VII., he bids them "obey their prince, but so as freemen preserving their own constitutional forms." He says also expressly: _Animadvertendum sane, quod cum dicitur humanum genus potest regi per unum supremum principem, non sic intelligendum est ut ab illo uno prodire possint municipia et leges municipales. Habent namque nationes, regna, et civitates inter se proprietates quas legibus differentibus regulari oportet_. Schlosser the historian compares Dante's system with that of the United States.[59] It in some respects resembled more the constitution of the Netherlands under the supreme stadtholder, but parallels between ideal and actual institutions are always unsatisfactory.[60] The second book is very curious. In it Dante endeavors to demonstrate the divine right of the Roman Empire to universal sovereignty. One of his arguments is, that Christ consented to be born under the reign of Augustus; another, that he assented to the imperial jurisdiction in allowing himself to be crucified under a decree of one of its courts. The atonement could not have been accomplished unless Christ suffered under sentence of a court having jurisdiction, for otherwise his condemnation would have been an injustice and not a penalty. Moreover, since all mankind was typified in the person of Christ, the court must have been one having jurisdiction over all mankind; and since he was delivered to Pilate, an officer of Tiberius, it must follow that the jurisdiction of Tiberius was universal. He draws an argument also from the wager of battle to prove that the Roman Empire was divinely permitted, at least, if not instituted. For since it is admitted that God gives the victory, and since the Romans always won it, therefore it was God's will that the Romans should attain universal empire. In the third book he endeavors to prove that the emperor holds by divine right, and not by permission of the pope. He assigns supremacy to the pope in spirituals, and to the emperor in temporals. This was a delicate subject, and though the king of Saxony (a Catholic) says that Dante did not overstep the limits of orthodoxy, it was on account of this part of the book that it was condemned as heretical.[61] Next follows the treatise _De Vulgari Eloquio_. Though we have doubts whether we possess this book as Dante wrote it, inclining rather to think that it is a copy in some parts textually exact, in others an abstract, there can be no question either of its great glossological value or that it conveys the opinions of Dante. We put it next in order, though written later than the _Convito_, only because, like the _De Monarchiâ_, it is written in Latin. It is a proof of the national instinct of Dante, and of his confidence in his genius, that he should have chosen to write all his greatest works in what was deemed by scholars a _patois_, but which he more than any other man made a classic language. Had he intended the _De Monarchiâ_ for a political pamphlet, he would certainly not have composed it in the dialect of the few. The _De Vulgari Eloquio_ was to have been in four books. Whether it was ever finished or not it is impossible to say; but only two books have come down to us. It treats of poetizing in the vulgar tongue, and of the different dialects of Italy. From the particularity with which it treats of the dialect of Bologna, it has been supposed to have been written in that city, or at least to furnish an argument in favor of Dante's having at some time studied there. In Lib. II. Cap. II., is a remarkable passage in which, defining the various subjects of song and what had been treated in the vulgar tongue by different poets, he says that his own theme had been righteousness. The _Convito_ is also imperfect. It was to have consisted of fourteen treatises, but, as we have it, contains only four. In the first he justifies the use of the vulgar idiom in preference to the Latin. In the other three he comments on three of his own _Canzoni_. It will be impossible to give an adequate analysis of this work in the limits allowed us.[62] It is an epitome of the learning of that age, philosophical, theological, and scientific. As affording illustration of the _Commedia_, and of Dante's style of thought, it is invaluable. It is reckoned by his countrymen the first piece of Italian prose, and there are parts of it which still stand unmatched for eloquence and pathos. The Italians (even such a man as Cantù among the rest) find in it and a few passages of the _Commedia_ the proof that Dante, as a natural philosopher was wholly in advance of his age,--that he had, among other things, anticipated Newton in the theory of gravitation. But this is as idle as the claim that Shakespeare had discovered the circulation of the blood before Harvey,[63] and one might as well attempt to dethrone Newton because Chaucer speaks of the love which draws the apple to the earth. The truth is, that it was only as a poet that Dante was great and original (glory enough, surely, to have not more than two competitors), and in matters of science, as did all his contemporaries, sought the guiding hand of Aristotle like a child. Dante is assumed by many to have been a Platonist, but this is not true, in the strict sense of the word. Like all men of great imagination, he was an idealist, and so far a Platonist, as Shakespeare might be proved to have been by his sonnets. But Dante's direct acquaintance with Plato may be reckoned at zero, and we consider it as having strongly influenced his artistic development for the better, that transcendentalist as he was by nature, so much so as to be in danger of lapsing into an Oriental mysticism, his habits of thought should have been made precise and his genius disciplined by a mind so severely logical as that of Aristotle. This does not conflict with what we believe to be equally true, that the Platonizing commentaries on his poem, like that of Landino, are the most satisfactory. Beside the prose already mentioned, we have a small collection of Dante's letters, the recovery of the larger number of which we owe to Professor Witte. They are all interesting, some of them especially so, as illustrating the prophetic character with which Dante invested himself. The longest is one addressed to Can Grande della Scalla, explaining the intention of the _Commedia_ and the method to be employed in its interpretation. The authenticity of this letter has been doubted, but is now generally admitted. We shall barely allude to the minor poems, full of grace and depth of mystic sentiment, and which would have given Dante a high place in the history of Italian literature, even had he written nothing else. They are so abstract, however, that without the extrinsic interest of having been written by the author of the _Commedia_, they would probably find few readers. All that is certainly known in regard to the _Commedia_ is that it was composed during the nineteen years which intervened between Dante's banishment and death. Attempts have been made to fix precisely the dates of the different parts, but without success, and the differences of opinion are bewildering. Foscolo has constructed an ingenious and forcible argument to show that no part of the poem was published before the author's death. The question depends somewhat on the meaning we attach to the word "published." In an age of manuscript the wide dispersion of a poem so long even as a single one of the three divisions of the _Commedia_ would be accomplished very slowly. But it is difficult to account for the great fame which Dante enjoyed during the latter years of his life, unless we suppose that parts, at least, of his greatest work had been read or heard by a large number of persons. This need not, however, imply publication; and Witte, whose opinion is entitled to great consideration, supposes even the _Inferno_ not to have been finished before 1314 or 1315. In a matter where certainty would be impossible, it is of little consequence to reproduce conjectural dates. In the letter to Can Grande, before alluded to, Dante himself has stated the theme of his song. He says that "the literal subject of the whole work is the state of the soul after death simply considered. But if the work be taken allegorically, the subject is man, as by merit or demerit, through freedom of the will, he renders himself liable to the reward or punishment of justice." He tells us that the work is to be interpreted in a literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical sense, a mode then commonly employed with the Scriptures,[64] and of which he gives the following example: "To make which mode of treatment more clear, it may be applied in the following verses: _In exitu Israel de Aegypto, domus Jacob de populo barbaro, facta est Judaea sanctificatio ejus, Israel potestas ejus_.[65] For if we look only at the literal sense, it signifies the going out of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses; if at the allegorical, it signifies our redemption through Christ; if at the moral, it signifies the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to a state of grace; and if at the anagogical, it signifies the passage of the blessed soul from the bondage of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory." A Latin couplet, cited by one of the old commentators, puts the matter compactly together for us:-- "_Litera_ gesta refert; quid credas _allegoria_; _Moralis_ quid agas; quid speres _anagogia_." Dante tells us that he calls his poem a comedy because it has a fortunate ending, and gives its title thus: "Here begins the comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by birth, but not in morals."[66] The poem consists of three parts, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each part is divided into thirty-three cantos, in allusion to the years of the Saviour's life; for though the Hell contains thirty-four, the first canto is merely introductory. In the form of the verse (triple rhyme) we may find an emblem of the Trinity, and in the three divisions, of the threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude. Symbolic meanings reveal themselves, or make themselves suspected, everywhere, as in the architecture of the Middle Ages. An analysis of the poem would be out of place here, but we must say a few words of Dante's position as respects modern literature. If we except Wolfram von Eschenbach, he is the first Christian poet, the first (indeed, we might say the only) one whose whole system of thought is colored in every finest fibre by a purely Christian theology. Lapse through sin, mediation, and redemption, these are the subjects of the three parts of the poem: or, otherwise stated, intellectual conviction of the result of sin, typified in Virgil (symbol also of that imperialism whose origin he sang); moral conversion after repentance, by divine grace, typified in Beatrice; reconciliation with God, and actual blinding vision of him,--"The pure in heart shall see God." Here are general truths which any Christian may accept and find comfort in. But the poem comes nearer to us than this. It is the real history of a brother man, of a tempted, purified, and at last triumphant human soul; it teaches the benign ministry of sorrow, and that the ladder of that faith by which man climbs to the actual fruition of things not seen _ex quovis ligno non fit_, but only of the cross manfully borne. The poem is also, in a very intimate sense, an apotheosis of woman Indeed, as Marvell's drop of dew mirrored the whole firmament, so we find in the _Commedia_ the image of the Middle Ages, and the sentimental gyniolatry of chivalry, which was at best but skin-deep, is lifted in Beatrice to an ideal and universal plane. It is the same with Catholicism, with imperialism, with the scholastic philosophy, and nothing is more wonderful than the power of absorption and assimilation in this man, who could take up into himself the world that then was, and reproduce it with such, cosmopolitan truth to human nature and to his own individuality, as to reduce all contemporary history to a mere comment on his vision. We protest, therefore, against the parochial criticism which would degrade Dante to a mere partisan, which sees in him a Luther before his time, and would clap the _bonnet rouge_ upon his heavenly muse. Like all great artistic minds, Dante was essentially conservative, and, arriving precisely in that period of transition when Church and Empire were entering upon the modern epoch of thought, he strove to preserve both by presenting the theory of both in a pristine and ideal perfection. The whole nature of Dante was one of intense belief. There is proof upon proof that he believed himself invested with a divine mission Like the Hebrew prophets, with whose writings his whole soul was imbued, it was back to the old worship and the God of the fathers that he called his people, and not Isaiah himself was more destitute of that humor, that sense of ludicrous contrast, which is an essential in the composition of a sceptic. In Dante's time, learning had something of a sacred character, the line was hardly yet drawn between the clerk and the possessor of supernatural powers, it was with the next generation, with the elegant Petrarch, even more truly than with the kindly Boccaccio, that the purely literary life, and that dilettanteism, which is the twin sister of scepticism, began. As a merely literary figure, the position of Dante is remarkable. Not only as respects thought, but as respects aesthetics also, his great poem stands as a monument on the boundary line between the ancient and modern. He not only marks, but is in himself, the transition. _Arma virumque cano_, that is the motto of classic song; the things of this world and great men. Dante says, _subjectum est homo_, not _vir_; my theme is man, not a man. The scene of the old epic and drama was in this world, and its catastrophe here; Dante lays his scene in the human soul, and his fifth act in the other world. He makes himself the protagonist of his own drama. In the _Commedia_ for the first time Christianity wholly revolutionizes Art, and becomes its seminal principle. But aesthetically also, as well as morally, Dante stands between the old and the new, and reconciles them. The theme of his poem is purely subjective, modern, what is called romantic; but its treatment is objective (almost to realism, here and there), and it is limited by a form of classic severity. In the same way he sums up in himself the two schools of modern poetry which had preceded him, and, while essentially lyrical in his subject, is epic in the handling of it. So also he combines the deeper and more abstract religious sentiment of the Teutonic races with the scientific precision and absolute systematism of the Romanic. In one respect Dante stands alone. While we can in some sort account for such representative men as Voltaire and Goethe (nay, even Shakespeare) by the intellectual and moral fermentation of the age in which they lived, Dante seems morally isolated and to have drawn his inspiration almost wholly from his own internal reserves. Of his mastery in style we need say little here. Of his mere language, nothing could be better than the expression of Rivarol "His verse holds itself erect by the mere force of the substantive and verb, without the help of a single epithet." We will only add a word on what seems to us an extraordinary misapprehension of Coleridge, who disparages Dante by comparing his Lucifer with Milton's Satan. He seems to have forgotten that the precise measurements of Dante were not prosaic, but absolutely demanded by the nature of his poem. He is describing an actual journey, and his exactness makes a part of the verisimilitude. We read the "Paradise Lost" as a poem, the _Commedia_ as a record of fact; and no one can read Dante without believing his story, for it is plain that he believed it himself. It is false aesthetics to confound the grandiose with the imaginative. Milton's angels are not to be compared with Dante's, at once real and supernatural; and the Deity of Milton is a Calvinistic Zeus, while nothing in all poetry approaches the imaginative grandeur of Dante's vision of God at the conclusion of the _Paradiso_. In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential; and there is no moral more touching than that the contemporary recognition of such a nature, so endowed and so faithful to its endowment, should be summed up in the sentence of Florence: _Igne comburatur sic quod moriatur_.[67] The range of Dante's influence is not less remarkable than its intensity. Minds, the antipodes of each other in temper and endowment, alike feel the force of his attraction, the pervasive comfort of his light and warmth. Boccaccio and Lamennais are touched with the same reverential enthusiasm. The imaginative Ruskin is rapt by him, as we have seen, perhaps beyond the limit where critical appreciation merges in enthusiasm; and the matter-of-fact Schlosser tells us that "he, who was wont to contemplate earthly life wholly in an earthly light, has made use of Dante, Landino, and Vellutello in his solitude to bring a heavenly light into his inward life." Almost all other poets have their seasons, but Dante penetrates to the moral core of those who once fairly come within his sphere, and possesses them wholly. His readers turn students, his students zealots, and what was a taste becomes a religion. The homeless exile finds a home in thousands of grateful hearts. _E venne da esilio in questa pace!_ Every kind of objection, aesthetic and other, may be, and has been, made to the _Divina Commedia_, especially by critics who have but a superficial acquaintance with it, or rather with the _Inferno_, which is as far as most English critics go. Coleridge himself, who had a way of divining what was in books, may be justly suspected of not going further, though with Carey to help him. Mr. Carlyle, who has said admirable things of Dante the man, was very imperfectly read in Dante the author, or he would never have put Sordello in hell and the meeting with Beatrice in paradise. In France it was not much better (though Rivarol has said the best thing hitherto of Dante's parsimony of epithet)[68] before Ozanam, who, if with decided ultramontane leanings, has written excellently well of our poet, and after careful study. Voltaire, though not without relentings toward a poet who had put popes heels upward in hell, regards him on the whole as a stupid monster and barbarian. It was no better in Italy, if we may trust Foscolo, who affirms that "neither Pelli nor others deservedly more celebrated than he ever read attentively the poem of Dante, perhaps never ran through it from the first verse to the last."[69] Accordingly we have heard that the _Commedia_ was a sermon, a political pamphlet, the revengeful satire of a disappointed Ghibelline, nay, worse, of a turncoat Guelph. It is narrow, it is bigoted, it is savage, it is theological, it is mediaeval, it is heretical, it is scholastic, it is obscure, it is pedantic, its Italian is not that of _la Crusca_, its ideas are not those of an enlightened eighteenth century, it is everything, in short, that a poem should not be; and yet, singularly enough, the circle of its charm has widened in proportion as men have receded from the theories of Church and State which are supposed to be its foundation, and as the modes of thought of its author have become more alien to those of his readers. In spite of all objections, some of which are well founded, the _Commedia_ remains one of the three or four universal books that have ever been written. We may admit, with proper limitations, the modern distinction between the Artist and the Moralist. With the one Form is all in all, with the other Tendency. The aim of the one is to delight, of the other to convince. The one is master of his purpose, the other mastered by it. The whole range of perception and thought is valuable to the one as it will minister to imagination, to the other only as it is available for argument. With the moralist use is beauty, good only as it serves an ulterior purpose; with the artist beauty is use, good in and for itself. In the fine arts the vehicle makes part of the thought, coalesces with it. The living conception shapes itself a body in marble, color, or modulated sound, and henceforth the two are inseparable. The results of the moralist pass into the intellectual atmosphere of mankind, it matters little by what mode of conveyance. But where, as in Dante, the religious sentiment and the imagination are both organic, something interfused with the whole being of the man, so that they work in kindly sympathy, the moral will insensibly suffuse itself with beauty as a cloud with light. Then that fine sense of remote analogies, awake to the assonance between facts seemingly remote and unrelated, between the outward and inward worlds, though convinced that the things of this life are shadows, will be persuaded also that they are not fantastic merely, but imply a substance somewhere, and will love to set forth the beauty of the visible image because it suggests the ineffably higher charm of the unseen original. Dante's ideal of life, the enlightening and strengthening of that native instinct of the soul which leads it to strive backward toward its divine source, may sublimate the senses till each becomes a window for the light of truth and the splendor of God to shine through. In him as in Calderon the perpetual presence of imagination not only glorifies the philosophy of life and the science of theology, but idealizes both in symbols of material beauty. Though Dante's conception of the highest end of man was that he should climb through every phase of human experience to that transcendental and super-sensual region where the true, the good, and the beautiful blend in the white light of God, yet the prism of his imagination forever resolved the ray into color again, and he loved to show it also where, entangled and obstructed in matter, it became beautiful once more to the eye of sense. Speculation, he tells us, is the use, without any mixture, of our noblest part (the reason). And this part cannot in this life have its perfect use, which is to behold God (who is the highest object of the intellect), except inasmuch as the intellect considers and beholds him in his effects.[70] Underlying Dante the metaphysician, statesman, and theologian, was always Dante the poet,[71] irradiating and vivifying, gleaming through in a picturesque phrase, or touching things unexpectedly with that ideal light which softens and subdues like distance in the landscape. The stern outline of his system wavers and melts away before the eye of the reader in a mirage of imagination that lifts from beyond the sphere of vision and hangs in serener air images of infinite suggestion projected from worlds not realized, but substantial to faith, hope, and aspiration. Beyond the horizon of speculation floats, in the passionless splendor of the empyrean, the city of our God, the Rome whereof Christ is a Roman,[72] the citadel of refuge, even in this life, for souls purified by sorrow and self denial, transhumanized[73] to the divine abstraction of pure contemplation. "And it is called Empyrean," he says in his letter to Can Grande, "which is the same as a heaven blazing with fire or ardor, not because there is in it a material fire or burning, but a spiritual one, which is blessed love or charity." But this splendor he bodies forth, if sometimes quaintly, yet always vividly and most often in types of winning grace. Dante was a mystic with a very practical turn of mind. A Platonist by nature, an Aristotelian by training, his feet keep closely to the narrow path of dialectics, because he believed it the safest, while his eyes are fixed on the stars and his brain is busy with things not demonstrable, save by that grace of God which passeth all understanding, nor capable of being told unless by far off hints and adumbrations. Though he himself has directly explained the scope, the method, and the larger meaning of his greatest work,[74] though he has indirectly pointed out the way to its interpretation in the _Convito_, and though everything he wrote is but an explanatory comment on his own character and opinions, unmistakably clear and precise, yet both man and poem continue not only to be misunderstood popularly, but also by such as should know better.[75] That those who confined their studies to the _Commedia_ should have interpreted it variously is not wonderful, for out of the first or literal meaning others open, one out of another, each of wider circuit and purer abstraction, like Dante's own heavens, giving and receiving light.[76] Indeed, Dante himself is partly to blame for this. "The form or mode of treatment," he says, "is poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, transumptive, and withal definitive, divisive, probative, improbative, and positive of examples." Here are conundrums enough, to be sure! To Italians at home, for whom the great arenas of political and religious speculation were closed, the temptation to find a subtler meaning than the real one was irresistible. Italians in exile, on the other hand, made Dante the stalking-horse from behind which they could take a long shot at Church and State, or at obscurer foes.[77] Infinitely touching and sacred to us is the instinct of intense sympathy which drawst hese latter toward their great forerunner, _exul immeritus_ like themselves.[78] But they have too often wrung a meaning from Dante which is injurious to the man and out of keeping with the ideas of his age. The aim in expounding a great poem should be, not to discover an endless variety of meanings often contradictory, but whatever it has of great and perennial significance; for such it must have, or it would long ago have ceased to be living and operative, would long ago have taken refuge in the Chartreuse of great libraries, dumb thenceforth to all mankind. We do not mean to say that this minute exegesis is useless or unpraiseworthy, but only that it should be subsidiary to the larger way. It serves to bring out more clearly what is very wonderful in Dante, namely, the omnipresence of his memory throughout the work, so that its intimate coherence does not exist in spite of the reconditeness and complexity of allusion, but is woven out of them. The poem has many senses, he tells us, and there can be no doubt of it; but it has also, and this alone will account for its fascination, a living soul behind them all and informing all, an intense singleness of purpose, a core of doctrine simple, human, and wholesome, though it be also, to use his own phrase, the bread of angels. Nor is this unity characteristic only of the _Divina Commedia_. All the works of Dante, with the possible exception of the _De vulgari Eloquio_ (which is unfinished), are component parts of a Whole Duty of Man mutually completing and interpreting one another. They are also, as truly as Wordsworth's "Prelude," a history of the growth of a poet's mind. Like the English poet he valued himself at a high rate, the higher no doubt after Fortune had made him outwardly cheap. _Sempre il magnanimo si magnifica in suo cuore; e così lo pusillanimo per contrario sempre si tiene meno che non è._[79] As in the prose of Milton, whose striking likeness to Dante in certain prominent features of character has been remarked by Foscolo, there are in Dante's minor works continual allusions to himself of great value as material for his biographer. Those who read attentively will discover that the tenderness he shows toward Francesca and her lover did not spring from any friendship for her family, but was a constant quality of his nature, and that what is called his revengeful ferocity is truly the implacable resentment of a lofty mind and a lover of good against evil, whether showing itself in private or public life; perhaps hating the former manifestation of it the most because he believed it to be the root of the latter,--a faith which those who have watched the course of politics in a democracy, as he had, will be inclined to share. His gentleness is all the more striking by contrast, like that silken compensation which blooms out of the thorny stem of the cactus. His moroseness,[80] his party spirit, and his personal vindictiveness are all predicated upon the _Inferno_, and upon a misapprehension or careless reading even of that. Dante's zeal was not of that sentimental kind, quickly kindled and as soon quenched, that hovers on the surface of shallow minds, "Even as the flame of unctuous is wont To move upon the outer surface only";[81] it was the steady heat of an inward fire kindling the whole character of the man through and through, like the minarets of his own city of Dis.[82] He was, as seems distinctive in some degree of the Latinized races, an unflinching _à priori_ logician, not unwilling to "syllogize invidious verities,"[83] wherever they might lead him, like Sigier, whom he has put in paradise, though more than suspected of heterodoxy. But at the same time, as we shall see, he had something of the practical good sense of that Teutonic stock whence he drew a part of his blood, which prefers a malleable syllogism that can yield without breaking to the inevitable, but incalculable pressure of human nature and the stiffer logic of events. His theory of Church and State was not merely a fantastic one, but intended for the use and benefit of men as they were; and he allowed accordingly for aberrations, to which even the law of gravitation is forced to give place; how much more, then, any scheme whose very starting-point is the freedom of the will! We are thankful for a commentator at last who passes dry-shod over the _turbide onde_ of inappreciative criticism, and, quietly waving aside the thick atmosphere which has gathered about the character of Dante both as man and poet, opens for us his City of Doom with the divining-rod of reverential study. Miss Rossetti comes commended to our interest, not only as one of a family which seems to hold genius by the tenure of gavelkind, but as having a special claim by inheritance to a love and understanding of Dante. She writes English with a purity that has in it something of feminine softness with no lack of vigor or precision. Her lithe mind winds itself with surprising grace through the metaphysical and other intricacies of her subject. She brings to her work the refined enthusiasm of a cultivated woman and the penetration of sympathy. She has chosen the better way (in which Germany took the lead) of interpreting Dante out of himself, the pure spring from which, and from which alone, he drew his inspiration, and not from muddy Fra Alberico or Abbate Giovacchino, from stupid visions of Saint Paul or voyages of Saint Brandan. She has written by far the best comment that has appeared in English, and we should say the best that has been done in England, were it not for her father's _Comento analitico_, for excepting which her filial piety will thank us. Students of Dante in the original will be grateful to her for many suggestive hints, and those who read him in English will find in her volume a travelling map in which the principal points and their connections are clearly set down. In what we shall say of Dante we shall endeavor only to supplement her interpretation with such side-lights as may have been furnished us by twenty years of assiduous study. Dante's thought is multiform, and, like certain street signs, once common, presents a different image according to the point of view. Let us consider briefly what was the plan of the _Divina Commedia_ and Dante's aim in writing it, which, if not to justify, was at least to illustrate, for warning and example, the ways of God to man. The higher intention of the poem was to set forth the results of sin, or unwisdom, and of virtue, or wisdom, in this life, and consequently in the life to come, which is but the continuation and fulfilment of this. The scene accordingly is the spiritual world, of which we are as truly denizens now as hereafter. The poem is a diary of the human soul in its journey upwards from error through repentance to atonement with God. To make it apprehensible by those whom it was meant to teach, nay, from its very nature as a poem, and not a treatise of abstract morality, it must set forth everything by means of sensible types and images. "To speak thus is adapted to your mind, Since only from the sensible it learns What makes it worthy of intellect thereafter, On this account the Scripture condescends Unto your faculties, and feet and hands To God attributes, and means something else."[84] Whoever has studied mediaeval art in any of its branches need not be told that Dante's age was one that demanded very palpable and even revolting types. As in the old legend, a drop of scalding sweat from the damned soul must shrivel the very skin of those for whom he wrote, to make them wince if not to turn them away from evil doing. To consider his hell a place of physical torture is to take Circe's herd for real swine. Its mouth yawns not only under Florence, but before the feet of every man everywhere who goeth about to do evil. His hell is a condition of the soul, and he could not find images loathsome enough to express the moral deformity which is wrought by sin on its victims, or his own abhorrence of it. Its inmates meet you in the street every day. "Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, for where we are is hell, And where hell is there we must ever be."[85] It is our own sensual eye that gives evil the appearance of good, and out of a crooked hag makes a bewitching siren. The reason enlightened by the grace of God sees it as it truly is, full of stench and corruption.[86] It is this office of reason which Dante undertakes to perform, by divine commission, in the _Inferno_. There can be no doubt that he looked upon himself as invested with the prophetic function, and the Hebrew forerunners, in whose society his soul sought consolation and sustainment, certainly set him no example of observing the conventions of good society in dealing with the enemies of God. Indeed, his notions of good society were not altogether those of this world in any generation. He would have defined it as meaning "the peers" of Philosophy, "souls free from wretched and vile delights and from vulgar habits, endowed with genius and memory."[87] Dante himself had precisely this endowment, and in a very surprising degree. His genius enabled him to see and to show what he saw to others; his memory neither forgot nor forgave. Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind would have been the modern theory which deals with sin as involuntary error, and by shifting off the fault to the shoulders of Atavism or those of Society, personified for purposes of excuse, but escaping into impersonality again from the grasp of retribution, weakens that sense of personal responsibility which is the root of self-respect and the safeguard of character. Dante indeed saw clearly enough that the Divine justice did at length overtake Society in the ruin of states caused by the corruption of private, and thence of civic, morals; but a personality so intense as his could not be satisfied with such a tardy and generalized penalty as this. "It is Thou," he says sternly, "who hast done this thing, and Thou, not Society, shalt be damned for it; nay, damned all the worse for this paltry subterfuge. This is not my judgment, but that of universal Nature[88] from before the beginning of the world."[89] Accordingly the highest reason, typified in his guide Virgil, rebukes him for bringing compassion to the judgments of God,[90] and again embraces him and calls the mother that bore him blessed, when he bids Filippo Argenti begone among the other dogs.[91] This latter case shocks our modern feelings the more rudely for the simple pathos with which Dante makes Argenti answer when asked who he was, "Thou seest I am one that weeps." It is also the one that makes most strongly for the theory of Dante's personal vindictiveness,[92] and it may count for what it is worth. We are not greatly concerned to defend him on that score, for he believed in the righteous use of anger, and that baseness was its legitimate quarry. He did not think the Tweeds and Fisks, the political wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his day merely amusing, and he certainly did think it the duty of an upright and thoroughly trained citizen to speak out severely and unmistakably. He believed firmly, almost fiercely, in a divine order of the universe, a conception whereof had been vouchsafed him, and that whatever and whoever hindered or jostled it, whether wilfully or blindly it mattered not, was to be got out of the way at all hazards; because obedience to God's law, and not making things generally comfortable, was the highest duty of man, as it was also his only way to true felicity. It has been commonly assumed that Dante was a man soured by undeserved misfortune, that he took up a wholly new outfit of political opinions with his fallen fortunes, and that his theory of life and of man's relations to it was altogether reshaped for him by the bitter musings of his exile. This would be singular, to say the least, in a man who tells us that he "felt himself indeed four-square against the strokes of chance," and whose convictions were so intimate that they were not merely intellectual conclusions, but parts of his moral being. Fortunately we are called on to believe nothing of the kind. Dante himself has supplied us with hints and dates which enable us to watch the germination and trace the growth of his double theory of government, applicable to man as he is a citizen of this world, and as he hopes to become hereafter a freeman of the celestial city. It would be of little consequence to show in which of two equally selfish and short-sighted parties a man enrolled himself six hundred years ago, but it is worth something to know that a man of ambitious temper and violent passions, aspiring to office in a city of factions, could rise to a level of principle so far above them all. Dante's opinions have life in them still, because they were drawn from living sources of reflection and experience, because they were reasoned out from the astronomic laws of history and ethics, and were not weather-guesses snatched in a glance at the doubtful political sky of the hour. Swiftly the politic goes: is it dark? he borrows a lantern; Slowly the statesman and sure, guiding his feet by the stars. It will be well, then, to clear up the chronology of Dante's thought. When his ancestor Cacciaguida prophesies to him the life which is to be his after 1300,[93] he says, speaking of his exile:-- "And that which most shall weigh upon thy shoulders Will be the bad and foolish company With which into this valley thou shalt fall; * * * * * "Of their bestiality their own proceedings Shall furnish proof; _so 'twill be well for thee A party to have made thee by thyself_." Here both context and grammatical construction (infallible guides in a writer so scrupulous and exact) imply irresistibly that Dante had become a party by himself before his exile. The measure adopted by the Priors of Florence while he was one of them (with his assent and probably by his counsel), of sending to the frontier the leading men of both factions, confirms this implication. Among the persons thus removed from the opportunity of doing mischief was his dearest friend Guido Cavalcanti, to whom he had not long before addressed the _Vita Nuova_.[94] Dante evidently looked back with satisfaction on his conduct at this time, and thought it both honest and patriotic, as it certainly was disinterested. "We whose country is the world, as the ocean to the fish," he tells us, "though we drank of the Arno in infancy, and love Florence so much that, _because we loved her, we suffer exile unjustly,_ support the shoulders of our judgment rather upon reason than the senses."[95] And again, speaking of old ago, he says: "And the noble soul at this age blesses also the times past, and well may bless them, because, revolving them in memory, she recalls her righteous conduct, without which she could not enter the port to which she draws nigh, with so much riches and so great gain." This language is not that of a man who regrets some former action as mistaken, still less of one who repented it for any disastrous consequences to himself. So, in justifying a man for speaking of himself, he alleges two examples,--that of Boethius, who did so to "clear himself of the perpetual infamy of his exile"; and that of Augustine, "for, by the process of his life, which was from bad to good, from good to better, and from better to best, he gave us example and teaching."[96] After middle life, at least, Dante had that wisdom "whose use brings with it marvellous beauties, that is, contentment with every condition of time, and contempt of those things which others make their masters."[97] If Dante, moreover, wrote his treatise _De Monarchiâ_ before 1302, and we think Witte's inference,[98] from its style and from the fact that he nowhere alludes to his banishment in it, conclusive on this point, then he was already a Ghibelline in the same larger and unpartisan sense which ever after distinguished him from his Italian contemporaries. "Let, let the Ghibellines ply their handicraft Beneath some other standard; for this ever Ill follows he who it and justice parts," he makes Justinian say, speaking of the Roman eagle.[99] His Ghibellinism, though undoubtedly the result of what he had seen of Italian misgovernment, embraced in its theoretical application the civilized world. His political system was one which his reason adopted, not for any temporary expediency, but because it conduced to justice, peace, and civilization,--the three conditions on which alone freedom was possible in any sense which made it worth having. Dante was intensely Italian, nay, intensely Florentine, but on all great questions he was, by the logical structure of his mind and its philosophic impartiality, incapable of intellectual provincialism.[100] If the circle of his affections, as with persistent natures commonly, was narrow, his thought swept a broad horizon from that tower of absolute self which he had reared for its speculation. Even upon the principles of poetry, mechanical and other,[101] he had reflected more profoundly than most of those who criticise his work, and it was not by chance that he discovered the secret of that magical word too few, which not only distinguishes his verse from all other, but so strikingly from his own prose. He never took the bit of art[102] between his teeth where only poetry, and not doctrine, was concerned. If Dante's philosophy, on the one hand, was practical a guide for the conduct of life, it was, on the other, a much more transcendent thing, whose body was wisdom her soul love, and her efficient cause truth. It is a practice of wisdom from the mere love of it, for so we must interpret his _amoroso uso di sapienzia_, when we remember how he has said before[103] that "the love of wisdom for its delight or profit is not true love of wisdom." And this love must embrace knowledge in all its branches, for Dante is content with nothing less than a pancratic training, and has a scorn of _dilettanti_, specialists, and quacks. "Wherefore none ought to be called a true philosopher who for any delight loves any part of knowledge, as there are many who delight in composing _Canzoni_, and delight to be studious in them, and who delight to be studious in rhetoric and in music, and flee and abandon the other sciences which are all members of wisdom."[104] "Many love better to be held masters than to be so." With him wisdom is the generalization from many several knowledges of small account by themselves; it results therefore from breadth of culture, and would be impossible without it. Philosophy is a noble lady (_donna gentil_),[105] partaking of the divine essence by a kind of eternal marriage, while with other intelligences she is united in a less measure "as a mistress of whom no lover takes complete joy."[106] The eyes of this lady are her demonstrations, and her smile is her persuasion. "The eyes of wisdom are her demonstrations by which truth is beheld most certainly; and her smile is her persuasions in which the interior light of wisdom is shown under a certain veil, and in these two is felt that highest pleasure of beatitude which is the greatest good in paradise."[107] "It is to be known that the beholding this lady was so largely ordained for us, not merely to look upon the face which she shows us, but that we may desire to attain the things which she keeps concealed. And as through her much thereof is seen by reason, so by her we believe that every miracle may have its reason in a higher intellect, and consequently may be. Whence our good faith has its origin, whence comes the hope of those unseen things which we desire, and through that the operation of charity, by the which three virtues we rise to philosophize in that celestial Athens where the Stoics, Peripatetics, and Epicureans through the art of eternal truth accordingly concur in one will."[108] As to the double scope of Dante's philosophy we will cite a passage from the _Convito_, all the more to our purpose as it will illustrate his own method of allegorizing. "Verily the use of our mind is double, that is, practical and speculative, the one and the other most delightful, although that of contemplation be the more so. That of the practical is for us to act virtuously, that is, honorably, with prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. [These are the four stars seen by Dante, _Purgatorio_, I. 22-27.] That of the speculative is not to act for ourselves, but to consider the works of God and nature.... Verily of these uses one is more full of beatitude than the other, as it is the speculative, which without any admixture is the use of our noblest part.... And this part in this life cannot have its use perfectly, which is to see God, except inasmuch as the intellect considers him and beholds him through his effects. And that we should seek this beatitude as the highest, and not the other, the Gospel of Mark teaches us if we will look well. Mark says that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Mary Salome went to find the Saviour at the tomb and found him not, but found a youth clad in white who said to them, 'Ye seek the Saviour, and I say unto you that he is not here; and yet fear ye not, but go and say unto his disciples and Peter that he will go before them into Galilee, and there ye shall see him even as he told you.' By these three women may be understood the three sects of the active life, that is, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Peripatetics, who go to the tomb, that is, to the present life, which is a receptacle of things corruptible, and seek the Saviour, that is, beatitude, and find him not, but they find a youth in white raiment, who, according to the testimony of Matthew and the rest, was an angel of God. This angel is that nobleness of ours which comes from God, as hath been said, which speaks in our reason and says to each of these sects, that is, to whoever goes seeking beatitude in this life, that it is not here, but go and say to the disciples and to Peter, that is, to those who go seeking it and those who are gone astray (like Peter who had denied), that it will go before them into Galilee, that is, into speculation. Galilee is as much as to say Whiteness. Whiteness is a body full of corporeal light more than any other, and so contemplation is fuller of spiritual light than anything else here below. And he says, 'it will go before,' and does not say, 'it will be with you,' to give us to understand that God always goes before our contemplation, nor can we ever overtake here Him who is our supreme beatitude. And it is said, 'There ye shall see him as he told you,' that is, here ye shall have of his sweetness, that is, felicity, as is promised you here, that is, as it is ordained that ye can have. And thus it appears that we find our beatitude, this felicity of which we are speaking, first imperfect in the active life, that is, in the operations of the moral virtues, and afterwards wellnigh perfect in the operation of the intellectual ones, the which two operations are speedy and most direct ways to lead to the supreme beatitude, the which cannot be had here, as appears by what has been said."[109] At first sight there may seem to be some want of agreement in what Dante says here of the soul's incapacity of the vision of God in this life with the triumphant conclusion of his own poem. But here as elsewhere Dante must be completed and explained by himself. "We must know that everything most greatly desires its own perfection, and in that its every desire is appeased, and by that everything is desired. [That is, the one is drawn toward, the other draws.] And this is that desire which makes every delight maimed, for no delight is so great in this life that it can take away from the soul this thirst so that desire remain not in the thought."[110] "And since it is most natural to wish to be in God, the human soul naturally wills it with all longing. And since its being depends on God and is preserved thereby it naturally desires and wills to be united with God in order to fortify its being. And since in the goodnesses of human nature is shown some reason for those of the Divine, it follows that the human soul unites itself in a spiritual way with those so much the more strongly and quickly as they appear more perfect, and this appearance happens according as the knowledge of the soul is clear or impeded. And this union is what we call Love, whereby may be known what is within the soul, seeing those it outwardly loves.... And the human soul which is ennobled with the ultimate potency, that is, reason, participates in the Divine nature after the manner of an eternal Intelligence, because the soul is so ennobled and denuded of matter in that sovran potency that the Divine light shines in it as in an angel."[111] This union with God may therefore take place before the warfare of life is over, but is only possible for souls _perfettamente naturati_, perfectly endowed by nature.[112] This depends on the virtue of the generating soul and the concordant influence of the planets. "And if it happen that through the purity of the recipient soul, the intellectual virtue be well abstracted and absolved from every corporeal shadow, the Divine bounty is multiplied in it as a thing sufficient to receive the same."[113] "And there are some who believe that if all the aforesaid virtues [powers] should unite for the production of a soul in their best disposition, so much of the Deity would descend into it that it would be almost another incarnate God."[114] Did Dante believe himself to be one of these? He certainly gives us reason to think so. He was born under fortunate stars, as he twice tells us,[115] and he puts the middle of his own life at the thirty-fifth year, which is the period he assigns for it in the diviner sort of men.[116] The stages of Dante's intellectual and moral growth may, we think, be reckoned with some approach to exactness from data supplied by himself. In the poems of the _Vita Nuova_, Beatrice, until her death, was to him simply a poetical ideal, a type of abstract beauty, chosen according to the fashion of the day after the manner of the Provençal poets, but in a less carnal sense than theirs. "And by the fourth nature of animals, that is, the sensitive, man has another love whereby he loves according to sensible appearance, even as a beast.... And by the fifth and final nature, that is, the truly human, or, to speak better, angelic, that is, rational, man has a love for truth and virtue.... Wherefore, since this nature is called _mind_, I said that love discoursed in my mind to make it understood that this love was that which is born in the noblest of natures, that is, [the love] of truth and virtue, and to _shut out every false opinion by which it might be suspected that my love was for the delight of sense._"[117] This is a very weighty affirmation, made, as it is, so deliberately by a man of Dante's veracity, who would and did speak truth at every hazard. Let us dismiss at once and forever all the idle tales of Dante's amours, of la Montanina, Gentucca, Pietra, Lisetta, and the rest, to that outer darkness of impure thoughts _là onde la stoltezza dipartille._[118] We think Miss Rossetti a little hasty in allowing that in the years which immediately followed Beatrice's death Dante gave himself up "more or less to sensual gratification and earthly aim." The earthly aim we in a certain sense admit; the sensual gratification we reject as utterly inconsistent, not only with Dante's principles, but with his character and indefatigable industry. Miss Rossetti illustrates her position by a subtle remark on "the lulling spell of an intellectual and sensitive delight in good running parallel with a voluntary and actual indulgence in evil." The dead Beatrice beckoned him toward the life of contemplation, and it was precisely during this period that he attempted to find happiness in the life of action. "Verily it is to be known, that we may in this life have two felicities, following two ways, good and best, which lead us thither. The one is the active, the other the contemplative life, the which (though by the active we may attain, as has been said, unto good felicity) leads us to the best felicity and blessedness."[119] "The life of my heart, that is, of my inward self, was wont to be a sweet thought which went many times to the feet of God, that is to say, in thought I contemplated the kingdom of the Blessed. And I tell the final cause why I mounted thither in thought when I say, 'Where it [the sweet thought] beheld a lady in glory,' that I might make it understood that I was and am certain, by _her gracious revelation, that she was in heaven,_ [not on earth, as I had vainly imagined,] whither I went in thought, so often as was possible to me, as it were rapt."[120] This passage exactly answers to another in _Purgatorio_, XXX. 115-138:-- "Not only by the work of those great wheels That destine every seed unto some end, According as the stars are in conjunction, _But by the largess of celestial graces,_ * * * * * "Such had this man become in his New Life Potentially, that every righteous habit Would have made admirable proof in him; * * * * * "Some time I did sustain him with my look (_volto_); Revealing unto him my youthful eyes, I led him with me turned in the right way. As soon as ever of my second age I was upon the threshold and changed life, Himself from me he took and gave to others. When from the flesh to spirit I ascended, And beauty and virtue were in me increased, I was to him less dear and less delightful, And into ways untrue he turned his steps, Pursuing the false images of good That never any promises fulfil[121] Nor prayer for inspiration me availed,[122] _By means of which in dreams and otherwise I called him back_, so little did he heed them. So low he fell, that all appliances For his salvation were already short Save showing him the people of perdition." Now Dante himself, we think, gives us the clew, by following which we may reconcile the contradiction, what Miss Rossetti calls "the astounding discrepancy," between the Lady of the _Vita Nuova_ who made him unfaithful to Beatrice, and the same Lady in the _Convito_, who in attributes is identical with Beatrice herself. We must remember that the prose part of the _Convito_, which is a comment on the _Canzoni_, was written after the _Canzoni_ themselves. How long after we cannot say with certainty, but it was plainly composed at intervals, a part of it probably after Dante had entered upon old age (which began, as he tells us, with the forty-fifth year), consequently after 1310. Dante had then written a considerable part of the _Divina Commedia_, in which Beatrice was to go through her final and most ethereal transformation in his mind and memory. We say in his memory, for such idealizations have a very subtle retrospective action, and the new condition of feeling or thought is uneasy till it has half unconsciously brought into harmony whatever is inconsistent with it in the past. The inward life unwillingly admits any break in its continuity, and nothing is more common than to hear a man, in venting an opinion taken up a week ago, say with perfect sincerity, "I have always thought so and so." Whatever belief occupies the whole mind soon produces the impression on us of having long had possession of it, and one mode of consciousness blends so insensibly with another that it is impossible to mark by an exact line where one begins and the other ends. Dante in his exposition of the _Canzoni_ must have been subject to this subtlest and most deceitful of influences. He would try to reconcile so far as he conscientiously could his present with his past. This he could do by means of the allegorical interpretation. "For it would be a great shame to him," he says in the _Vita Nuova_, "who should poetize something under the vesture of some figure or rhetorical color, and afterwards, when asked, could not strip his words of that vesture in such wise that they should have a true meaning." Now in the literal exposition of the _Canzone_ beginning, "Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete,"[123] he tells us that the _grandezza_ of the _Donna Gentil_ was "temporal greatness" (one certainly of the felicities attainable by way of the _vita attiva_), and immediately after gives us a hint by which we may comprehend why a proud[124] man might covet it. "How much wisdom and how great a persistence in virtue (_abito virtuoso_) are hidden for want of this lustre!"[125] When Dante reaches the Terrestrial Paradise[126] which is the highest felicity of this world, and therefore the consummation of the Active Life, he is welcomed by a Lady who is its symbol, "Who went along Singing and culling floweret after floweret." and warming herself in the rays of Love, or "actual speculation," that is, "where love makes its peace felt."[127] That she was the symbol of this is evident from the previous dream of Dante,[128] in which he sees Leah, the universally accepted type of it, "Walking in a meadow, Gathering flowers; and singing she was saying, 'Know whosoever may my name demand That I am Leah, who go moving round My beauteous hands to make myself a garland,'" that is to say, of good works. She, having "washed him thoroughly from sin,"[129] "All dripping brought Into the dance of the four beautiful,"[130] who are the intellectual virtues Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude, the four stars, guides of the Practical Life, which he had seen when he came out of the Hell where he had beheld the results of sin, and arrived at the foot of the Mount of Purification. That these were the special virtues of practical goodness Dante had already told us in a passage before quoted from the _Convito_.[131] That this was Dante's meaning is confirmed by what Beatrice says to him,[132] "Short while shalt thou be here a forester (_silvano_) And thou shalt be with me forevermore A citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman"; for by a "forest" he always means the world of life and action.[133] At the time when Dante was writing the _Canzoni_ on which the _Convito_ was a comment, he believed science to be the "ultimate perfection itself, and not the way to it,"[134] but before the _Convito_ was composed he had become aware of a higher and purer light, an inward light, in that Beatrice, already clarified wellnigh to a mere image of the mind, "who lives in heaven with the angels, and on earth with my soul."[135] So spiritually does Dante always present Beatrice to us, even where most corporeal, as in the _Vita Nuova_, that many, like Biscione and Rossetti, have doubted her real existence. But surely we must consent to believe that she who speaks of "The fair limbs wherein I was enclosed, which scattered are in earth," was once a creature of flesh and blood,-- "A creature not too bright and good For human nature's daily food." When she died, Dante's grief, like that of Constance, filled her room up with something fairer than the reality had ever been. There is no idealizer like unavailing regret, all the more if it be a regret of fancy as much as of real feeling. She early began to undergo that change into something rich and strange in the sea[136] of his mind which so completely supernaturalized her at last. It is not impossible, we think, to follow the process of transformation. During the period of the _Convito Canzoni_, when he had so given himself to study that to his weakened eyes "the stars were shadowed with a white blur,"[137] this star of his imagination was eclipsed for a time with the rest. As his love had never been of the senses (which is bestial),[138] so his sorrow was all the more ready to be irradiated with celestial light, and to assume her to be the transmitter of it who had first awakened in him the nobler impulses of his nature,-- ("Such had this man become in his New Life Potentially,") and given him the first hints of a higher, nay, of the highest good. With that turn for double meaning and abstraction which was so strong in him, her very name helped him to allegorize her into one who makes blessed (_beat_), and thence the step was a short one to personify in her that Theosophy which enables man to see God and to be mystically united with him even in the flesh. Already, in the _Vita Nuova_,[139] she appears to him as afterwards in the Terrestrial Paradise, clad in that color of flame which belongs to the seraphim who contemplate God in himself, simply, and not in his relation to the Son or the Holy Spirit.[140] When misfortune came upon him, when his schemes of worldly activity failed, and science was helpless to console, as it had never been able wholly to satisfy, she already rose before him as the lost ideal of his youth, reproaching him with his desertion of purely spiritual aims. It is, perhaps, in allusion to this that he fixes the date of her death with such minute precision on the 9th June, 1390, most probably his own twenty-fifth birthday, on which he passed the boundary of adolescence.[141] That there should seem to be a discrepancy between the Lady of the _Vita Nuova_ and her of the _Convito_, Dante himself was already aware when writing the former and commenting it. Explaining the sonnet beginning _Gentil pensier_, he says, "In this sonnet I make two parts of myself according as my thoughts were divided in two. The one part I call _heart_, that is, the appetite, the other _soul_, that is, reason.... It is true that in the preceding sonnet I take side with the heart against the eyes [which were weeping for the lost Beatrice], and that appears contrary to what I say in the present one; and therefore I say that in that sonnet also I mean by my _heart_ the appetite, because my desire to remember me of my most gentle Lady was still greater than to behold this one, albeit I had already some appetite for her, but slight as should seem: whence it appears that the one saying is not contrary to the other."[142] When, therefore, Dante speaks of the love of this Lady as the "adversary of _Reason_," he uses the word in its highest sense, not as understanding (_Intellectus_), but as synonymous with _soul_. Already, when the latter part of the _Vita Nuova_, nay, perhaps the whole of the explanatory portion of it, was written the plan of the _Commedia_ was complete, a poem the higher aim of which was to keep the soul alive both in this world and for the next. As Dante tells us, the contradiction in his mind was, though he did not become aware of it till afterwards, more apparent than real. He sought consolation in study, and, failing to find it in Learning (_scienza_), he was led to seek it in Wisdom (_sapienza_), which is the love of God and the knowledge of him.[143] He had sought happiness through the understanding; he was to find it through intuition. The lady Philosophy (according as she is moral or intellectual) includes both. Her gradual transfiguration is exemplified in passages already quoted. The active life leads indirectly by a knowledge of its failures and sins (_Inferno_), or directly by a righteous employment of it (_Purgatorio_), to the same end. The use of the sciences is to induce in us the ultimate perfection, that of speculating upon truth; the use of the highest of them, theology, the contemplation of God.[144] To this they all lead up. In one of those curious chapters of the _Convito_,[145] where he points out the analogy between the sciences and the heavens, Dante tells us that he compares moral philosophy with the crystalline heaven or _Primum Mobile_, because it communicates life and gives motion to all the others below it. But what gives motion to the crystalline heaven (moral philosophy) itself? "The most fervent appetite which it has in each of its parts to be conjoined with each part of that most divine quiet heaven" (Theology).[146] Theology, the divine science, corresponds with the Empyrean, "because of its peace, the which, through the most excellent certainty of its subject, which is God, suffers no strife of opinions or sophistic arguments."[147] No one of the heavens is at rest but this, and in none of the inferior sciences can we find repose, though he likens physics to the heaven of the fixed stars, in whose name is a suggestion of the certitude to be arrived at in things demonstrable. Dante had this comparison in mind, it may be inferred, when he said, "Well I perceive that never sated is Our intellect unless the Truth illume it Beyond which nothing true[148] expands itself. It rests therein as wild beast in his lair; When it attains it, and it can attain it; If not, then each desire would frustrate be. Therefore springs up, in fashion of a shoot, Doubt at the foot of truth, and this is nature Which to the top from height to height impels us."[149] The contradiction, as it seems to us, resolves itself into an essential, easily apprehensible, if mystical, unity. Dante at first gave himself to the study of the sciences (after he had lost the simple, unquestioning faith of youth) as the means of arriving at certainty. From the root of every truth to which he attained sprang this sucker (_rampollo_) of doubt, drawing out of it the very sap of its life. In this way was Philosophy truly an adversary of his soul, and the reason of his remorse for fruitless studies which drew him away from the one that alone was and could be fruitful is obvious enough. But by and by out of the very doubt came the sweetness[150] of a higher and truer insight. He became aware that there were "things in heaven and earth undreamt of in your philosophy," as another doubter said, who had just finished _his_ studies, but could not find his way out of the scepticism they engendered as Dante did. "Insane is he who hopeth that our reason Can traverse the illimitable way Which the one Substance in three Persons follows! Mortals, remain contented at the _Quia_; For, if ye had been able to see all, No need there were [had been] for Mary to bring forth. And ye have seen desiring without fruit, Those whose desire would have been quieted Which evermore is given them for a grief. I speak of Aristotle and of Plato And many others."[151] Whether at the time when the poems of the _Vita Nuova_ were written the Lady who withdrew him for a while From Beatrice was (which we doubt) a person of flesh and blood or not, she was no longer so when the prose narrative was composed. Any one familiar with Dante's double meanings will hardly question that by putting her at a window, which is a place to look out of, he intended to imply that she personified Speculation, a word which he uses with a wide range of meaning, sometimes as _looking for_, sometimes as seeing (like Shakespeare's "There is no speculation in those eyes"), sometimes as _intuition_, or the beholding all things in God, who is the cause of all. This is so obvious, and the image in this sense so familiar, that we are surprised it should have been hitherto unremarked. It is plain that, even when the _Vita Nuova_ was written, the Lady was already Philosophy, but philosophy applied to a lower range of thought, not yet ascended from flesh to spirit. The Lady who seduced him was the science which looks for truth in second causes, or even in effects, instead of seeking it, where alone it can be found, in the First Cause; she was the Philosophy which looks for happiness in the visible world (of shadows), and not in the spiritual (and therefore substantial) world. The guerdon of his search was doubt. But Dante, as we have seen, made his very doubts help him upward toward certainty; each became a round in the ladder by which he climbed to clearer and clearer vision till the end.[152] Philosophy had made him forget Beatrice; it was Philosophy who was to bring him back to her again, washed clean in that very stream of forgetfulness that had made an impassable barrier between them.[153] Dante had known how to find in her the gift of Achilles's lance, "Which used to be the cause First of a sad and then a gracious boon."[154] There is another possible, and even probable, theory which would reconcile the Beatrice of the _Purgatorio_ with her of the _Vita Nuova_. Suppose that even in the latter she signified Theology, or at least some influence that turned his thoughts to God? Pietro di Dante, commenting the _pargoletta_ passage in the _Purgatorio_, says expressly that the poet had at one time given himself to the study of theology and deserted it for poesy and other mundane sciences. This must refer to a period beginning before 1290. Again there is an early tradition that Dante in his youth had been a novice in a Franciscan convent, but never took the vows. Buti affirms this expressly in his comment on _Inferno_, XVI. 106-123. It is perhaps slightly confirmed by what Dante says in the _Convito_,[155] that "one cannot only turn to Religion by making himself like in habit and life to St. Benedict, St. Augustine, St. Francis, and St. Dominic, but likewise one may turn to good and true religion in a state of matrimony, for God wills no religion in us but of the heart." If he had ever thought of taking monastic vows, his marriage would have cut short any such intention. If he ever wished to wed the real Beatrice Portinari, and was disappointed, might not this be the time when his thoughts took that direction? If so, the impulse came indirectly, at least, from her. We have admitted that Beatrice Portinari was a real creature, "Col sangue suo e con le sue giunture"; but _how_ real she was, and whether as real to the poet's memory as to his imagination, may fairly be questioned. She shifts, as the controlling emotion or the poetic fitness of the moment dictates, from a woman loved and lost to a gracious exhalation of all that is fairest in womanhood or most divine in the soul of man and ere the eye has defined the new image it has become the old one again, or another mingled of both. "Nor one nor other seemed now what it was, E'en as proceedeth on before the flame Upward along the paper a brown color, Which is not black as yet, and the white dies."[156] As the mystic Griffin in the eyes of Beatrice (her demonstrations), so she in his own, "Now with the one, now with the other nature; Think, Reader, if within myself I marvelled When I beheld the thing itself stand still And in its image it transformed itself."[157] At the very moment when she had undergone her most sublimated allegorical evaporation, his instinct as poet, which never failed him, realized her into woman again in those scenes of almost unapproached pathos which make the climax of his _Purgatorio_. The verses tremble with feeling and shine with tears.[158] Beatrice recalls her own beauty with a pride as natural as that of Fair Annie in the old ballad, and compares herself as advantageously with the "brown, brown bride" who had supplanted her. If this be a ghost, we do not need be told that she is a woman still.[159] We must remember, however, that Beatrice had to be real that she might be interesting, to be beautiful that her goodness might be persuasive, nay, to be beautiful at any rate, because beauty has also something in it of divine. Dante has told, in a passage already quoted, that he would rather his readers should find his doctrine sweet than his verses, but he had his relentings from this Stoicism. "'Canzone, I believe those will be rare Who of thine inner sense can master all, Such toil it costs thy native tongue to learn; Wherefore, if ever it perchance befall That thou in presence of such men shouldst fare As seem not skilled thy meaning to discern, I pray thee then thy grief to comfort turn, Saying to them, O thou my new delight, 'Take heed at least how fair I am to sight.'"[160] We believe all Dante's other Ladies to have been as purely imaginary as the Dulcinea of Don Quixote, useful only as _motives_, but a real Beatrice is as essential to the human sympathies of the _Divina Commedia_ as her glorified Idea to its allegorical teaching, and this Dante understood perfectly well.[161] Take _her_ out of the poem, and the heart of it goes with her; take out her ideal, and it is emptied of its soul. She is the menstruum in which letter and spirit dissolve and mingle into unity. Those who doubt her existence must find Dante's graceful sonnet[162] to Guido Cavalcante as provoking as Sancho's story of his having seen Dulcinea winnowing wheat was to his master, "so alien is it from all that which eminent persons, who are constituted and preserved for other exercises and entertainments, do and ought to do."[163] But we should always remember in reading Dante that with him the allegorical interpretation is the true one (_verace sposizione_), and that he represents himself (and that at a time when he was known to the world only by his minor poems) as having made righteousness (_rettitudine_, in other words, moral philosophy) the subject of his verse.[164] Love with him seems first to have meant the love of truth and the search after it (_speculazione_), and afterwards the contemplation of it in its infinite source (_speculazione_ in its higher and mystical sense). This is the divine love "which where it shines darkens and wellnigh extinguishes all other loves."[165] Wisdom is the object of it, and the end of wisdom to contemplate God the true mirror (_verace spegio, speculum_), wherein all things are seen as they truly are. Nay, she herself "is the brightness of the eternal light, the unspotted mirror of the majesty of God."[166] There are two beautiful passages in the _Convito_, which we shall quote, both because they have, as we believe a close application to Dante's own experience, and because they are good specimens of his style as a writer of prose. In the manly simplicity which comes of an earnest purpose, and in the eloquence of deep conviction, this is as far beyond that of any of his contemporaries as his verse, nay, more, has hardly been matched by any Italian from that day to this. Illustrating the position that "the highest desire of everything and the first given us by nature is to return to its first cause," he says: "And since God is the beginning of our souls and the maker of them like unto himself, according as was written, 'Let us make man in our image and likeness,' this soul most greatly desires to return to him. And as a pilgrim who goes by a way he has never travelled, who believes every house he sees afar off to be his inn, and not finding it to be so directs his belief to another, and so from house to house till he come to the inn, so our soul forthwith on entering upon the new and never-travelled road of this life directs its eyes to the goal of its highest good, and therefore believes whatever thing it sees that seems to have in it any good to be that. And because its first knowledge is imperfect by reason of not being experienced nor indoctrinated, small goods seem to it great. Wherefore we see children desire most greatly an apple, and then proceeding further on desire a bird, and then further yet desire fine raiment, and then a horse, and then a woman, and then, riches not great, and then greater and greater. And this befalls because in none of these things it finds that which it goes seeking, and thinks to find it further on. By which it may be seen that one desirable stands before another in the eyes of our soul in a fashion as it were pyramidal, for the smallest at first covers the whole of them, and is as it were the apex of the highest desirable, which is God, as it were the base of all; so that the further we go from the apex toward the base the desirables appear greater; and this is the reason why human desires become wider one after the other. Verily this way is lost through error as the roads of earth are; for as from one city to another there is of necessity one best and straightest way, and one that always leads farther from it, that is, the one which goes elsewhere, and many others, some less roundabout and some less direct, so in human life are divers roads whereof one is the truest and another the most deceitful, and certain ones less deceitful, and certain less true. And as we see that that which goes most directly to the city fulfils desire and gives repose after weariness, and that which goes the other way never fulfils it and never can give repose, so it falls out in our life. The good traveller arrives at the goal and repose, the erroneous never arrives thither, but with much weariness of mind, always with greedy eyes looks before him."[167] If we may apply Dante's own method of exposition to this passage, we find him telling us that he first sought felicity in knowledge, "That apple sweet which through so many branches The care of mortals goeth in pursuit of,"[168] then in fame, a bird that flits before us as we follow,[169] then in being esteemed of men ("to be clothed in purple, ... to sit next to Darius, ... and be called Darius his cousin "), then in power,[170] then in the riches of the Holy Spirit in larger and larger measure.[171] He, too, had found that there was but one straight road, whether to the Terrestrial Paradise or the Celestial City, and may come to question by and by whether they be not parallel one with the other, or even parts of the same road, by which only repose is to be reached at last. Then, when in old age "the noble soul returns to God as to that port whence she set forth on the sea of this life, ... just as to him who comes from a long journey, before he enters into the gate of his city, the citizens thereof go forth to meet him, so the citizens of the eternal life go to meet _her_, and do so because of her good deeds and contemplations, who, having already betaken herself to God, seems to see those whom she believes to be nigh unto God."[172] This also was to be the experience of Dante, for who can doubt that the _Paradiso_ was something very unlike a poetical exercise to him who appeals to the visions even of sleep as proof of the soul's immortality? When did his soul catch a glimpse of that certainty in which "the mind that museth upon many things" can find assured rest? We have already said that we believe Dante's political opinions to have taken their final shape and the _De Monarchiâ_ to have been written before 1300.[173] That the revision of the _Vita Nuova_ was completed in that year seems probable from the last sonnet but one, which is addressed to pilgrims on their way to the Santa Veronica at Rome.[174] In this sonnet he still laments Beatrice as dead; he would make the pilgrims share his grief. It is the very folly of despairing sorrow, that calls on the first comer, stranger though he be, for a sympathy which none can fully give, and he least of all. But in the next sonnet, the last in the book, there is a surprising change of tone. The transfiguration of Beatrice has begun, and we see completing itself that natural gradation of grief which will erelong bring the mourner to call on the departed saint to console him for her own loss. The sonnet is remarkable in more senses than one, first for its psychological truth, and then still more for the light it throws on Dante's inward history as poet and thinker. Hitherto he had celebrated beauty and goodness in the creature; henceforth he was to celebrate them in the Creator whose praise they were.[175] We give an extempore translation of this sonnet, in which the meaning is preserved so far as is possible where the grace is left out. We remember with some compunction as we do it, that Dante has said, "know every one that nothing harmonized by a musical band can be transmuted from its own speech to another without breaking all its sweetness and harmony,"[176] and Cervantes was of the same mind:[177] "Beyond the sphere that hath the widest gyre Passeth the sigh[178] that leaves my heart below; A new intelligence doth love bestow On it with tears that ever draws it higher; When it wins thither where is its desire, A Lady it beholds who honor so And light receives, that, through her splendid glow, The pilgrim spirit[179] sees her as in fire; It sees her such, that, telling me again I understand it not, it speaks so low Unto the mourning heart that bids it tell; Its speech is of that noble One I know, For 'Beatrice' I often hear full plain, So that, dear ladies, I conceive it well." No one can read this in its connection with what goes before and what follows without feeling that a new conception of Beatrice had dawned upon the mind of Dante, dim as yet, or purposely made to seem so, and yet the authentic forerunner of the fulness of her rising as the light of his day and the guide of his feet, the divine wisdom whose glory pales all meaner stars. The conception of a poem in which Dante's creed in politics and morals should be picturesquely and attractively embodied, and of the high place which Beatrice should take in it, had begun vaguely to shape itself in his thought. As he brooded over it, of a sudden it defined itself clearly. "Soon after this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision[180] wherein I saw things which made me propose not to say more of that blessed one until I could treat of her more worthily. And to arrive at that I study all I can, as she verily knows. So that, if it be the pleasure of Him through whom all things live, that my life hold out yet a few years, I hope to say that of her which was never yet said of any (woman). And then may it please Him who is the Lord of Courtesy that my soul may go to see the glory of her Lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice who gloriously beholds the face of Him _qui est per omnia saecula benedictus_." It was the method of presentation that became clear to Dante at this time,--the plan of the great poem for whose completion the experience of earth and the inspiration of heaven were to combine, and which was to make him lean for many years.[181] The doctrinal scope of it was already determined. Man, he tells us, is the only creature who partakes at once of the corruptible and incorruptible nature; "and since every nature is ordained to some ultimate end, it follows that the end of man is double. And as among all beings he alone partakes of the corruptible and incorruptible, so alone among all beings he is ordained to a double end, whereof the one is his end as corruptible, the other as incorruptible. That unspeakable Providence therefore foreordered two ends to be pursued by man, to wit, beatitude in this life, which consists in the operation of our own virtue, and is figured by the Terrestrial Paradise, and the beatitude of life eternal, which consists in a fruition of the divine countenance, whereto our own virtue cannot ascend unless aided by divine light, which is understood by the Celestial Paradise." The one we attain by practice of the moral and intellectual virtues as they are taught by philosophers, the other by spiritual teachings transcending human reason, and the practice of the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. For one, Reason suffices ("which was wholly made known to us by philosophers"), for the other we need the light of supernatural truth revealed by the Holy Spirit and "needful for us." Men led astray by cupidity turn their backs on both, and in their bestiality need bit and rein to keep them in the way. "Wherefore to man was a double guidance needful according to the double end," the Supreme Pontiff in spiritual, the Emperor in temporal things.[182] But how to put this theory of his into a poetic form which might charm while it was teaching? He would typify Reason in Virgil (who would serve also as a symbol of political wisdom as having celebrated the founding of the Empire), and the grace of God in that Beatrice whom he had already supernaturalized into something which passeth all understanding. In choosing Virgil he was sure of that interest and sympathy which his instinct led him to seek in the predisposition of his readers, for the popular imagination of the Middle Ages had busied itself particularly with the Mantuan poet. The Church had given, him a quasi-orthodoxy by interpreting his _jam redit et virgo_ as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. At Naples he had become a kind of patron saint, and his bones were exhibited as relics. Dante himself may have heard at Mantua the hymn sung on the anniversary of St. Paul, in which the apostle to the Gentiles is represented as weeping at the tomb of the greatest of poets. Above all, Virgil had described the descent of Aeneas to the under-world. Dante's choice of a guide was therefore, in a certain degree, made for him. But the mere Reason[183] of man without the illumination of divine Grace cannot be trusted, and accordingly the intervention of Beatrice was needed,--of Beatrice, as Miss Rossetti admirably well expresses it "already transfigured, potent not only now to charm and soothe, potent to rule; to the Intellect a light, to the Affections a compass and a balance, a sceptre over the Will." The wood obscure in which Dante finds himself is the world.[184] The three beasts who dispute his way are the sins that most easily beset us, Pride, the Lusts of the Flesh, and Greed. We are surprised that Miss Rossetti should so localize and confine Dante's meaning as to explain them by Florence, France, and Rome. Had he written in so narrow a sense as this, it would indeed be hard to account for the persistent power of his poem. But it was no political pamphlet that Dante was writing. _Subjectum est Homo_, and it only takes the form of a diary by Dante Alighieri because of the intense realism of his imagination, a realism as striking in the _Paradiso_ as the _Inferno_, though it takes a different shape. Everything, the most supersensual, presented itself to his mind, not as abstract idea, but as visible type. As men could once embody a quality of good in a saint and _see_ it, as they even now in moments of heightened fantasy or enthusiasm can personify their country and speak of England, France, or America, as if they were real beings, so did Dante habitually.[185] He saw all his thoughts as distinctly as the hypochondriac sees his black dog, and, as in that, their form and color were but the outward form of an inward and spiritual condition. Whatever subsidiary interpretations the poem is capable of, its great and primary value is as the autobiography of a human soul, of yours and mine, it may be, as well as Dante's. In that lie its profound meaning and its permanent force. That an exile, a proud man forced to be dependent, should have found some consolation in brooding over the justice of God, weighed in such different scales from those of man, in contrasting the outward prosperity of the sinner with the awful spiritual ruin within, is not wonderful, nay, we can conceive of his sometimes finding the wrath of God sweeter than his mercy. But it is wonderful that out of the very wreck of his own life he should have built this three-arched bridge, still firm against the wash and wear of ages, stretching from the Pit to the Empyrean, by which men may pass from a doubt of God's providence to a certainty of his long-suffering and loving-kindness. "The Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms That it receives whatever turns to it."[186] A tear is enough to secure the saving clasp of them.[187] It cannot be too often repeated that Dante's Other World is not in its first conception a place of _departed_ spirits. It is the Spiritual World, whereof we become denizens by birth and citizens by adoption. It is true that for artistic purposes he makes it conform so far as possible with vulgar preconceptions, but he himself has told us again and again what his real meaning was. Virgil tells Dante,-- "Thou shalt behold the people dolorous Who have foregone the good of intellect."[188] The "good of the intellect," Dante tells us after Aristotle, is Truth.[189] He says that Virgil has led him "through the deep night of the _truly dead_."[190] Who are they? Dante had in mind the saying of the Apostle, "to be carnally minded is death." He says: "In man to live is to use reason. Then if living is the being of man, to depart from that use is to depart from being, and so to be dead. And doth not he depart from the use of reason who doth not reason out the object of his life?" "I say that so vile a person is dead, seeming to be alive. For we must know _that the wicked man may be called truly dead_." "He is dead who follows not the teacher. And of such a one some might say, how is he dead and yet goes about? I answer that the man is dead and the beast remains."[191] Accordingly he has put living persons in the _Inferno_, like Frate Alberigo and Branca d' Oria, of whom he says with bitter sarcasm that he still "eats and drinks and puts on clothes," as if that were his highest ideal of the true ends of life.[192] There is a passage in the first canto of the _Inferno_[193] which has been variously interpreted:-- "The ancient spirits disconsolate Who cry out each one for the _second death_." Miss Rossetti cites it as an example of what she felicitously calls "an ambiguity, not hazy, but prismatic, and therefore not really perplexing." She gives us accordingly our choice of two interpretations, "'each cries out on account of the second death which he is suffering,' and 'each cries out for death to come a second time and ease him of his sufferings.'"[194] Buti says: "Here one doubts what the author meant by the second death, and as for me I think he meant the last damnation, which shall be at the day of judgment, because they would wish through envy that it had already come, that they might have more companions, since the first death is the first damnation, when the soul parted from the body is condemned to the pains of hell for its sins. The second is when, resuscitated at the judgment day, they shall be finally condemned, soul and body together.... It may otherwise be understood as annihilation." Imola says, "Each would wish to die again, if he could, to put an end to his pain. Do not hold with some who think that Dante calls the second death the day of judgment," and then quotes a passage from St. Augustine which favors that view. Pietro di Dante gives us four interpretations among which to choose, the first being that, "allegorically, depraved and vicious men are in a certain sense dead in reputation, and this is the first death; the second is that of the body." This we believe to be the true meaning. Dante himself, in a letter to the "most rascally (_scelestissimis_) dwellers in Florence," gives us the key: "but you, transgressors of the laws of God and man, whom the direful maw of cupidity hath enticed not unwilling to every crime, does not the terror of the _second death_ torment you?" Their first death was in their sins, the second is what they may expect from the just vengeance of the Emperor Henry VII. The world Dante leads us through is that of his own thought, and it need not surprise us therefore if we meet in it purely imaginary beings like Tristrem[195] and Renoard of the club.[196] His personality is so strongly marked that it is nothing more than natural that his poem should be interpreted as if only he and his opinions, prejudices, or passions were concerned. He would not have been the great poet he was if he had not felt intensely and humanly, but he could never have won the cosmopolitan place he holds had he not known how to generalize his special experience into something mediatorial for all of us. Pietro di Dante in his comment on the thirty-first canto of the _Purgatorio_ says that "unless you understand him and his figures allegorically, you will be deceived by the bark," and adds that our author made his pilgrimage as the representative of the rest (_in, persona ceterorum_).[197] To give his vision reality, he has adapted it to the vulgar mythology, but to understand it as the author meant, it must be taken in the larger sense. To confine it to Florence or to Italy is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind. It was not from the campanile of the Badia that Dante got his views of life and man. The relation of Dante to literature is monumental, and marks the era at which the modern begins. He is not only the first great poet, but the first great prose writer who used a language not yet subdued to literature, who used it moreover for scientific and metaphysical discussion, thus giving an incalculable impulse to the culture of his countrymen by making the laity free of what had hitherto been the exclusive guild of clerks.[198] Whatever poetry had preceded him, whether in the Romance or Teutonic tongues, is interesting mainly for its simplicity without forethought, or, as in the _Nibelungen_, for a kind of savage grandeur that rouses the sympathy of whatever of the natural man is dormant in us. But it shows no trace of the creative faculty either in unity of purpose or style, the proper characteristics of literature. If it have the charm of wanting artifice, it has not the higher charm of art. We are in the realm of chaos and chance, nebular, with phosphorescent gleams here and there, star stuff, but uncondensed in stars. The _Nibelungen_ is not without far-reaching hints and forebodings of something finer than we find in it, but they are a glamour from the vague darkness which encircles it, like the whisper of the sea upon an unknown shore at night, powerful only over the more vulgar side of the imagination, and leaving no thought, scarce even any image (at least of beauty) behind them. Such poems are the amours, not the lasting friendships and possessions of the mind. They thrill and cannot satisfy. But Dante is not merely the founder of modern literature. He would have been that if he had never written anything more than his _Canzoni_, which for elegance, variety of rhythm, and fervor of sentiment were something altogether new. They are of a higher mood than any other poems of the same style in their own language, or indeed in any other. In beauty of phrase and subtlety of analogy they remind one of some of the Greek tragic choruses. We are constantly moved in them by a nobleness of tone, whose absence in many admired lyrics of the kind is poorly supplied by conceits. So perfect is Dante's mastery of his material, that in compositions, as he himself has shown, so artificial,[199] the form seems rather organic than mechanical, which cannot be said of the best of the Provençal poets who led the way in this kind. Dante's sonnets also have a grace and tenderness which have been seldom matched. His lyrical excellence would have got him into the Collections, and he would have made here and there an enthusiast as Donne does in English, but his great claim to remembrance is not merely Italian. It is that he was the first Christian poet, in any proper sense of the word, the first who so subdued dogma to the uses of plastic imagination as to make something that is still poetry of the highest order after it has suffered the disenchantment inevitable in the most perfect translation. Verses of the kind usually called _sacred_ (reminding one of the adjective's double meaning) had been written before his time in the vulgar tongue,--such verses as remain inviolably sacred in the volumes of specimens, looked at with distant reverence by the pious, and with far other feelings by the profane reader. There were cycles of poems in which the physical conflict between Christianity and Paganism[200] furnished the subject, but in which the theological views of the authors, whether doctrinal or historical, could hardly be reconciled with any system of religion ancient or modern. There were Church legends of saints and martyrs versified, fit certainly to make any other form of martyrdom seem amiable to those who heard them, and to suggest palliative thoughts about Diocletian. Finally, there were the romances of Arthur and his knights, which later, by means of allegory, contrived to be both entertaining and edifying; every one who listened to them paying the minstrel his money, and having his choice whether he would take them as song or sermon. In the heroes of some of these certain Christian virtues were typified, and around a few of them, as the Holy Grail, a perfume yet lingers of cloistered piety and withdrawal. Wolfram von Eschenbach, indeed, has divided his _Parzival_ into three books, of Simplicity, Doubt, and Healing, which has led Gervinus to trace a not altogether fanciful analogy between that poem and the _Divina Commedia_. The doughty old poet, who says of himself,-- "Of song I have some slight control, But deem her of a feeble soul That doth not love my naked sword Above my sweetest lyric word," tells us that his subject is the choice between good and evil; "Whose soul takes Untruth for its bride And sets himself on Evil's side, Chooses the Black, and sure it is His path leads down to the abyss; But he who doth his nature feed With steadfastness and loyal deed Lies open to the heavenly light And takes his portion with the White." But Wolfram's poem has no system, and shows good feeling rather than settled conviction. Above all it is wandering (as he himself confesses), and altogether wants any controlling purpose. But to whatever extent Christianity had insinuated itself into and colored European literature, it was mainly as mythology. The Christian idea had never yet incorporated itself. It was to make its avatar in Dante. To understand fully what he accomplished we must form some conception of what is meant by the Christian idea. To bring it into fuller relief, let us contrast it with the Greek idea as it appears in poetry; for we are not dealing with a question of theology so much as with one of aesthetics. Greek art at its highest point is doubtless the most perfect that we know. But its circle of motives was essentially limited; and the Greek drama in its passion, its pathos, and its humor is primarily Greek, and secondarily human. Its tragedy chooses its actors from certain heroic families, and finds its springs of pity and terror in physical suffering and worldly misfortune. Its best examples, like the _Antigone_, illustrate a single duty, or, like the _Hippolytus_, a single passion, on which, as on a pivot, the chief character, statuesquely simple in its details, revolves as pieces of sculpture are sometimes made to do, displaying its different sides in one invariable light. The general impression left on the mind (and this is apt to be a truer one than any drawn from single examples) is that the duty is one which is owed to custom, that the passion leads to a breach of some convention settled by common consent,[201] and accordingly it is an outraged society whose figure looms in the background, rather than an offended God. At most it was one god of many, and meanwhile another might be friendly. In the Greek epic, the gods are partisans, they hold caucuses, they lobby and log-roll for their candidates. The tacit admission of a revealed code of morals wrought a great change. The complexity and range of passion is vastly increased when the offence is at once both crime and sin, a wrong done against order and against conscience at the same time. The relation of the Greek Tragedy to the higher powers is chiefly antagonistic, struggle against an implacable destiny, sublime struggle, and of heroes, but sure of defeat at last. And that defeat is final. Grand figures are those it exhibits to us, in some respects unequalled, and in their severe simplicity they compare with modern poetry as sculpture with painting. Considered merely as works of art, these products of the Greek imagination satisfy our highest conception of form. They suggest inevitably a feeling of perfect completeness, isolation, and independence, of something rounded and finished in itself. The secret of those old shapers died with them; their wand is broken, their book sunk deeper than ever plummet sounded. The type of their work is the Greek Temple, which leaves nothing to hope for in unity and perfection of design, in harmony and subordination of parts, and in entireness of impression. But in this aesthetic completeness it ends. It rests solidly and complacently on the earth, and the mind rests there with it. Now the Christian idea has to do with the human soul, which Christianity may be almost said to have invented. While all Paganism represents a few pre-eminent families, the founders of dynasties or ancestors of races, as of kin with the gods, Christianity makes every pedigree end in Deity, makes monarch and slave the children of one God. Its heroes struggle not against, but upward and onward _toward_, the higher powers who are always on their side. Its highest conception of beauty is not aesthetic, but moral. With it prosperity and adversity have exchanged meanings. It finds enemies in those worldly good-fortunes where Pagan and even Hebrew literature saw the highest blessing, and invincible allies in sorrow, poverty, humbleness of station, where the former world recognized only implacable foes. While it utterly abolished all boundary lines of race or country and made mankind unitary, its hero is always the individual man whoever and wherever he may be. Above all, an entirely new conception of the Infinite and of man's relation to it came in with Christianity. That, and not the finite, is always the background, consciously or not. It changed the scene of the last act of every drama to the next world. Endless aspiration of all the faculties became thus the ideal of Christian life, and to express it more or less perfectly the ideal of essentially Christian art. It was this which the Middle Ages instinctively typified in the Gothic cathedral,--no accidental growth, but the visible symbol of an inward faith,--which soars forever upward, and yearns toward heaven like a martyr-flame suddenly turned to stone. It is not without significance that Goethe, who, like Dante, also absorbed and represented the tendency and spirit of his age, should, during his youth and while Europe was alive with the moral and intellectual longing which preluded the French Revolution, have loved the Gothic architecture. It is no less significant that in the period of reaction toward more positive thought which followed, he should have preferred the Greek. His greatest poem, conceived during the former era, is Gothic. Dante, endeavoring to conform himself to literary tradition, began to write the _Divina Commedia_ in Latin, and had elaborated several cantos of it in that dead and intractable material. But that poetic instinct, which is never the instinct of an individual, but of his age, could not so be satisfied, and leaving the classic structure he had begun to stand as a monument of failure, he completed his work in Italian. Instead of endeavoring to manufacture a great poem out of what was foreign and artificial, he let the poem make itself out of him. The epic which he wished to write in the universal language of scholars, and which might have had its ten lines in the history of literature, would sing itself in provincial Tuscan, and turns out to be written in the universal dialect of mankind. Thus all great poets have been in a certain sense provincial,--Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Burns, Scott in the "Heart of Midlothian" and "Bride of Lammermoor,"--because the office of the poet is always vicarious, because nothing that has not been living experience can become living expression, because the collective thought, the faith, the desire of a nation or a race, is the cumulative result of many ages, is something organic, and is wiser and stronger than any single person, and will make a great statesman or a great poet out of any man who can entirely surrender himself to it. As the Gothic cathedral, then, is the type of the Christian idea, so is it also of Dante's poem. And as that in its artistic unity is but the completed thought of a single architect, which yet could never have been realized except out of the faith and by the contributions of an entire people, whose beliefs and superstitions, whose imagination and fancy, find expression in its statues and its carvings, its calm saints and martyrs now at rest forever in the seclusion of their canopied niches, and its wanton grotesques thrusting themselves forth from every pinnacle and gargoyle, so in Dante's poem, while it is as personal and peculiar as if it were his private journal and autobiography, we can yet read the diary and the autobiography of the thirteenth century and of the Italian people. Complete and harmonious in design as his work is, it is yet no Pagan temple enshrining a type of the human made divine by triumph of corporeal beauty; it is not a private chapel housing a single saint and dedicate to one chosen bloom of Christian piety or devotion; it is truly a cathedral, over whose high altar hangs the emblem of suffering, of the Divine made human to teach the beauty of adversity, the eternal presence of the spiritual, not overhanging and threatening, but informing and sustaining the material. In this cathedral of Dante's there are side-chapels as is fit, with altars to all Christian virtues and perfections; but the great impression of its leading thought is that of aspiration, for ever and ever. In the three divisions of the poem we may trace something more than a fancied analogy with a Christian basilica. There is first the ethnic forecourt, then the purgatorial middle-space, and last the holy of holies dedicated to the eternal presence of the mediatorial God. But what gives Dante's poem a peculiar claim to the title of the first Christian poem is not merely its doctrinal truth or its Christian mythology, but the fact that the scene of it is laid, not in this world, but in the soul of man; that it is the allegory of a human life, and therefore universal in its significance and its application. The genius of Dante has given to it such a self-subsistent reality, that one almost gets to feel as if the chief value of contemporary Italian history had been to furnish it with explanatory foot-notes, and the age in which it was written assumes towards it the place of a satellite. For Italy, Dante is the thirteenth century. Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean. But Dante had made up his mind as to the true purpose and meaning of our existence in this world, shortly after he had passed his twenty-fifth year. He had already conceived the system about which as a connecting thread the whole experience of his life, the whole result of his studies, was to cluster in imperishable crystals. The cornerstone of his system was the Freedom of the Will (in other words, the right of private judgment with the condition of accountability), which Beatrice calls the "noble virtue."[202] As to every man is offered his choice between good and evil, and as, even upon the root of a nature originally evil a habit of virtue may be engrafted,[203] no man is excused. "All hope abandon ye who enter in," for they have thrown away reason which is the good of the intellect, "and it seems to me no less a marvel to bring back to reason him in whom it is wholly spent than to bring back to life him who has been four days in the tomb."[204] As a guide of the will in civil affairs the Emperor; in spiritual, the Pope.[205] Dante is not one of those reformers who would assume the office of God to "make all things new." He knew the power of tradition and habit, and wished to utilize it for his purpose. He found the Empire and the Papacy already existing, but both needing reformation that they might serve the ends of their original institution. Bad leadership was to blame, men fit to gird on the sword had been turned into priests, and good preachers spoiled to make bad kings.[206] The spiritual had usurped to itself the prerogatives of the temporal power. "Rome, that reformed the world, accustomed was Two suns to have which one road and the other, Of God and of the world, made manifest. One has the other quenched, and to the crosier The sword is joined, and ill beseemeth it, * * * * * "Because, being joined one feareth not the other."[207] Both powers held their authority directly from God, "not so, however, that the Roman Prince is not in some things subject to the Roman Pontiff, since that human felicity [to be attained only by peace, justice, and good government, possible only under a single ruler] is in some sort ordained to the end of immortal felicity. Let Caesar use that reverence toward Peter which a first-born son ought to use toward a father; that, shone upon by the light of paternal grace, he may more powerfully illumine the orb of earth over which he is set by him alone who is the ruler of all things spiritual and temporal."[208] As to the fatal gift of Constantine, Dante demonstrates that an Emperor could not alienate what he held only in trust; but if he made the gift, the Pope should hold it as a feudatory of the Empire, for the benefit, however, of Christ's poor.[209] Dante is always careful to distinguish between the Papacy and the Pope. He prophesies for Boniface VIII. a place in hell,[210] but acknowledges him as the Vicar of Christ, goes so far even as to denounce the outrage of Guillaume de Nogaret at Anagni as done to the Saviour himself.[211] But in the Spiritual World Dante acknowledges no such supremacy, and, when he would have fallen on his knees before Adrian V., is rebuked by him in a quotation from the Apocalypse:-- "Err not, fellow-servant am I With thee and with the others to one power."[212] So impartial was this man whose great work is so often represented as a kind of bag in which he secreted the gall of personal prejudice, so truly Catholic is he, that both parties find their arsenal in him. The Romanist proves his soundness in doctrine, the anti-Romanist claims him as the first Protestant, the Mazzinist and the Imperialist can alike quote him for their purpose. Dante's ardent conviction would not let him see that both Church and Empire were on the wane. If an ugly suspicion of this would force itself upon him, perhaps he only clung to both the more tenaciously; but he was no blind theorist. He would reform the Church through the Church, and is less anxious for Italian independence than for Italian good government under an Emperor from Germany rather than from Utopia. The Papacy was a necessary part of Dante's system, as a supplement to the Empire, which we strongly incline to believe was always foremost in his mind. In a passage already quoted, he says that "the soil where Rome sits is worthy beyond what men preach and admit," that is, as the birthplace of the Empire. Both in the _Convito_ and the _De Monarchia_ he affirms that the course of Roman history was providentially guided from the first. Rome was founded in the same year that brought into the world David, ancestor of the Redeemer after the flesh. St. Augustine said that "God showed in the most opulent and illustrious Empire of the Romans how much the civil virtues might avail even without true religion, that it might be understood how, this added, men became citizens of another city whose king is truth, whose law charity, and whose measure eternity." Dante goes further than this. He makes the Romans as well as the Jews a chosen people, the one as founders of civil society, the other as depositaries of the true faith.[213] One side of Dante's mind was so practical and positive, and his pride in the Romans so intense,[214] that he sometimes seems to regard their mission as the higher of the two. Without peace which only good government could give, mankind could not arrive at the highest virtue, whether of the active or contemplative life. "And since what is true of the part is true of the whole, and it happens in the particular man that by sitting quietly he is perfected in prudence and wisdom, it is clear that the human race in the quiet or tranquillity of peace is most freely and easily disposed for its proper work which is almost divine, as it is written, 'Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels'[215] Whence it is manifest that universal peace is the best of those things which are ordained for our beatitude. Hence it is that not riches, not pleasures, not honors, not length of life, not health, not strength, not comeliness, was sung to the shepherds from on high, but peace."[216] It was Dante's experience of the confusion of Italy, where "One doth gnaw the other Of those whom one wall and one fosse shut in,"[217] that suggested the thought of a universal umpire, for that, after all, was to be the chief function of his Emperor. He was too wise to insist on a uniformity of political institutions _a priori_,[218] for he seems to have divined that the surest stay of order, as of practical wisdom, is habit, which is a growth, and cannot be made offhand. He believed with Aristotle that vigorous minds were intended by nature to rule,[219] and that certain races, like certain men, are born to leadership.[220] He calls democracies, oligarchies, and petty princedoms (_tyrannides_) "oblique policies which drive the human race to slavery, as is patent in all of them to one who reasons."[221] He has nothing but pity for mankind when it has become a many-headed beast, "despising the higher intellect irrefragable in reason, the lower which hath the face of experience."[222] He had no faith in a turbulent equality asserting the divine right of _I'm as good as you_. He thought it fatal to all discipline: "The confounding of persons hath ever been the beginning of sickness in the state."[223] It is the same thought which Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Ulysses:-- "Degree being vizarded, The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask, When degree is shaked, Which is the ladder to all high designs, The enterprise is sick."[224] Yet no one can read Dante without feeling that he had a high sense of the worth of freedom, whether in thought or government. He represents, indeed, the very object of his journey through the triple realm of shades as a search after liberty.[225] But it must not be that scramble after undefined and indefinable rights which ends always in despotism, equally degrading whether crowned with a red cap or an imperial diadem. His theory of liberty has for its corner-stone the Freedom of the Will, and the will is free only when the judgment wholly controls the appetite.[226] On such a base even a democracy may rest secure, and on such alone. Rome was always the central point of Dante's speculation. A shadow of her old sovereignty was still left her in the primacy of the Church, to which unity of faith was essential. He accordingly has no sympathy with heretics of whatever kind. He puts the ex-troubadour Bishop of Marseilles, chief instigator of the horrors of Provence, in paradise.[227] The Church is infallible in spiritual matters, but this is an affair of outward discipline merely, and means the Church as a form of polity. Unity was Dante's leading doctrine, and therefore he puts Mahomet among the schismatics, not because he divided the Church, but the faith.[228] Dante's Church was of this world, but he surely believed in another and spiritual one. It has been questioned whether he was orthodox or not. There can be no doubt of it so far as outward assent and conformity are concerned, which he would practice himself and enforce upon others as the first postulate of order, the prerequisite for all happiness in this life. In regard to the Visible Church he was a reformer, but no revolutionist; it is sheer ignorance to speak of him as if there were anything new or exceptional in his denunciation of the corruptions of the clergy. They were the commonplaces of the age, nor were they confined to laymen.[229] To the absolute authority of the Church Dante admitted some exceptions. He denies that the supreme Pontiff has the unlimited power of binding and loosing claimed for him. "Otherwise he might absolve me impenitent, which God himself could not do."[230] "By malison of theirs is not so lost Eternal Love that it cannot return."[231] Nor does the sacredness of the office extend to him who chances to hold it. Philip the Fair himself could hardly treat Boniface VIII. worse than he. With wonderful audacity, he declares the Papal throne vacant by the mouth of Saint Peter himself.[232] Even if his theory of a dual government were not in question, Dante must have been very cautious in meddling with the Church. It was not an age that stood much upon ceremony. He himself tells us he had seen men burned alive, and the author of the _Ottimo Comento_ says: "I the writer saw followers of his [Fra Dolcino] burned at Padua to the number of twenty-two together."[233] Clearly, in such a time as this, one must not make "the veil of the mysterious Terse" _too_ thin.[234] In the affairs of this life Dante was, as we have said, supremely practical, and he makes prudence the chief of the cardinal virtues.[235] He has made up his mind to take things as they come, and to do at Rome as the Romans do. "Ah, savage company! but in the Church With saints, and in the tavern with the gluttons!"[236] In the world of thought it was otherwise, and here Dante's doctrine, if not precisely esoteric, was certainly not that of his day, and must be gathered from hints rather than direct statements. The general notion of God was still (perhaps is largely even now) of a provincial, one might almost say a denominational, Deity. The popular poets always represent Macon, Apolm, Tervagant, and the rest as quasi-deities unable to resist the superior strength of the Christian God. The Paynim answers the arguments of his would-be converters with the taunt that he would never worship a divinity who could not save himself from being done ignominiously to death. Dante evidently was not satisfied with the narrow conception which limits the interest of the Deity to the affairs of Jews and Christians That saying of Saint Paul, "Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you," had perhaps influenced him, but his belief in the divine mission of the Roman people probably was conclusive. "The Roman Empire had the help of miracles in perfecting itself," he says, and then enumerates some of them. The first is that "under Numa Pompilius, the second king of the Romans, when he was sacrificing according to the rite of the Gentiles, a shield fell from heaven into the city chosen of God."[237] In the _Convito_ we find "Virgil speaking in the person of God," and Aeacus "wisely having recourse to God," the god being Jupiter.[238] Ephialtes is punished in hell for rebellion against "the Supreme Jove,"[239] and, that there may be no misunderstanding, Dante elsewhere invokes the "Jove Supreme, Who upon earth for us wast crucified."[240] It is noticeable also that Dante, with evident design, constantly alternates examples drawn from Christian and Pagan tradition or mythology.[241] He had conceived a unity in the human race, all of whose branches had worshipped the same God under divers names and aspects, had arrived at the same truth by different roads. We cannot understand a passage in the twenty-sixth _Paradiso_, where Dante inquires of Adam concerning the names of God, except as a hint that the Chosen People had done in this thing even as the Gentiles did.[242] It is true that he puts all Pagans in Limbo, "where without hope they live in longing," and that he makes baptism essential to salvation.[243] But it is noticeable that his Limbo is the Elysium of Virgil, and that he particularizes Adam, Noah, Moses, Abraham, David, and others as prisoners there with the rest till the descent of Christ into hell.[244] But were they altogether without hope? and did baptism mean an immersion of the body or a purification of the soul? The state of the heathen after death had evidently been to Dante one of those doubts that spring up at the foot of every truth. In the _De Monarchia_ he says: "There are some judgments of God to which, though human reason cannot attain by its own strength, yet is it lifted to them by the help of faith and of those things which are said to us in Holy Writ,--as to this, that no one, however perfect in the moral and intellectual virtues both as a habit [of the mind] and in practice, can be saved without faith, it being granted that he shall never have heard anything concerning Christ; for the unaided reason of man cannot look upon this as just; nevertheless, with the help of faith, it can."[245] But faith, it should seem, was long in lifting Dante to this height; for in the nineteenth canto of the _Paradiso_, which must have been written many years after the passage just cited, the doubt recurs again, and we are told that it was "a cavern," concerning which he had "made frequent questioning." The answer is given here:-- "Truly to him who with me subtilizes, _If so the Scripture were not over you_, For doubting there were marvellous occasion." But what Scripture? Dante seems cautious, tells us that the eternal judgments are above our comprehension, postpones the answer, and when it comes, puts an orthodox prophylactic before it:-- "Unto this kingdom never Ascended one who had not faith in Christ Before or since he to the tree was nailed But look thou, _many crying are, 'Christ, Christ!' Who at the judgment shall be far less near To him than some shall be who knew not Christ_." There is, then, some hope for the man born on the bank of Indus who has never heard of Christ? Dante is still cautious, but answers the question indirectly in the next canto by putting the Trojan Ripheus among the blessed:-- "Who would believe, down in the errant world, That e'er the Trojan Ripheus in this round Could be the fifth one of these holy lights? Now knoweth he enough of what the world Has not the power to see of grace divine, Although _his_ sight may not discern the bottom." Then he seems to hesitate again, brings in the Church legend of Trajan brought back to life by the prayers of Gregory the Great that he might be converted, and after an interval of fifty lines tells us how Ripheus was saved:-- "The other one, through grace that from so deep A fountain wells that never hath the eye Of any creature reached its primal wave, Set all his love below on righteousness; Wherefore from grace to grace did God unclose His eye to our redemption yet to be, Whence he believed therein, and suffered not From that day forth the stench of Paganism, And he reproved therefor the folk perverse. Those maidens three, whom at the right hand wheel[246] Thou didst behold, were unto him for baptism More than a thousand years before baptizing." If the reader recall a passage already quoted from the _Convito_,[247] he will perhaps think with us that the gate of Dante's _Limbo_ is left ajar even for the ancient philosophers to slip out. The divine judgments are still inscrutable, and the ways of God past finding out, but faith would seem to have led Dante at last to a more merciful solution of his doubt than he had reached when he wrote the _De Monarchia_. It is always humanizing to see how the most rigid creed is made to bend before the kindlier instincts of the heart. The stern Dante thinks none beyond hope save those who are dead in sin, and have made evil their good. But we are by no means sure that he is not right in insisting rather on the implacable severity of the law than on the possible relenting of the judge. Exact justice is commonly more merciful in the long run than pity, for it tends to foster in men those stronger qualities which make them good citizens, an object second only with the Roman-minded Dante to that of making them spiritually regenerate, nay, perhaps even more important as a necessary preliminary to it. The inscription over the gate of hell tells us that the terms on which we receive the trust of life were fixed by the Divine Power (which can what it wills), and are therefore unchangeable; by the Highest Wisdom, and therefore for our truest good; by the Primal Love, and therefore the kindest. These are the three attributes of that justice which moved the maker of them. Dante is no harsher than experience, which always exacts the uttermost farthing; no more inexorable than conscience, which never forgives nor forgets. No teaching is truer or more continually needful than that the stains of the soul are ineffaceable, and that though their growth may be arrested, their nature is to spread insidiously till they have brought all to their own color. Evil is a far more cunning and persevering propagandist than Good, for it has no inward strength, and is driven to seek countenance and sympathy. It must have company, for it cannot bear to be alone in the dark, while "Virtue can see to do what Virtue would By her own radiant light." There is one other point which we will dwell on for a moment as bearing on the question of Dante's orthodoxy. His nature was one in which, as in Swedenborg's, a clear practical understanding was continually streamed over by the northern lights of mysticism, through which the familiar stars shine with a softened and more spiritual lustre. Nothing is more interesting than the way in which the two qualities of his mind alternate, and indeed play into each other, tingeing his matter-of-fact sometimes with unexpected glows of fancy, sometimes giving an almost geometrical precision to his most mystical visions. In his letter to Can Grande he says: "It behooves not those to whom it is given to know what is best in us to follow the footprints of the herd; much rather are they bound to oppose its wanderings. For the vigorous in intellect and reason, endowed with a certain divine liberty, are constrained by no customs. Nor is it wonderful, since they are not governed by the laws, but much more govern the laws themselves." It is not impossible that Dante, whose love of knowledge was all-embracing, may have got some hint of the doctrine of the Oriental Sufis. With them the first and lowest of the steps that lead upward to perfection is the Law, a strict observance of which is all that is expected of the ordinary man whose mind is not open to the conception of a higher virtue and holiness. But the Sufi puts himself under the guidance of some holy man [Virgil in the _Inferno_], whose teaching he receives implicitly, and so arrives at the second step, which is the Path [_Purgatorio_] by which he reaches a point where he is freed from all outward ceremonials and observances, and has risen from an outward to a spiritual worship. The third step is Knowledge [_Paradiso_], endowed by which with supernatural insight, he becomes like the angels about the throne, and has but one farther step to take before he reaches the goal and becomes one with God. The analogies of this system with Dante's are obvious and striking. They become still more so when Virgil takes leave of him at the entrance of the Terres trial Paradise with the words:-- "Expect no more a word or sign from me; Free and upright and sound is thy free-will, And error were it not to do its bidding; Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre,"[248] that is, "I make thee king and bishop over thyself; the inward light is to be thy law in things both temporal and spiritual." The originality of Dante consists in his not allowing any divorce between the intellect and the soul in its highest sense, in his making reason and intuition work together to the same end of spiritual perfection. The unsatisfactoriness of science leads Faust to seek repose in worldly pleasure; it led Dante to find it in faith, of whose efficacy the short-coming of all logical substitutes for it was the most convincing argument. That we cannot know, is to him a proof that there is some higher plane on which we can believe and see. Dante had discovered the incalculable worth of a single idea as compared with the largest heap of facts ever gathered. To a man more interested in the soul of things than in the body of them, the little finger of Plato is thicker than the loins of Aristotle. We cannot but think that there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals. No doubt the laws of morals existed from the beginning, but so also did those of science, and it is by the application, not the mere recognition, of both that the race is benefited. No one questions how much science has done for our physical comfort and convenience, and with the mass of men these perhaps must of necessity precede the quickening of their moral instincts; but such material gains are illusory, unless they go hand in hand with a corresponding ethical advance. The man who gives his life for a principle has done more for his kind than he who discovers a new metal or names a new gas, for the great motors of the race are moral, not intellectual, and their force lies ready to the use of the poorest and weakest of us all. We accept a truth of science so soon as it is demonstrated, are perfectly willing to take it on authority, can appropriate whatever use there may be in it without the least understanding of its processes, as men send messages by the electric telegraph, but every truth of morals must be redemonstrated in the experience of the individual man before he is capable of utilizing it as a constituent of character or a guide in action. A man does not receive the statements that "two and two make four," and that "the pure in heart shall see God," on the same terms. The one can be proved to him with four grains of corn; he can never arrive at a belief in the other till he realize it in the intimate persuasion of his whole being. This is typified in the mystery of the incarnation. The divine reason must forever manifest itself anew in the lives of men, and that as individuals. This atonement with God, this identification of the man with the truth,[249] so that right action shall not result from the lower reason of utility, but from the higher of a will so purified of self as to sympathize by instinct with the eternal laws,[250] is not something that can be done once for all, that can become historic and traditional, a dead flower pressed between the leaves of the family Bible, but must be renewed in every generation, and in the soul of every man, that it may be valid. Certain sects show their recognition of this in what are called revivals, a gross and carnal attempt to apply truth, as it were, mechanically, and to accomplish by the etherization of excitement and the magnetism of crowds what is possible only in the solitary exaltations of the soul. This is the high moral of Dante's poem. We have likened it to a Christian basilica; and as in that so there is here also, painted or carven, every image of beauty and holiness the artist's mind could conceive for the adornment of the holy place. We may linger to enjoy these if we will, but if we follow the central thought that runs like the nave from entrance to choir, it leads us to an image of the divine made human, to teach us how the human might also make itself divine. Dante beholds at last an image of that Power, Love, and Wisdom, one in essence, but trine in manifestation, to answer the needs of our triple nature and satisfy the senses, the heart, and the mind. "Within the deep and luminous subsistence Of the High Light appeared to me three circles Of threefold color and of one dimension, And by the second seemed the first reflected As iris is by iris, and the third Seemed fire that equally by both is breathed. * * * * * "Within itself, of its own very color, Seemed to me painted with our effigy, Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein." He had reached the high altar where the miracle of transubstantiation is wrought, itself also a type of the great conversion that may be accomplished in our own nature (the lower thing assuming the qualities of the higher), not by any process of reason, but by the very fire of the divine love. "Then there smote my mind A flash of lightning wherein came its wish."[251] Perhaps it seems little to say that Dante was the first great poet who ever made a poem wholly out of himself, but, rightly looked at, it implies a wonderful self-reliance and originality in his genius. His is the first keel that ever ventured into the silent sea of human consciousness to find a new world of poetry. "L'acqua ch' io prendo giammai non si corse."[252] He discovered that not only the story of some heroic person, but that of any man might be epical; that the way to heaven was not outside the world, but through it. Living at a time when the end of the world was still looked for as imminent,[253] he believed that the second coming of the Lord was to take place on no more conspicuous stage than the soul of man; that his kingdom would be established in the surrendered will. A poem, the precious distillation of such a character and such a life as his through all those sorrowing but undespondent years, must have a meaning in it which few men have meaning enough in themselves wholly to penetrate. That its allegorical form belongs to a past fashion, with which the modern mind has little sympathy, we should no more think of denying than of whitewashing a fresco of Giotto. But we may take it as we may nature, which is also full of double meanings, either as picture or as parable, either for the simple delight of its beauty or as a shadow of the spiritual world. We may take it as we may history, either for its picturesqueness or its moral, either for the variety of its figures, or as a witness to that perpetual presence of God in his creation of which Dante was so profoundly sensible. He had seen and suffered much, but it is only to the man who is himself of value that experience is valuable. He had not looked on man and nature as most of us do, with less interest than into the columns of our daily newspaper. He saw in them the latest authentic news of the God who made them, for he carried everywhere that vision washed clear with tears which detects the meaning under the mask, and, beneath the casual and transitory, the eternal keeping its sleepless watch. The secret of Dante's power is not far to seek. Whoever can express _himself_ with the full force of unconscious sincerity will be found to have uttered something ideal and universal. Dante intended a didactic poem, but the most picturesque of poets could not escape his genius, and his sermon sings and glows and charms in a manner that surprises more at the fiftieth reading than the first, such variety of freshness is in imagination. There are no doubt in the _Divina Commedia_ (regarded merely as poetry) sandy spaces enough both of physics and metaphysics, but with every deduction Dante remains the first of descriptive as well as moral poets. His verse is as various as the feeling it conveys; now it has the terseness and edge of steel, and now palpitates with iridescent softness like the breast of a dove. In vividness he is without a rival. He drags back by its tangled locks the unwilling head of some petty traitor of an Italian provincial town, lets the fire glare on the sullen face for a moment, and it sears itself into the memory forever. He shows us an angel glowing with that love of God which makes him a star even amid the glory of heaven, and the holy shape keeps lifelong watch in our fantasy constant as a sentinel. He has the skill of conveying impressions indirectly. In the gloom of hell his bodily presence is revealed by his stirring something, on the mount of expiation by casting a shadow. Would he have us feel the brightness of an angel? He makes him whiten afar through the smoke like a dawn,[254] or, walking straight toward the setting sun, he finds his eyes suddenly unable to withstand a greater splendor against which his hand is unavailing to shield him. Even its reflected light, then, is brighter than the direct ray of the sun.[255] And how mack more keenly do we feel the parched lips of Master Adam for those rivulets of the Casentino which run down into the Arno, "making their channels cool and soft"! His comparisons are as fresh, as simple, and as directly from nature as those of Homer.[256] Sometimes they show a more subtle observation, as where he compares the stooping of Antaeus over him to the leaning tower of Garisenda, to which the clouds, flying in an opposite direction to its inclination, give away their motion.[257] His suggestions of individuality, too, from attitude or speech, as in Farinata, Sordello, or Pia,[258] give in a hint what is worth acres of so-called character-painting. In straightforward pathos, the single and sufficient thrust of phrase, he has no competitor. He is too sternly touched to be effusive and tearful: "Io non piangeva, si dentro impietrai."[259] His is always the true coin of speech, "Si lucida e si tonda Che nel suo conio nulla ci s'inforsa," and never the highly ornamented promise to pay, token of insolvency. No doubt it is primarily by his poetic qualities that a poet must be judged, for it is by these, if by anything, that he is to maintain his place in literature. And he must be judged by them absolutely, with reference, that is, to the highest standard, and not relatively to the fashions and opportunities of the age in which he lived. Yet these considerations must fairly enter into our decision of another side of the question, and one that has much to do with the true quality of the man, with his character as distinguished from his talent, and therefore with how much he will influence men as well as delight them. We may reckon up pretty exactly a man's advantages and defects as an artist; these he has in common with others, and they are to be measured by a recognized standard; but there is something in his _genius_ that is incalculable. It would be hard to define the causes of the difference of impression made upon us respectively by two such men as Aeschylus and Euripides, but we feel profoundly that the latter, though in some respects a better dramatist, was an infinitely lighter weight. Aeschylus stirs something in us far deeper than the sources of mere pleasurable excitement. The man behind the verse is far greater than the verse itself, and the impulse he gives to what is deepest and most sacred in us, though we cannot always explain it, is none the less real and lasting. Some men always seem to remain outside their work; others make their individuality felt in every part of it; their very life vibrates in every verse, and we do not wonder that it has "made them lean for many years." The virtue that has gone out of them abides in what they do. The book such a man makes is indeed, as Milton called it, "the precious lifeblood of a master spirit." Theirs is a true immortality, for it is their soul, and not their talent, that survives in their work. Dante's concise forthrightness of phrase, which to that of most other poets is as a stab[260] to a blow with a cudgel, the vigor of his thought, the beauty of his images, the refinement of his conception of spiritual things, are marvellous if we compare him with his age and its best achievement. But it is for his power of inspiring and sustaining, it is because they find in him a spur to noble aims, a secure refuge in that defeat which the present always seems, that they prize Dante who know and love him best. He is not merely a great poet, but an influence, part of the soul's resources in time of trouble. From him she learns that, "married to the truth, she is a mistress, but otherwise a slave shut out of all liberty."[261] All great poets have their message to deliver us, from something higher than they. We venture on no unworthy comparison between him who reveals to us the beauty of this world's love and the grandeur of this world's passion and him who shows that love of God is the fruit whereof all other loves are but the beautiful and fleeting blossom, that the passions are yet sublimer objects of contemplation, when, subdued by the will, they become patience in suffering and perseverance in the upward path. But we cannot help thinking that if Shakespeare be the most comprehensive intellect, so Dante is the highest spiritual nature that has expressed itself in rhythmical form. Had he merely made us feel how petty the ambitions, sorrows, and vexations of earth appear when looked down on from the heights of our own character and the seclusion of our own genius, or from the region where we commune with God, he had done much: "I with my sight returned through one and all The sevenfold spheres, and I beheld this globe Such that I smiled at its ignoble semblance."[262] But he has done far more; he has shown us the way by which that country far beyond the stars may be reached, may become the habitual dwelling-place and fortress of our nature, instead of being the object of its vague aspiration in moments of indolence. At the Round Table of King Arthur there was left always one seat empty for him who should accomplish the adventure of the Holy Grail. It was called the perilous seat because of the dangers he must encounter who would win it. In the company of the epic poets there was a place left for whoever should embody the Christian idea of a triumphant life, outwardly all defeat, inwardly victorious, who should make us partakers of that cup of sorrow in which all are communicants with Christ. He who should do this would indeed achieve the perilous seat, for he must combine poesy with doctrine in such cunning wise that the one lose not its beauty nor the other its severity,--and Dante has done it. As he takes possession of it we seem to hear the cry he himself heard when Virgil rejoined the company of great singers, "All honor to the loftiest of poets!" Footnotes: [1] The Shadow of Dante, being an Essay towards studying Himself, his World, and his Pilgrimage. By Maria Francesca Rossetti. "Se Dio te lasci, lettor prender frutto Di tua lezione." Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1872. 8vo. pp. 296. [2] The Florentines should seem to have invented or re-invented banks, book-keeping by double entry, and bills of exchange. The last, by endowing Value with the gift of fern seed and enabling it to walk invisible, turned the flank of the baronial tariff-system and made the roads safe for the great liberalizer Commerce. This made Money omnipresent, and prepared the way for its present omnipotence. Fortunately it cannot usurp the third attribute of Deity,--omniscience. But whatever the consequences, this Florentine invention was at first nothing but admirable, securing to brain its legitimate influence over brawn. The latter has begun its revolt, but whether it will succeed better in its attempt to restore mediaeval methods, than the barons in maintaining them remains to be seen. [3] Ghiberti's designs have been criticised by a too systematic aestheticism, as confounding the limits of sculpture and painting. But is not the _riliero_ precisely the bridge by which the one art passes over into the territory of the other? [4] Inferno, IV. 102. [5] The Nouvelle Biographie Générale gives May 8 as his birthday. This is a mere assumption, for Boccaccio only says generally May. The indication which Dante himself gives that he was born when the sun was in Gemini would give a range from about the middle of May to about the middle of June, so that the 8th is certainly too early. [6] Secolo di Dante, Udine edition of 1828, Vol. III. Part I. p.578. [7] Arrivabene, however, is wrong. Boccaccio makes precisely the same reckoning in the first note of his Commentary (Bocc. Comento, etc., Firenze, 1844, Vol. I. pp. 32, 33). [8] Dict. Phil., art. _Dante_. [9] Paradise, XXII. [10] Canto XV. [11] Purgatorio, XVI. [12] Though he himself preferred French, and wrote his _Trésor_ in that language for two reasons, _"l'una perchè noi siamo in Francia, e l'altra perchè, la parlatura francesca e più dilettevolee più comune che tutti li altri linguaggi_." (_Proemio, sul fine_.) [13] Inferno, Canto VII. [14] Paradiso, Canto X. [15] See especially Inferno, IX. 112 et seq.; XII. 120; XV. 4 et seq.; XXXII. 25-30. [16] Vit. Nuov. p. 61, ed. Pesaro, 1829. [17] Tratt. III. Cap. XI. [18] Letter of Dante, now lost, cited by Aretino. [19] Inferno, XXI. 94. [20] Balbo, Vita di Dante, Firenze, 1853, p. 117. [21] Life and Times of Dante, London, 1858, p. 80. [22] Notes to Spenser's "Shepherd's Calendar." [23] See the story at length in Balbo, Vita di Dante, Cap. X. [24] Thus Foscolo. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that at first the blacks were the extreme Guelphs, and the whites those moderate Guelphs inclined to make terms with the Ghibellines. The matter is obscure, and Balbo contradicts himself about it. [25] Secolo di Dante, p. 654. He would seem to have been in Rome during the Jubilee of 1300. See Inferno, XVIII. 28-33. [26] That Dante was not of the _grandi_, or great nobles (what we call grandees), as some of his biographers have tried to make out, is plain from this sentence, where his name appears low on the list and with no ornamental prefix, after half a dozen _domini_. Bayle, however, is equally wrong in supposing his family to have been obscure. [27] See Witte, "Quando e da chi sia composto l' Ottimo Comento," etc. (Leipsic, 1847) [28] Ott. Com. Parad. XVII. [29] The loose way in which many Italian scholars write history is as amazing as it is perplexing. For example: Count Balbo's "Life of Dante" was published originally at Turin, in 1839. In a note (Lib. I. Cap. X.) he expresses a doubt whether the date of Dante's banishment should not be 1303, and inclines to think it should be. Meanwhile, it seems never to have occurred to him to employ some one to look at the original decree, still existing in the archives. Stranger still, Le Monnier, reprinting the work at Florence in 1853, within a stone's throw of the document itself, and with full permission from Balbo to make corrections, leaves the matter just where it was. [30] Convito, Tratt. I. Cap. III. [31] Macchiavelli is the authority for this, and is carelessly cited in the preface to the Udine edition of the "Codex Bartolinianus" as placing it in 1312. Macchiavelli does no such thing, but expressly implies an earlier date, perhaps 1310. (See Macch. Op. ed. Baretti, London, 1772, Vol. I. p. 60.) [32] See Carlyle's "Frederic," Vol. I. p. 147. [33] A mistake, for Guido did not become lord of Ravenna till several years later. But Boccaccio also assigns 1313 as the date of Dante's withdrawal to that city, and his first protector may have been one of the other Polentani to whom Guido (surnamed Novello, or the Younger; his grandfather having borne the same name) succeeded. [34] Under this date (1315) a 4th _condemnatio_ against Dante is mentioned _facta in anno 1315 de mense Octobris per D. Rainerium, D. Zachario de Urbeveteri, olim et tunc vicarium regium civitatis Florentia_, etc. It is found recited in the decree under which in 1342 Jacopo di Dante redeemed a portion of his father's property, to wit: _Una possessione cum vinea et cum domibus super ea, combustis et non combustis, posita in populo S. Miniatis de Pagnlao_. In the _domibus combustis_ we see the blackened traces of Dante's kinsman by marriage, Corso Donati, who plundered and burnt the houses of the exiled Bianchi, during the occupation of the city by Charles of Valois. (See "De Romanis," notes on Tiraboschi's Life of Dante, in the Florence ed. of 1830, Vol. V. p. 119.) [35] Voltaire's blunder has been made part of a serious theory by Mons. E. Aroux, who gravely assures us that, during the Middle Ages, Tartar was only a cryptonym by which heretics knew each other, and adds: _Il n'y a donc pas trop à s'etonner des noms bizarres de Mastino et de Cane donnés à ces Della Scala_. (Dante, hérétique, révolutionnaire, et socialiste, Paris, 1854, pp. 118-120.) [36] If no monument at all was built by Guido, as is asserted by Balbo (Vita, I. Lib. II. Cap. XVII.), whom De Vericour copies without question, we are at a loss to account for the preservation of the original epitaph replaced by Cardinal Bembo when he built the new tomb, in 1483. Bembo's own inscription implies an already existing monument, and, if in disparaging terms, yet epitaphial Latin verses are not to be taken too literally, considering the exigencies of that branch of literary ingenuity. The doggerel Latin has been thought by some unworthy of Dante, as Shakespeare's doggerel English epitaph has been thought unworthy of him. In both cases the rudeness of the verses seems to us a proof of authenticity. An enlightened posterity with unlimited superlatives at command, and in an age when stone-cutting was cheap, would have aimed at something more befitting the occasion. It is certain, at least in Dante's case, that Cardinal Bembo would never have inserted in the very first words an allusion to the De Monarchiâ, a book long before condemned as heretical. [37] We have translated _lacusque_ by "the Pit," as being the nearest English correlative. Dante probably meant by it the several circles of his Hell, narrowing, one beneath the other, to the centre. As a curious specimen of English we subjoin Professor de Vericour's translation: "I have sang the rights of monarchy; I have sang, in exploring them, the abode of God, the Phlegethon and the impure lakes, as long as destinies have permitted. But as the part of myself, which was only passing, returns to better fields, and happier, returned to his Maker, I, Dante, exiled from the regions of fatherland, I am laid here, I, to whom Florence gave birth, a mother who experienced but a feeble love." (The Life and Times of Dante, London, 1858, p. 208.) [38] Inferno, X. 85. [39] Paradiso, XVII. [40] He says after the return of Louis of Bavaria to Germany, which took place in that year. The De Monarchiâ was afterward condemned by the Council of Trent. [41] Paradiso, XXVII. [42] Inferno, XI. [43] See the letter in Gaye, Carteggio inedito d' artisti, Vol. I. p. 123. [44] St. René Taillandier, in Revue des Deux Mondes, December 1, 1856. [45] Dante, Vol. IV. p. 116. [46] Ste. Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, Tome XI. p. 169. [47] Dict. Phil., art. _Dante_. [48] Corresp. gén., Oeuvres, Tome LVII. pp. 80, 81. [49] Essai sur les moeurs, Oeuvres, Tome XVII. pp. 371, 372. [50] Génie du Christianisme, Cap. IV. [51] Ed. Lond. 1684, p. 199. [52] It is worth notice, as a proof of Chaucer's critical judgment, that he calls Dante "the great poet of Itaille," while in the "Clerke's Tale" he speaks of Petrarch as a "worthy clerk," as "the laureat poete" (alluding to the somewhat sentimental ceremony at Rome), and says that his "Rhetorike sweete Enlumined all Itaille of poetry." [53] It is possible that Sackville may have read the Inferno, and it is certain that Sir John Harrington had. See the preface to his translation of the Orlando Furioso. [54] Second edition, 1800. [55] Dante Alighieri's lyrische Gedichte, Leipzig, 1842, Theil II. pp. 4-9. [56] Vita, p. 97. [57] Comment on Paradiso, VI. [58] Jean de Meung had already said,-- "Ge n'en met hors rois ne prélas * * * * * "Qu'il sunt tui serf au menu pueple." Roman de la Rose (ed. Méon), V. ii. pp. 78, 79. [59] Dante, Studien, etc., 1855, p. 144. [60] Compare also Spinoza, Tractat. polit., Cap. VI. [61] It is instructive to compare Dante's political treatise with those of Aristotle and Spinoza. We thus see more clearly the limitations of the age in which he lived, and this may help us to a broader view of him as poet. [62] A very good one may be found in the sixth volume of the Molini edition of Dante, pp. 391-433. [63] See Field's "Theory of Colors." [64] As by Dante himself in the Convito. [65] Psalm cxiv. 1, 2. [66] He commonly prefaced his letters with some such phrase as _exul immeritus_. [67] In order to fix more precisely in the mind the place of Dante in relation to the history of thought, literature, and events, we subjoin a few dates: Dante born, 1265; end of Crusades, death of St. Louis, 1270; Aquinas died, 1274; Bonaventura died, 1274; Giotto born, 1276; Albertus Magnus died, 1280; Sicilian vespers, 1282; death of Ugolino and Francesca da Rimini, 1282; death of Beatrice, 1290; Roger Bacon died, 1292; death of Cimabue, 1302; Dante's banishment, 1302; Petrarch born, 1304; Fra Dolcino burned, 1307; Pope Clement V. at Avignon, 1309; Templars suppressed, 1312; Boccaccio born, 1313; Dante died, 1321; Wycliffe born, 1324; Chaucer born, 1328. [68] Rivavol characterized only a single quality of Dante's style, who knew how to spend as well as spare. Even the Inferno, on which he based his remark, might have put him on his guard. Dante understood very well the use of ornament in its fitting place. _Est enim exornatio alicujus convenientis additio_, he tells us in his De Vulgari Eloquio (Lib. II. C. II.). His simile of the doves (Inferno, V. 82 et seq.), perhaps the most exquisite in all poetry, quite oversteps Rivarol's narrow limit of "substantive and verb." [69] Discorso sul testo, ec., § XVIII. [70] Convito, B. IV. C. XXII. [71] It is remarkable that when Dante, in 1297, as a preliminary condition to active politics, enrolled himself in the guild of physicians and apothecaries, he is qualified only with the title _poeta_. The arms of the Alighieri (curiously suitable to him who _sovra gli altri come aquila vola_) were a wing of gold in a field of azure. His vivid sense of beauty even hovers sometimes like a _corposant_ over the somewhat stiff lines of his Latin prose. For example, in his letter to the kings and princes of Italy on the coming of Henry VII: "A new day brightens, revealing the dawn which already scatters the shades of long calamity; already the breezes of morning gather; _the lips of heaven are reddening!"_ [72] Purgatorio, XXXII. 100. [73] Paradiso, I. 70. [74] In a letter to Can Grande (XI. of the Epistolae). [75] Witte, Wegele, and Ruth in German, and Ozanam in French, have rendered ignorance of Dante inexcusable among men of culture. [76] Inferno, VII. 75. "Nay, his style," says Miss Rossetti, "is more than concise: it is elliptical, it is recondite. A first thought often lies coiled up and hidden under a second; the words which state the conclusion involve the premises and develop the subject." (p. 3.) [77] A complete vocabulary of Italian billingsgate might be selected from Biagioli. Or see the concluding pages of Nannucci's excellent tract "Intorno alle voci usate da Dante," Corfu, 1840. Even Foscolo could not always refrain. Dante should have taught them to shun such vulgarities. See Inferno, XXX. 131-148. [78] "My Italy, my sweetest Italy, for having loved thee too much I have lost thee, and, perhaps, ... ah, may God avert the omen! But more proud than sorrowful, for an evil endured for thee alone, I continue to consecrate my vigils to thee alone.... An exile full of anguish, perchance, availed to sublime the more in thy Alighieri that lofty soul which was a beautiful gift of thy smiling sky; and an exile equally wearisome and undeserved now avails, perhaps, to sharpen my small genius so that it may penetrate into what he left written for thy instruction and for his glory." (Rossetti, Disamina, ec., p. 405.) Bossetti is himself a proof that a noble mind need not be narrowed by misfortune. His "Comment" (unhappily incomplete) is one of the most valuable and suggestive. [79] The great-minded man ever magnifies himself in his heart, and in like manner the pusillanimous holds himself less than he is. (Convito, Tr. I. c. 11.) [80] Dante's notion of virtue was not that of an ascetic, nor has any one ever painted her in colors more soft and splendid than he in the Convito. She is "sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes," and he dwells on the delights of her love with a rapture which kindles and purifies. So far from making her an inquisitor, he says expressly that she "should be gladsome and not sullen in all her works." (Convito, Tr. I. c. 8.) "Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose"! [81] Inferno, XIX. 28, 29. [82] Inferno, VIII. 70-75. [83] Paradise, X. 138. [84] Paradiso, IV. 40-45 (Longfellow's version). [85] Marlowe's "Faustus." "Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell." (Paradise Lost, IV. 75.) In the same way, _ogni dove in cielo o Paradiso_. (Paradiso, III. 88, 89.) [86] Purgatorio, XIX. 7-33. [87] Convito, Tr. II. c. 16. [88] _La natura universale, cioè Iddio._ (Convito, Tr. III. c. 4.) [89] Inferno, III. 7, 8. [90] Inferno, XX. 30. Mr. W.M. Rossetti strangely enough renders this verse "Who hath a passion for God's judgeship" _Compassion porta_, is the reading of the best texts, and Witte adopts it. Buti's comment is "_cioè porta pena e dolore di colui che giustamente è condannato da Dio che e sempre giusto_." There is an analogous passage in "The Revelation of the Apostle Paul," printed in the "Proceedings of the American Oriental Society" (Vol. VIII. pp. 213, 214): "And the angel answered and said, 'Wherefore dost thou weep? Why! art thou more merciful than God?' And I said, 'God forbid, O my lord; for God is good and long-suffering unto the sons of men, and he leaves every one of them to his own will, and he walks as he pleases'" This is precisely Dante's view. [91] Inferno, VIII 40. [92] "I following her (Moral Philosophy) in the work as well as the passion, so far as I could, abominated and disparaged the errors of men, not to the infamy and shame of the erring, but of the errors." (Convito, Tr IV. c. 1.) "Wherefore in my judgment as he who defames a worthy man ought to be avoided by people and not listened to, so a vile man descended of worthy ancestors ought to be hunted out by all." (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 29.) [93] Paradise, XVII. 61-69. [94] It is worth mentioning that the sufferers in his Inferno are in like manner pretty exactly divided between the two parties. This is answer enough to the charge of partiality. He even puts persons there for whom he felt affection (as Brunetto Latini) and respect (as Farinata degli Uberti and Frederick II.). Till the French looked up their MSS., it was taken for granted that the _beccajo di Parigi_ (Purgatorio, XX. 52) was a drop of Dante's gall. "Ce fu Huez Capez e' on apelle bouchier." Hugues Capet, p. 1. [95] De Vulgari Eloquio, Lib. I, Cap. VI. Cf. Inferno, XV. 61-64. [96] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 23. Ib. Tr. I. c. 2. [97] Convito, Tr. III. c. 13. [98] Opp. Min., ed. Fraticelli, Vol. II. pp. 281 and 283. Witte is inclined to put it even earlier than 1300, and we believe he is right. [99] Paradiso, VI. 103-105. [100] Some Florentines have amusingly enough doubted the genuineness of the De vulgari Eloquio, because Dante therein denies the pre-eminence of the Tuscan dialect. [101] See particularly the second book of the De vulgari Eloquio. [102] Purgatorio, XXXIII. 141. "That thing one calls beautiful whose parts answer to each other, because pleasure results from their harmony." (Convito, Tr. I. c. 5.) Carlyle says that "he knew too, partly, that his work was great, the greatest a man could do." He knew it fully. Telling us how Giotto's fame as a painter had eclipsed that of Cimabue, he takes an example from poetry also, and selecting two Italian poets,--one the most famous of his predecessors, the other of his contemporaries,--calmly sets himself above them both (Purgatorio, XI. 97-99), and gives the reason for his supremacy (Purgatorio, XXIV. 49-62). It is to be remembered that _Amore_ in the latter passage does not mean love in the ordinary sense, but in that transcendental one set forth in the Convito,--that state of the soul which opens it for the descent of God's spirit, to make it over into his own image. "Therefore it is manifest that in this love the Divine virtue descends into men in the guise of an angel, ... and it is to be noted that the descending of the virtue of one thing into another is nothing else than reducing it to its own likeness." (Convito, Tr. III. c. 14.) [103] Convito, Tr. III. c. 11. Ib. Tr. I. c. 11. [104] Convito, Tr. III. c. 12-15. [105] Inferno, II. 94. The _donna gentil_ is Lucia, the prevenient Grace, the _light_ of God which shows the right path and guides the feet in it. With Dante God is always the sun, "which leadeth others right by every road." (Inferno, I. 18.) "The spiritual and unintelligible Sun, which is God." (Convito, Tr. III. c. 12) His light "enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world," but his dwelling is in the heavens. He who wilfully deprives himself of this light is spiritually dead in sin. So when in Mars he beholds the glorified spirits of the martyrs he exclaims, "O Elios, who so arrayest them!" (Paradiso, XIV. 96.) Blanc (Vocabolario, _sub voce_) rejects this interpretation. But Dante, entering the abode of the Blessed, invokes the "good Apollo," and shortly after calls him _divina virtù._ We shall have more to say of this hereafter. [106] Convito, Tr. III. c. 12. [107] Convito, Tr. III. c. 15. Recalling how the eyes of Beatrice lift her servant through the heavenly spheres, and that smile of hers so often dwelt on with rapture, we see how Dante was in the habit of commenting and illustrating his own works. We must remember always that with him the allegorical exposition is the true one (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 1), the allegory being a truth which is hidden under a beautiful falsehood (Convito, Tr. II. c. 1), and that Dante thought his poems without this exposition "under some shade of obscurity, so that to many their beauty was more grateful than their goodness" (Convito, Tr. I. c. 1), "because the goodness is in the meaning, and the beauty in the ornament of the words" (Convito, Tr. II. c. 12). [108] Convito, Tr. III. c. 14. [109] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 22. [110] Convito, Tr. III. c. 6. [111] Convito, Tr. III. c. 2. By _potenzia_ and _potenza_ Dante means the faculty of receiving influences or impressions. (Paradiso, XIII. 61; XXIX. 34.) Reason is the "sovran potency" because it makes us capable of God. [112] "O thou _well-born_, unto whom Grace concedes To see the thrones of the Eternal triumph, Or ever yet the warfare be abandoned." Paradiso, V. 115-118. [113] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 21. [114] Convito, Tr. III. c. 7. [115] Inferno, X. 55, 56; Paradiso, XXII. 112-117. [116] Convito, Tr. I. c. 23 (cf. Inferno, I. IV). [117] Convito, Tr. III. c. 3; Paradiso, XVIII. 108-130. [118] See an excellent discussion and elucidation of this matter by Witte, who so highly deserves the gratitude of all students of Dante, in Dante Alighieri's Lyrische Gedichte, Theil II. pp. 48-57. It was kindly old Boccaccio, who, without thinking any harm, first set this nonsense agoing. His "Life of Dante" is mainly a rhetorical exercise. After making Dante's marriage an excuse for revamping all the old slanders against matrimony, he adds gravely, "Certainly I do not affirm these things to have happened to Dante, for I do not know it, though it be true that (whether things like these or others were the cause of it), once parted from her, he would never come where she was nor suffer her to come where he was, for all that she was the mother of several children by him." That he did not come to her is not wonderful, for he would have been burned alive if he had. Dante could not send for her because he was a homeless wanderer. She remained in Florence with her children because she had powerful relations and perhaps property there. It is plain, also, that what Boccaccio says of Dante's _lussuria_ had no better foundation. It gave him a chance to turn a period. He gives no particulars, and his general statement is simply incredible. Lionardo Bruni and Vellutello long ago pointed out the trifling and fictitious character of this "Life." Those familiar with Dante's allegorical diction will not lay much stress on the literal meaning of _pargoletta_ in Purgatono, XXXI. 59. Gentucca, of course, was a real person, one of those who had shown hospitality to the exile. Dante remembers them all somewhere, for gratitude (which is quite as rare as genius) was one of the virtues of his unforgetting nature Boccaccio's "Comment" is later and far more valuable than the "Life." [119] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 17; Purgatorio, XXVII. 100-108. [120] Convito, Tr. II. c. 8. [121] That is, _wholly_ fulfil, _rendono intera_. [122] We should prefer here, "Nor inspirations _won by prayer_ availed," as better expressing _Nè l'impetrare spirazion_. Mr. Longfellow's translation is so admirable for its exactness as well as its beauty that it may be thankful for the minutest criticism, such only being possible. [123] Which he cites in the Paradiso, VIII. 37. [124] Dante confesses his guiltiness of the sin of pride, which (as appears by the examples he gives of it) included ambition, in Purgatorio, XIII. 136, 137. [125] Convito, Tr. II. c. 11. [126] Purgatorio, XXVIII. [127] Purgatorio, XXVIII. 40-44; Convito, Tr. III. c. 13. [128] Purgatorio, XXVII. 94-105. [129] Psalm li. 2. "And therefore I say that her [Philosophy's] beauty, that is, morality, rains flames of fire, that is, a righteous appetite which is generated in the love of moral doctrine, the which appetite removes us from the natural as well as other vices." (Convito, Tr. III. c. 15.) [130] Purgatorio, XXXI. 103,104. [131] Tr. IV. c. 22. [133] Purgatorio, 100-102. [133] Such is the _selva oscura_ (Inferno, I. 2), such, the _selva erronea di questa vita_ (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 24). [134] Convito, Tr. I. c. 13. [135] Convito, Tr. II. c. 2. [136] _Mar di tutto il senno_, he calls Virgil (Inferno, VIII. 7). Those familiar with his own works will think the phrase singularly applicable to himself. [137] Convito, Tr. III. c. 9. [138] Convito, Tr. III. c. 3. [139] Vita Nuova, XI. [140] Vita Nuova, Tr. II. c. 6. [141] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 24. The date of Dante's birth is uncertain, but the period he assigns for it (Paradiso, XXII. 112-117) extends from the middle of May to the middle of June. If we understand Buti's astrological comment, the day should fall in June rather than May. [142] Vita Nuova, XXXIX. Compare for a different view, "The New Life of Dante, an Essay with Translations," by C. E. Norton, pp. 92. et seq. [143] There is a passage in the Convito (Tr. III. c. 15) in which Dante seems clearly to make the distinction asserted above, "And therefore the desire of man is limited in this life to that _knowledge_ (_scienzia_) which may here be had, and passes not save by error that point which is beyond our natural understanding. And so is limited and measured in the angelic nature the amount of that _wisdom_ which the nature of each is capable of receiving." Man is, according to Dante, superior to the angels in this, that he is capable both of reason and contemplation, while they are confined to the latter. That Beatrice's reproaches refer to no human _pargoletta_, the context shows, where Dante asks, "But wherefore so beyond my power of sight Soars your desirable discourse that aye The more I strive, so much the more I lose it? That thou mayst recognize, she said, the school Which thou hast followed, and mayst see how far Its doctrine follows after my discourse, And mayst behold your path from the divine Distant as far as separated is From earth the heaven that highest hastens on." Purgatorio, XXXIII. 82-90. The _pargoletta_ in its ordinary sense was necessary to the literal and human meaning, but it is shockingly discordant with that non-natural interpretation which, according to Dante's repeated statement, lays open the true and divine meaning. [144] "So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you." Romans viii. 8, 9. [145] Convito, Tr. II. c. 14, 15. [146] Convito, Tr. II. c. 4. Compare Paradiso, I. 76, 77. [147] "Vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called." 1 Tim. vi. 20. [148] That is, no partial truth. [149] Paradise, IV. 124-132. [150] "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness."--Judges xiv. 14. [151] Purgatorio, III. 34-44. The allusions in this passage are all to sayings of Saint Paul, of whom Dante was plainly a loving reader. "Remain contented at the _Quia_," that is, be satisfied with knowing _that_ things are, without inquiring too nicely _how_ or _why_. "Being justified by faith we have peace with God" (Rom. v. 1). _Infinita via_: "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!" (Rom. xi. 93) _Aristotle and Plato_: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness.... For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so _that they are without excuse_. Because that when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened" (Rom. i. 18-21). He refers to the Greeks. The Epistle to the Romans, by the way, would naturally be Dante's favorite. As Saint Paul made the Law, so he would make Science, "our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith" (Gal. iii. 24). He puts Aristotle and Plato in his Inferno, because they did not "adore God duly" (Inferno, IV. 38), that is, they "held the truth in unrighteousness." Yet he calls Aristotle "the master and guide of human reason" (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 6), and Plato "a most excellent man" (Convito, Tr. II. c 5). Plato and Aristotle, like all Dante's figures, are types. We must disengage our thought from the individual, and fix on the genus. [152] It is to be remembered that Dante has typified the same thing when he describes how Reason (Virgil) first carries him down by clinging to the fell of Satan, and then in the same way upwards again _a riveder le stelle_. Satan is the symbol of materialism, fixed at the point "To which things heavy draw from every side"; as God is Light and Warmth, so is he "cold obstruction"; the very effort which he makes to rise by the motion of his wings begets the chilly blast that freezes him more immovably in his place of doom. The danger of all science save the highest (theology) was that it led to materialism There appears to have been a great deal of it in Florence in the time of Dante. Its followers called themselves Epicureans, and burn in living tombs (Inferno, X.). Dante held them in special horror. "Of all bestialities that is the most foolish and vile and hurtful which believes there is no other life after this." "And I so believe, so affirm, and so am certain that we pass to another better life after this" (Convito, Tr. II. c. 9). It is a fine divination of Carlyle from the _Non han speranza di morte_ that "one day it had risen sternly benign in the scathed heart of Dante that he, wretched, never resting, worn as he was, would [should] full surely _die_." [153] Purgatorio, XXXI. 103. [154] Inferno, XXXI. 5, 6. [155] Tr. IV. c. 28. [156] Inferno, XXV. 64-67. [157] Purgatorio, XXXI. 123-126. [158] Spenser, who had, like Dante, a Platonizing side, and who was probably the first English poet since Chaucer that had read the Commedia, has imitated the pictorial part of these passages in the "Faerie Queene" (B. VI. c. 10). He has turned it into a compliment, and a very beautiful one, to a living mistress. It is instructive to compare the effect of his purely sensuous verses with that of Dante's, which have such a wonderful reach behind them. They are singularly pleasing, but they do not stay by us as those of his model had done by him. Spenser was, as Milton called him, a "sage and serious poet"; he would be the last to take offence if we draw from him a moral not without its use now that Priapus is trying to persuade us that pose and drapery will make him as good as Urania. Better far the naked nastiness; the more covert the indecency, the more it shocks. Poor old god of gardens! Innocent as a clownish symbol, he is simply disgusting as an ideal of art. In the last century, they set him up in Beatrice recalls her Germany and in France as befitting an era of enlightenment, the light of which came too manifestly from the wrong quarter to be long endurable. [159] This touch of nature recalls another. The Italians claim humor for Dante. We have never been able to find it, unless it be in that passage (Inferno, XV. 119) where Brunetto Latini lingers under the burning shower to recommend his Tesoro to his former pupil. There is a comical touch of nature in an author's solicitude for his little work, not, as in Fielding's case, after _its_, but his own damnation. We are not sure, but we fancy we catch the momentary flicker of a smile across those serious eyes of Dante's. There is something like humor in the opening verses of the XVI. Paradiso, where Dante tells us how even in heaven he could not help glorying in being gently born,--he who had devoted a Canzone and a book of the Convito to proving that nobility consisted wholly in virtue. But there is, after all, something touchingly natural in the feeling. Dante, unjustly robbed of his property, and with it of the independence so dear to him, seeing "Needy nothings trimmed in jollity, And captive Good attending Captain Ill," would naturally fall back on a distinction which money could neither buy nor replace. There is a curious passage in the Convito which shows how bitterly he resented his undeserved poverty. He tells us that buried treasure commonly revealed itself to the bad rather than the good. "Verily I saw the place on the flanks of a mountain in Tuscany called Falterona, where the basest peasant of the whole countryside digging found there more than a bushel of pieces of the finest silver, which perhaps had awaited him more than a thousand years." (Tr. IV. c. 11.) One can see the grimness of his face as he looked and thought, "how salt a savor hath the bread of others!" [160] L'Envoi of Canzone XIV. of the Canzoniere, I. of the Convito. Dante cites the first verse of this Canzone, Paradiso, VIII. 37. [161] How Dante himself could allegorize even historical personages may be seen in a curious passage of the Convito (Tr. IV. c. 28), where, commenting on a passage of Lucan, he treats Martia and Cato as mere figures of speech. [162] II. of the Canzoniere. See Fraticelli's preface. [163] Don Quixote, P. II. c. VIII. [164] De vulgari Eloquio, L. II. c. 2. He says the same of Giraud de Borneil, many of whose poems are moral and even devotional. See, particularly, "Al honor Dieu torn en mon chan" (Raynouard, Lex Rom I. 388), "Ben es dregz pos en aital port" (Ib. 393), "Jois sia comensamens" (Ib. 395), and "Be veg e conosc e say" (Ib. 398). Another of his poems ("Ar ai grant joy," Raynouard, Choix, III. 304) may _possibly_ be a mystical profession of love for the Blessed Virgin, for whom, as Dante tells us, Beatrice had a special devotion. [165] Convito, Tr. III. c. 14. In the same chapter is perhaps an explanation of the two rather difficult verses which follow that in which the _verace speglio_ is spoken of (Paradise, XXVI. 107, 108). "Che fa di sè pareglie l' altre cose E nulla face lui di sè pareglio." Buti's comment is, "that is, makes of itself a receptacle to other things, that is, to all things that exist, which are all seen in it." Dante says (_ubi supra_), "The descending of the virtue of one thing into another is a reducing that other into a likeness of itself.... Whence we see that the sun sending his ray down hitherward reduces things to a likeness with his light in so far as they are able by their disposition to receive light from his power. So I say that God reduces this love to a likeness with himself as much as it is possible for it to be like him." In Provençal _pareilh_ means _like_, and Dante may have formed his word from it. But the four earliest printed texts read:-- "Che fa di sè pareglio all' altre cose." Accordingly we are inclined to think that the next verse should be corrected thus:-- "E nulla face a lui di sè pareglio." We would form _pareglio_ from _parere_ (a something in which things _appear_), as _miraglio_ from _mirare_ (a something in which they are _seen_). God contains all things in himself, but nothing can wholly contain him. The blessed behold all things in him as if reflected, but not one of the things so reflected is capable of his image in its completeness. This interpretation is confirmed by Paradiso, XIX. 49-51. "E quinci appar _ch' ogni minor natura É corto recettacolo a quel bene Che non ha fine_, e sè con sè misura." [166] "Wisdom of Solomon," VII. 26, quoted by Dante (Convito, Tr. III. c. 15) There are other passages in the "Wisdom of Solomon" besides that just cited which we may well believe Dante to have had in his mind when writing the Canzone beginning,-- "Amor che nella mente mi ragiona," and the commentary upon it, and some to which his experience of life must have given an intenser meaning. The writer of that book also personifies Wisdom as the mistress of his soul: "I loved her and sought her out from my youth, I desired to make her my spouse, and I was a lover of her beauty." He says of Wisdom that she was "present when thou (God) madest the world," and Dante in the same way identifies her with the divine Logos, citing as authority the "beginning of the Gospel of John." He tells us, "I perceived that I could not otherwise obtain her except God gave her me," and Dante came at last to the same conclusion. Again, "For the very true beginning of her is the desire of discipline; and the care of discipline is love. And love is the keeping of her laws; and the giving heed unto her laws is the assurance of incorruption." But who can doubt that he read with a bitter exultation, and applied to himself passages like these which follow? "When the righteous _fled from his brothers wrath, she guided him in right paths showed him the kingdom of God, and gave him knowledge of holy things_. She defended him from his enemies and kept him safe from those that lay in wait, ... that he might know that godliness is stronger than all.... She forsook him not, but delivered him from sin; _she went down with him into the pit_, and left him not in bonds till she brought him the sceptre of the kingdom, ... and gave him perpetual glory." It was, perhaps, from this book that Dante got the hint of making his punishments and penances typical of the sins that earned them. "Wherefore, whereas men lived dissolutely and unrighteously, thou hast tormented them with their own abominations." Dante was intimate with the Scriptures. They do even a scholar no harm. M. Victor Le Clerc, in his "Histoire Littéraire de la France au quatorzième siècle" (Tom. II. p. 72), thinks it "not impossible" that a passage in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, paraphrased by Dante, may have been suggested to him by Rutebeuf or Tristan, rather than by the prophet himself! Dante would hardly have found himself so much at home in the company of _jongleurs_ as in that of prophets. Yet he was familiar with French and Provençal poetry. Beside the evidence of the _Vulgari Eloquio_, there are frequent and broad traces in the Commedia of the _Roman de la Rose_, slighter ones of the _Chevalier de la Charette, Guillaume d'Orange,_ and a direct imitation of Bernard de Ventadour. [167] Convito, Tr. I. c. 12. [168] Purgatorio, XXII. 115, 116. [169] That Dante loved fame we need not be told. He several times confesses it, especially in the De Vulgari Eloquio, I. 17. "How glorious she [the Vulgar Tongue] makes her intimates [_familiares_, those of her household], we ourselves have known, who in the sweetness of this glory put our exile behind our backs." [170] Dante several times uses the sitting a horse as an image of rule. See especially Purgatorio, VI. 99, and Convito, Tr. IV. c. 11. [171] "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!" Dante quotes this in speaking of the influence of the stars, which, interpreting it presently "by the theological way," he compares to that of the Holy Spirit "And thy counsel who hath known, except thou give wisdom and send thy Holy Spirit from above?" (Wisdom of Solomon, ix. 17.) The last words of the Convito are, "her [Philosophy] whose proper dwelling is in the depths of the Divine mind". The ordinary reading is _ragione_ (reason), but it seems to us an obvious blunder for _magione_ (mansion, dwelling). [172] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 28. [173] He refers to a change in his own opinions (Lib II. § 1), where he says, "When I knew the nations to have murmured against the preeminence of the Roman people, and saw the people imagining vain things _as I myself was wont_." He was a Guelph by inheritance, he became a Ghibelline by conviction. [174] It should seem from Dante's words ("at the time when much people went to see the blessed image," and "ye seem to come from a far off people") that this was some extraordinary occasion, and what so likely as the jubilee of 1300? (Compare Paradiso, XXXI. 103-108.) Dante's comparisons are so constantly drawn from actual eye-sight, that his allusion (Inferno, XIII. 28-33) to a device of Boniface VIII. for passing the crowds quietly across the bridge of Saint Angelo, renders it not unlikely that he was in Rome at that time, and perhaps conceived his poem there as Giovanni Villani his chronicle. That Rome would deeply stir his mind and heart is beyond question "And certes I am of a firm opinion that the stones that stand in her walls are worthy of reverence, and the soil where she sits worthy beyond what is preached and admitted of men." (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 5.) [175] _Beatrice, loda di Dio vera_, Inferno, II. 103. "Surely vain are all men by nature who are ignorant of God, and could not out of the good things that are seen know him that is, neither by considering the works did they acknowledge the work-master.... For, being conversant in his works, they search diligently and believe their sight, because the things are beautiful that are seen. Howbeit, neither are they to be pardoned." (Wisdom of Solomon, XIII. 1, 7, 8.) _Non adorar debitamente, Dio_. "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead; so that they are without excuse." It was these "invisible things" whereof Dante was beginning to get a glimpse. [176] Convito, Tr. I. c. 7. [177] "And here we would have forgiven Mr. Captain if he had not betrayed him (_traido, traduttore traditore_) to Spain and made him a Castilian, for he took away much of his native worth, and so will all those do who shall undertake to turn a poem into another tongue; for with all the care they take and ability they show, they will never reach the height of its original conception," says the Curate, speaking of a translation of Ariosto. (Don Quixote, P. I. c. 6.) [177] In his own comment Dante says, "I tell whither goes my thought, calling it by the name of one of its effects." [178] _Spirito_ means in Italian both breath (_spirto ed acqua fessi_, Purgatorio, XXX. 98) and spirit. [180] By _visione_ Dante means something seen waking by the inner eye. He believed also that dreams were sometimes divinely inspired, and argues from such the immortality of the soul. (Convito, Tr. II. c. 9.) [181] Paradiso, XXV. 1-3. [182] De Monarchia, Lib. III. § _ult_. See the whole passage in Miss Rossetti, p 39. It is noticeable that Dante says that the Pope is to _lead_ (by example), the Emperor to _direct_ (by the enforcing of justice) The duty, we are to observe, was a double but not a divided one. To exemplify this unity was indeed one object of the Commedia. [183] "What Reason seeth here Myself [Virgil] can tell thee; beyond that await For Beatrice, since 'tis a work of Faith." _Purgatorio_, XVIII. 46-48. Beatrice here evidently impersonates Theology. It would be interesting to know what was the precise date of Dante's theological studies. The earlier commentators all make him go to Paris, the great fountain of such learning, after his banishment. Boccaccio indeed says that he did not return to Italy till 1311. Wegele (Dante's "Leben und Werke," p. 85) puts the date of his journey between 1292 and 1297. Ozanam, with a pathos comically touching to the academic soul, laments that poverty compelled him to leave the university without the degree he had so justly earned. He consoles himself with the thought that "there remained to him an incontestable erudition and the love of serious studies." (Dante et la philosophic catholique, p. 112.) It _is_ sad that we cannot write _Dantes Alighierius, S. T. D._! Dante seems to imply that he began to devote himself to Philosophy and Theology shortly after Beatrice's death. (Convito, Tr. II. c. 13.) He compares himself to one who, "seeking silver, should, without meaning it, find gold, which an occult cause presents to him, not perhaps without the divine command." Here again apparently is an allusion to his having found Wisdom while he sought Learning. He had thought to find God in the beauty of his works, he learned to seek all things in God. [184] In a more general view, matter, the domain of the senses, no doubt with a recollection of Aristotle's [Greek: hylae]. [185] As we have seen, even a sigh becomes _He_. This makes one of the difficulties of translating his minor poems. The modern mind is incapable of this subtlety. [186] Purgatorio, III. 122,123. [186] Purgatorio, III. 122,123. [187] Purgatorio, V. 107. [188] Inferno, III. 17, 18 (_hanno perduto_ = thrown away). [189] Convito, Tr. II. c. 14. [190] Purgatorio, XXIII. 121, 122. [191] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 7. [192] Inferno, XXXIII. 118, et seq. [193] Inferno, I. 116, 117. [194] Mr. Longfellow's _for_, like the Italian _per_, gives us the same privilege of election. We "freeze for cold," we "hunger for food." [195] Inferno, V. 67. [196] Paradiso, XVIII. 46. Renoard is one of the heroes (a rudely humorous one) in "La Bataille d'Alischans," an episode of the measureless "Guillaume d'Orange." It was from the graves of those supposed to have been killed in this battle that Dante draws a comparison, Inferno, IX. Boccaccio's comment on this passage might have been read to advantage by the French editors of "Alischans." [197] We cite this comment under its received name, though it is uncertain if Pietro was the author of it. Indeed, we strongly doubt it. It is at least one of the earliest, for it appears, by the comment on Paradiso, XXVI., that the greater part of it was written before 1341. It is remarkable for the strictness with which it holds to the spiritual interpretation of the poem, and deserves much more to be called Ottimo, than the comment which goes by that name. Its publication is due to the zeal and liberality of the late Lord Vernon, to whom students of Dante are also indebted for the parallel-text reprint of the four earliest editions of the Commedia. [198] See Wegele, _ubi supra_, p. 174, et seq. The best analysis of Dante's opinions we have ever met with is Emil Ruth's "Studien über Dante Alighieri," Tübingen, 1853. Unhappily it wants an index, and accordingly loses a great part of its usefulness for those not already familiar with the subject. Nor are its references sufficiently exact. We always respect Dr. Ruth's opinions, if we do not wholly accept them, for they are all the results of original and assiduous study. [199] See the second book of the De Vulgari Eloquio. The only other Italian poet who reminds us of Dante in sustained dignity is Guido Guinicelli. Dante esteemed him highly, calls him maximus in the De Vulgari Eloquio, and "the father of me and of my betters," in the XXVI. Purgatorio. See some excellent specimens of him in Mr. D. G. Rossetti's remarkable volume of translations from the early Italian poets. Mr. Rossetti would do a real and lasting service to literature by employing his singular gift in putting Dante's minor poems into English. [200] The old French poems confound all unbelievers together as pagans and worshippers of idols. [201] Dante is an ancient in this respect as in many others, but the difference is that with him society is something divinely ordained. He follows Aristotle pretty closely, but on his own theory crime and sin are identical. [202] Purgatorio, XVIII. 73. He defines it in the De Monarchia (Lib. I. § 14). Among other things he calls it "the first beginning of our liberty." Paradiso, V. 19, 20, he calls it "the greatest gift that in his largess God creating made." "Dico quod judicium medium est apprehensionis et appetitus." (De Monarchia, _ubi supra_.) "Right and wrong, Between whose endless jar justice resides." _Troilus and Cressida._ [203] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 22. [204] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 7. "Qui descenderit ad inferos, non ascendet." Job vii. 9. [205] But it may he inferred that he put the interests of mankind above both. "For citizens," he says, "exist not for the sake of consuls, nor the people for the sake of the king, but, on the contrary, consuls for the sake of citizens, and the king for the sake of the people." [206] Paradiso, VIII. 145, 146. [207] Purgatorio, XVI. 106-112. [208] De Monarchia, § _ult_. [209] De Monarchia Lib III § 10. "Poterat tamen Imperator in patrocinium Eccelesiae patrimonium et alia deputare immoto semper superiori dominio cujus unitas divisio non patitur. Poterat et Vicarius Dei recipere, non tanquam possessor, sed tanquam fructuum pro Eccelesia proque Christi pauperibus dispensator." He tells us that St. Dominic did not ask for the tithes which belong to the poor of God. (Paradiso, XII. 93, 94.) "Let them return whence they came," he says (De Monarchia, Lib II. § 10); "they came well, let them return ill, for they were well given and ill held." [210] Inferno, XIX. 53; Paradiso, XXX. 145-148. [211] Purgatorio, XX. 86-92. [211] Purgatorio, XX. 86-92. [212] Purgatorio, XIX. 134, 135. [213] This results from the whole course of his argument in the second book of De Monarchia, and in the VI. Paradiso he calls the Roman eagle "the bird of God" and "the scutcheon of God." We must remember that with Dante God is always the "Emperor of Heaven," the barons of whose court are the Apostles. (Paradiso, XXIV. 115; Ib., XXV. 17.) [214] Dante seems to imply (though his name be German) that he was of Roman descent He makes the original inhabitants of Florence (Inferno, XV. 77, 78) of Roman seed, and Cacciaguida, when asked by him about his ancestry, makes no more definite answer than that their dwelling was in the most ancient part of the city (Paradiso, XVI. 40.) [215] Man was created, according to Dante (Convito, Tr. II. c. 6), to supply the place of the fallen angels, and is in a sense superior to the angels, inasmuch as he has reason, which they do not need. [216] De Monarchia, Lib I. § 5. [217] Purgatorio, VI. 83, 84. [218] De Monarchia, Lib. I. § 16. [219] De Monarchia, Lib. I. § 5. [220] De Monarchia, Lib II. § 7. [221] Purgatorio, XVI. 67, 68. [222] "Troilus and Cressida," Act I. s. 3. The whole speech is very remarkable both in thought and phrase. [223] Purgatorio, I. 71. [224] De Monarchia, Lib. I. § 14. [225] De Monarchia, Lib. I. § 18. [226] De Monarchia, Lib. I. § 14. [227] Paradiso, IX. [228] Inferno, XXXVIII; Purgatorio, XXXII. [229] See the poems of Walter Mapes (who was Archdeacon of Oxford); the "Bible Guiot," and the "Bible au seignor de Berze," Barbezan and Méon, II. [230] De Monarchia, Lib. III. § 8. [231] Purgatorio, III. 133, 134. [232] Paradiso, XXVII. 22. [233] Purgatorio, XXVII. 18; Ottimo, Inferno, XXVIII. 55. [234] Inferno, IX. 63; Purgatorio, VIII. 20. [235] Purgatorio, XXIX. 131, 132. [236] Inferno, XXII. 13, 14. [237] De Monarchia, Lib. II. § 4. [238] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 4; Ib., c. 27; Aeneid, I. 178, 179; Ovid's Met., VII. [239] Inferno, XXXI. 92. [240] Purgatorio, VI. 118, 119. Pulci, not understanding, has parodied this. ("Morgante," Canto II. st. 1.) [241] See, for example, Purgatorio, XX. 100-117. [242] We believe that Dante, though he did not understand Greek, knew something of Hebrew. He would have been likely to study it as the sacred language, and opportunities of profiting by the help of learned Jews could not have been wanting to him in his wanderings. In the above-cited passage some of the best texts read _I s' appellava_, and others _Un s' appellava_. God was called I (the _Je_ in Jehovah) or _One_, and afterwards _El_,--the strong,--an epithet given to many gods. Whichever reading we adopt, the meaning and the inference from it are the same. [243] Inferno, IV. [244] Dante's "Limbo," of course, is the older "Limbus Patrum." [245] De Monarchia, Lib. II. § 8. [246] Faith, Hope, and Charity. (Purgatorio, XXIX. 121.) Mr. Longfellow has translated the last verse literally. The meaning is, "More than a thousand years ere baptism was." [247] In which the _celestial Athens_ is mentioned. [248] Purgatorio, XXVII. 139-142. [249] "I conceived myself to be now," says Milton, "not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was persuaded." [250] "But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love that moves the sun and other stars." Paradiso, XXXIII., closing verses of the Divina Commedia. [251] Dante seems to allude directly to this article of the Catholic faith when he says, on entering the Celestial Paradise, "to signify transhumanizing by words could not be done," and questions whether he was there in the renewed spirit only or in the flesh also:-- "If I was merely _what of me thou newly Createdst_, Love who governest the heavens, Thou knowest who didst lift me with thy light." Paradiso, I. 70-75. [252] Paradiso, II. 7. Lucretius makes the same boast:-- "Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante Trita solo." [253] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 15. [254] Purgatorio, XVI. 142. Here is Milton's "Far off his coming shone." [255] Purgatorio, XV. 7, et seq. [256] See, for example, Inferno, XVII. 127-132; Ib. XXIV. 7-12; Purgatorio, II. 124-129; Ib., III. 79-84; Ib., XXVII. 76-81; Paradiso, XIX. 91-93; Ib. XXI. 34-39; Ib. XXIII. 1-9. [257] Inferno, XXXI. 136-138. "And those thin clouds above, in fakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars." Coleridge, "Dejection, an Ode." See also the comparison of the dimness of the faces seen around him in Paradise to "a pearl on a white forehead." (Paradiso, III. 14.) [258] Inferno, X. 35-41; Purgatorio, VI. 61-66; Ib., X. 133. [259] For example, Cavalcanti's _Come dicesti egli ebbe_? (Inferno, X. 67, 68.) Anselmuccio's _Tu guardi si, padre, che hai_? (Inferno, XXXIII. 51.) [260] To the "bestiality" of certain arguments Dante says, "one would wish to reply, not with words, but with a knife." (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 14.) [261] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 2. [262] Paradiso, XXII. 132-135; Ib., XXVII. 110. SPENSER. Chaucer had been in his grave one hundred and fifty years ere England had secreted choice material enough for the making of another great poet. The nature of men living together in societies, as of the individual man, seems to have its periodic ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the ideal and the matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful boundary line of shore between them is in one generation a hard sandy actuality strewn only with such remembrances of beauty as a dead sea-moss here and there, and in the next is whelmed with those lacelike curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding foam, and that dance of joyous spray which for a moment catches and holds the sunshine. From the two centuries between 1400 and 1600 the indefatigable Ritson in his _Bibliographia Poetica_ has made us a catalogue of some six hundred English poets, or, more properly, verse-makers. Ninety-nine in a hundred of them are mere names, most of them no more than shadows of names, some of them mere initials. Nor can it be said of them that their works have perished because they were written in an obsolete dialect; for it is the poem that keeps the language alive, and not the language that buoys up the poem. The revival of letters, as it is called, was at first the revival of _ancient_ letters, which, while it made men pedants, could do very little toward making them poets, much less toward making them original writers. There was nothing left of the freshness, vivacity, invention, and careless faith in the present which make many of the productions of the Norman Trouvères delightful reading even now. The whole of Europe during the fifteenth century produced no book which has continued readable, or has become in any sense of the word a classic. I do not mean that that century has left us no illustrious names, that it was not enriched with some august intellects who kept alive the apostolic succession of thought and speculation, who passed along the still unextinguished torch of intelligence, the _lampada vitae_, to those who came after them. But a classic is properly a book which maintains itself by virtue of that happy coalescence of matter and style, that innate and exquisite sympathy between the thought that gives life and the form that consents to every mood of grace and dignity, which can be simple without being vulgar, elevated without being distant, and which is something neither ancient nor modern, always new and incapable of growing old. It is not his Latin which makes Horace cosmopolitan, nor can Béranger's French prevent his becoming so. No hedge of language however thorny, no dragon-coil of centuries, will keep men away from these true apples of the Hesperides if once they have caught sight or scent of them. If poems die, it is because there was never true life in them, that is, that true poetic vitality which no depth of thought, no airiness of fancy, no sincerity of feeling, can singly communicate, but which leaps throbbing at touch of that shaping faculty the imagination. Take Aristotle's ethics, the scholastic philosophy, the theology of Aquinas, the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the small politics of a provincial city of the Middle Ages, mix in at will Grecian, Roman, and Christian mythology, and tell me what chance there is to make an immortal poem of such an incongruous mixture. Can these dry bones live? Yes, Dante can create such a soul under these ribs of death that one hundred and fifty editions of his poem shall be called for in these last sixty years, the first half of the sixth century since his death. Accordingly I am apt to believe that the complaints one sometimes hears of the neglect of our older literature are the regrets of archaeologists rather than of critics. One does not need to advertise the squirrels where the nut-trees are, nor could any amount of lecturing persuade them to spend their teeth on a hollow nut. On the whole, the Scottish poetry of the fifteenth century has more meat in it than the English, but this is to say very little. Where it is meant to be serious and lofty it falls into the same vices of unreality and allegory which were the fashion of the day, and which there are some patriots so fearfully and wonderfully made as to relish. Stripped of the archaisms (that turn every _y_ to a meaningless _z_, spell which _quhilk_, shake _schaik_, bugle _bowgill_, powder _puldir_, and will not let us simply whistle till we have puckered our mouths to _quhissill_) in which the Scottish antiquaries love to keep it disguised,--as if it were nearer to poetry the further it got from all human recognition and sympathy,--stripped of these, there is little to distinguish it from the contemporary verse-mongering south of the Tweed. Their compositions are generally as stiff and artificial as a trellis, in striking contrast with the popular ballad-poetry of Scotland (some of which possibly falls within this period, though most of it is later), which clambers, lawlessly if you will, but at least freely and simply, twining the bare stem of old tradition with graceful sentiment and lively natural sympathies. I find a few sweet and flowing verses in Dunbar's "Merle and Nightingale,"--indeed one whole stanza that has always seemed exquisite to me. It is this:-- "Ne'er sweeter noise was heard by living man Than made this merry, gentle nightingale. Her sound went with the river as it ran Out through the fresh and flourished lusty vale; O merle, quoth she, O fool, leave off thy tale, For in thy song good teaching there is none, For both are lost,--the time and the travail Of every love but upon God alone." But except this lucky poem, I find little else in the serious verses of Dunbar that does not seem to me tedious and pedantic. I dare say a few more lines might be found scattered here and there, but I hold it a sheer waste of time to hunt after these thin needles of wit buried in unwieldy haystacks of verse. If that be genius, the less we have of it the better. His "Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins," over which the excellent Lord Hailes went into raptures, is wanting in everything but coarseness; and if his invention dance at all, it is like a galley-slave in chains under the lash. It would be well for us if the sins themselves were indeed such wretched bugaboos as he has painted for us. What he means for humor is but the dullest vulgarity; his satire would be Billingsgate if it could, and, failing, becomes a mere offence in the nostrils, for it takes a great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet. Mr. Sibbald, in his "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," has admiringly preserved more than enough of it, and seems to find a sort of national savor therein, such as delights his countrymen in a _haggis_, or the German in his _sauer-kraut_. The uninitiated foreigner puts his handkerchief to his nose, wonders, and gets out of the way as soon as he civilly can. Barbour's "Brus," if not precisely a poem, has passages whose simple tenderness raises them to that level. That on Freedom is familiar.[263] But its highest merit is the natural and unstrained tone of manly courage in it, the easy and familiar way in which Barbour always takes chivalrous conduct as a matter of course, as if heroism were the least you could ask of any man. I modernize a few verses to show what I mean. When the King of England turns to fly from the battle of Bannockburn (and Barbour with his usual generosity tells us he has heard that Sir Aymer de Valence led him away by the bridle-rein against his will), Sir Giles d'Argente "Saw the king thus and his menie Shape them to flee so speedily, He came right to the king in hy [hastily] And said, 'Sir, since that is so That ye thus gate your gate will go, Have ye good-day, for back will I: Yet never fled I certainly, And I choose here to bide and die Than to live shamefully and fly.'" The "Brus" is in many ways the best rhymed chronicle ever written. It is national in a high and generous way, but I confess I have little faith in that quality in literature which is commonly called nationality,--a kind of praise seldom given where there is anything better to be said. Literature that loses its meaning, or the best part of it, when it gets beyond sight of the parish steeple, is not what I understand by literature. To tell you when you cannot fully taste a book that it is because it is so thoroughly national, is to condemn the book. To say it of a poem is even worse, for it is to say that what should be true of the whole compass of human nature is true only to some north-and-by-east-half-east point of it. I can understand the nationality of Firdusi when, looking sadly back to the former glories of his country, he tells us that "the nightingale still sings old Persian"; I can understand the nationality of Burns when he turns his plough aside to spare the rough burr thistle, and hopes he may write a song or two for dear auld Scotia's sake. That sort of nationality belongs to a country of which we are all citizens,--that country of the heart which has no boundaries laid down on the map. All great poetry must smack of the soil, for it must be rooted in it, must suck life and substance from it, but it must do so with the aspiring instinct of the pine that climbs forever toward diviner air, and not in the grovelling fashion of the potato. Any verse that makes you and me foreigners is not only not great poetry, but no poetry at all. Dunbar's works were disinterred and edited some thirty years ago by Mr. Laing, and whoso is national enough to like thistles may browse there to his heart's content. I am inclined for other pasture, having long ago satisfied myself by a good deal of dogged reading that every generation is sure of its own share of bores without borrowing from the past. A little later came Gawain Douglas, whose translation of the Aeneid is linguistically valuable, and whose introductions to the seventh and twelfth books--the one describing winter and the other May--have been safely praised, they are so hard to read. There is certainly some poetic feeling in them, and the welcome to the sun comes as near enthusiasm as is possible for a ploughman, with a good steady yoke of oxen, who lays over one furrow of verse, and then turns about to lay the next as cleverly alongside it as he can. But it is a wrong done to good taste to hold up this _item_ kind of description any longer as deserving any other credit than that of a good memory. It is a mere bill of parcels, a _post-mortem_ inventory of nature, where imagination is not merely not called for, but would be out of place. Why, a recipe in the cookery-book is as much like a good dinner as this kind of stuff is like true word-painting. The poet with a real eye in his head does not give us everything, but only the _best_ of everything. He selects, he combines, or else gives what is characteristic only; while the false style of which I have been speaking seems to be as glad to get a pack of impertinences on its shoulders as Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress was to be rid of his. One strong verse that can hold itself upright (as the French critic Rivarol said of Dante) with the bare help of the substantive and verb, is worth acres of this dead cord-wood piled stick on stick, a boundless continuity of dryness. I would rather have written that half-stanza of Longfellow's, in the "Wreck of the Hesperus," of the "billow that swept her crew like icicles from her deck," than all Gawain Douglas's tedious enumeration of meteorological phenomena put together. A real landscape is never tiresome; it never presents itself to us as a disjointed succession of isolated particulars; we take it in with one sweep of the eye,--its light, its shadow, its melting gradations of distance: we do not say it is this, it is that, and the other; and we may be sure that if a description in poetry is tiresome there is a grievous mistake somewhere. All the pictorial adjectives in the dictionary will not bring it a hair's-breadth nearer to truth and nature. The fact is that what we see is in the mind to a greater degree than we are commonly aware. As Coleridge says,-- "O lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone doth Nature live!" I have made the unfortunate Dunbar the text for a diatribe on the subject of descriptive poetry, because I find that this old ghost is not laid yet, but comes back like a vampire to suck the life out of a true enjoyment of poetry,--and the medicine by which vampires were cured was to unbury them, drive a stake through them, and get them under ground again with all despatch. The first duty of the Muse is to be delightful, and it is an injury done to all of us when we are put in the wrong by a kind of statutory affirmation on the part of the critics of something to which our judgment will not consent, and from which our taste revolts. A collection of poets is commonly made up, nine parts in ten, of this perfunctory verse-making, and I never look at one without regretting that we have lost that excellent Latin phrase, _Corpus poetarum_. In fancy I always read it on the backs of the volumes,--a _body_ of poets, indeed, with scarce one soul to a hundred of them. One genuine English poet illustrated the early years of the sixteenth century,--John Skelton. He had vivacity, fancy, humor, and originality. Gleams of the truest poetical sensibility alternate in him with an almost brutal coarseness. He was truly Rabelaisian before Rabelais. But there is a freedom and hilarity in much of his writing that gives it a singular attraction. A breath of cheerfulness runs along the slender stream of his verse, under which it seems to ripple and crinkle, catching and casting back the sunshine like a stream blown on by clear western winds. But Skelton was an exceptional blossom of autumn. A long and dreary winter follows. Surrey, who brought back with him from Italy the blank-verse not long before introduced by Trissino, is to some extent another exception. He had the sentiment of nature and unhackneyed feeling, but he has no mastery of verse, nor any elegance of diction. We have Gascoyne, Surrey, Wyatt, stiff, pedantic, artificial, systematic as a country cemetery, and, worst of all, the whole time desperately in love. Every verse is as flat, thin, and regular as a lath, and their poems are nothing more than bundles of such tied trimly together. They are said to have refined our language. Let us devoutly hope they did, for it would be pleasant to be grateful to them for something. But I fear it was not so, for only genius can do that; and Sternhold and Hopkins are inspired men in comparison with them. For Sternhold was at least the author of two noble stanzas:-- "The Lord descended from above And bowed the heavens high, And underneath his feet he cast The darkness of the sky; On cherubs and on cherubims Full royally he rode, And on the wings of all the winds Came flying all abroad." But Gascoyne and the rest did nothing more than put the worst school of Italian love poetry into an awkward English dress. The Italian proverb says, "Inglese italianizzato, Diavolo incarnato," that an Englishman Italianized is the very devil incarnate, and one feels the truth of it here. The very titles of their poems set one yawning, and their wit is the cause of the dulness that is in other men. "The lover, deceived by his love, repenteth him of the true love he bare her." As thus:-- "Where I sought heaven there found I hap; From danger unto death, Much like the mouse that treads the trap In hope to find her food, And bites the bread that stops her breath,-- So in like case I stood." "The lover, accusing his love for her unfaithfulness, proposeth to live in liberty." He says:-- "But I am like the beaten fowl That from the net escaped, And thou art like the ravening owl That all the night hath waked." And yet at the very time these men were writing there were simple ballad-writers who could have set them an example of simplicity, force, and grandeur. Compare the futile efforts of these poetasters to kindle themselves by a painted flame, and to be pathetic over the lay figure of a mistress, with the wild vigor and almost fierce sincerity of the "Twa Corbies":-- "As I was walking all alone I heard twa corbies making a moan. The one unto the other did say, Where shall we gang dine to-day? In beyond that old turf dyke I wot there lies a new slain knight; And naebody kens that he lies there But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair. His hound is to the hunting gone, His hawk to fetch the wild fowl home, His lady has ta'en another mate, So we may make our dinner sweet. O'er his white bones as they lie bare The wind shall blow forevermair." There was a lesson in rhetoric for our worthy friends, could they have understood it. But they were as much afraid of an attack of nature as of the plague. Such was the poetical inheritance of style and diction into which Spenser was born, and which he did more than any one else to redeem from the leaden gripe of vulgar and pedantic conceit. Sir Philip Sidney, born the year after him, with a keener critical instinct, and a taste earlier emancipated than his own, would have been, had he lived longer, perhaps even more directly influential in educating the taste and refining the vocabulary of, his contemporaries and immediate successors. The better of his pastoral poems in the "Arcadia" are, in my judgment, more simple, natural, and, above all, more pathetic than those of Spenser, who sometimes strains the shepherd's pipe with a blast that would better suit the trumpet. Sidney had the good sense to feel that it was unsophisticated sentiment rather than rusticity of phrase that befitted such themes.[264] He recognized the distinction between simplicity and vulgarity, which Wordsworth was so long in finding out, and seems to have divined the fact that there is but one kind of English that is always appropriate and never obsolete, namely, the very best.[265] With the single exception of Thomas Campion, his experiments in adapting classical metres to English verse are more successful than those of his contemporaries. Some of his elegiacs are not ungrateful to the ear, and it can hardly be doubted that Coleridge borrowed from his eclogue of Strephon and Klaius the pleasing movement of his own _Catullian Hendecasyllabics_. Spenser, perhaps out of deference to Sidney, also tried his hand at English hexameters, the introduction of which was claimed by his friend Gabriel Harvey, who thereby assured to himself an immortality of grateful remembrance. But the result was a series of jolts and jars, proving that the language had run off the track. He seems to have been half conscious of it himself, and there is a gleam of mischief in what he writes to Harvey: "I like your late English hexameter so exceedingly well that I also enure my pen sometime in that kind, which I find indeed, as I have often heard you defend in word, neither so hard nor so harsh but that it will easily yield itself to our mother-tongue. For the only or chiefest hardness, which seemeth, is in the accent, which sometime gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ill-favoredly, coming short of that it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the number, as in _Carpenter_; the middle syllable being used short in speech, when it shall be read long in verse, seemeth like a lame gosling that draweth one leg after her; and _Heaven_ being used short as one syllable, when it is in verse stretched out with a diastole, is like a lame dog that holds up one leg."[266] It is almost inconceivable that Spenser's hexameters should have been written by the man who was so soon to teach his native language how to soar and sing, and to give a fuller sail to English verse. One of the most striking facts in our literary history is the pre-eminence at once so frankly and unanimously conceded to Spenser by his contemporaries. At first, it is true, he had not many rivals. Before the "Faery Queen" two long poems were printed and popular,--the "Mirror for Magistrates" and Warner's "Albion's England,"--and not long after it came the "Polyolbion" of Drayton and the "Civil Wars" of Daniel. This was the period of the saurians in English poetry, interminable poems, book after book and canto after canto, like far-stretching _vertebrae_, that at first sight would seem to have rendered earth unfit for the habitation of man. They most of them sleep well now, as once they made their readers sleep, and their huge remains lie embedded in the deep morasses of Chambers and Anderson. We wonder at the length of face and general atrabilious look that mark the portraits of the men of that generation, but it is no marvel when even their relaxations were such downright hard work. Fathers when their day on earth was up must have folded down the leaf and left the task to be finished by their sons,--a dreary inheritance. Yet both Drayton and Daniel are fine poets, though both of them in their most elaborate works made shipwreck of their genius on the shoal of a bad subject. Neither of them could make poetry coalesce with gazetteering or chronicle-making. It was like trying to put a declaration of love into the forms of a declaration in trover. The "Polyolbion" is nothing less than a versified gazetteer of England and Wales,--fortunately Scotland was not yet annexed, or the poem would have been even longer, and already it is the plesiosaurus of verse. Mountains, rivers, and even marshes are personified, to narrate historical episodes, or to give us geographical lectures. There are two fine verses in the seventh book, where, speaking of the cutting down some noble woods, he says,-- "Their trunks like aged folk now bare and naked stand, As for revenge to heaven each held a withered hand"; and there is a passage about the sea in the twentieth book that comes near being fine; but the far greater part is mere joiner-work. Consider the life of man, that we flee away as a shadow, that our days are as a post, and then think whether we can afford to honor such a draft upon our time as is implied in these thirty books all in alexandrines! Even the laborious Selden, who wrote annotations on it, sometimes more entertaining than the text, gave out at the end of the eighteenth book. Yet Drayton could write well, and had an agreeable lightsomeness of fancy, as his "Nymphidia" proves. His poem "To the Cambro-Britons on their Harp" is full of vigor; it runs, it leaps, clashing its verses like swords upon bucklers, and moves the pulse to a charge. Daniel was in all respects a man of finer mould. He did indeed refine our tongue, and deserved the praise his contemporaries concur in giving him of being "well-languaged."[267] Writing two hundred and fifty years ago, he stands in no need of a glossary, and I have noted scarce a dozen words, and not more turns of phrase, in his works, that have become obsolete. This certainly indicates both remarkable taste and equally remarkable judgment. There is an equable dignity in his thought and sentiment such as we rarely meet. His best poems always remind me of a table-land, where, because all is so level, we are apt to forget on how lofty a plane we are standing. I think his "Musophilus" the best poem of its kind in the language. The reflections are natural, the expression condensed, the thought weighty, and the language worthy of it. But he also wasted himself on an historical poem, in which the characters were incapable of that remoteness from ordinary associations which is essential to the ideal. Not that we can escape into the ideal by _merely_ emigrating into the past or the unfamiliar. As in the German legend the little black Kobold of prose that haunts us in the present will seat himself on the first load of furniture when we undertake our flitting, if the magician be not there to exorcise him. No man can jump off his own shadow, nor, for that matter, off his own age, and it is very likely that Daniel had only the thinking and languaging parts of a poet's outfit, without the higher creative gift which alone can endow his conceptions with enduring life and with an interest which transcends the parish limits of his generation. In the prologue to his "Masque at Court" he has unconsciously defined his own poetry:-- "Wherein no wild, no rude, no antic sport, But tender passions, motions soft and grave, The still spectator must expect to have." And indeed his verse does not snatch you away from ordinary associations and hurry you along with it as is the wont of the higher kinds of poetry, but leaves you, as it were, upon the bank watching the peaceful current and lulled by its somewhat monotonous murmur. His best-known poem, blunderingly misprinted in all the collections, is that addressed to the Countess of Cumberland. It is an amplification of Horace's _Integer Vitae_, and when we compare it with the original we miss the point, the compactness, and above all the urbane tone of the original. It is very fine English, but it is the English of diplomacy somehow, and is never downright this or that, but always has the honor to be so or so, with sentiments of the highest consideration. Yet the praise of _well-languaged_, since it implies that good writing then as now demanded choice and forethought, is not without interest for those who would classify the elements of a style that will wear and hold its colors well. His diction, if wanting in the more hardy evidences of muscle, has a suppleness and spring that give proof of training and endurance. His "Defence of Rhyme," written in prose (a more difficult test than verse), has a passionate eloquence that reminds one of Burke, and is more light-armed and modern than the prose of Milton fifty years later. For us Occidentals he has a kindly prophetic word:-- "And who in time knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue? to what strange shores The gain of our best glory may be sent To enrich unknowing nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident May come refined with accents that are ours?" During the period when Spenser was getting his artistic training a great change was going on in our mother-tongue, and the language of literature was disengaging itself more and more from that of ordinary talk. The poets of Italy, Spain, and France began to rain influence and to modify and refine not only style but vocabulary. Men were discovering new worlds in more senses than one, and the visionary finger of expectation still pointed forward. There was, as we learn from contemporary pamphlets, very much the same demand for a national literature that we have heard in America. This demand was nobly answered in the next generation. But no man contributed so much to the transformation of style and language as Spenser; for not only did he deliberately endeavor at reform, but by the charm of his diction, the novel harmonies of his verse, his ideal method of treatment, and the splendor of his fancy, he made the new manner popular and fruitful. We can trace in Spenser's poems the gradual growth of his taste through experiment and failure to that assured self-confidence which indicates that he had at length found out the true bent of his genius,--that happiest of discoveries (and not so easy as it might seem) which puts a man in undisturbed possession of his own individuality. Before his time the boundary between poetry and prose had not been clearly defined. His great merit lies not only in the ideal treatment with which he glorified common things and gilded them with a ray of enthusiasm, but far more in the ideal point of view which he first revealed to his countrymen. He at first sought for that remoteness, which is implied in an escape from the realism of daily life, in the pastoral,--a kind of writing which, oddly enough, from its original intention as a protest in favor of naturalness, and of human as opposed to heroic sentiments, had degenerated into the most artificial of abstractions. But he was soon convinced of his error, and was not long in choosing between an unreality which pretended to be real and those everlasting realities of the mind which seem unreal only because they lie beyond the horizon of the every-day world and become visible only when the mirage of fantasy lifts them up and hangs them in an ideal atmosphere. As in the old fairy-tales, the task which the age imposes on its poet is to weave its straw into a golden tissue; and when every device has failed, in comes the witch Imagination, and with a touch the miracle is achieved, simple as miracles always are after they are wrought. Spenser, like Chaucer a Londoner, was born in 1553.[268] Nothing is known of his parents, except that the name of his mother was Elizabeth; but he was of gentle birth, as he more than once informs us, with the natural satisfaction of a poor man of genius at a time when the business talent of the middle class was opening to it the door of prosperous preferment. In 1569 he was entered as a sizar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and in due course took his bachelor's degree in 1573, and his master's in 1576. He is supposed, on insufficient grounds, as it appears to me, to have met with some disgust or disappointment during his residence at the University.[269] Between 1576 and 1578 Spenser seems to have been with some of his kinsfolk "in the North" It was during this interval that he conceived his fruitless passion for the Rosalinde, whose jilting him for another shepherd, whom he calls Menalcas, is somewhat perfunctorily bemoaned in his pastorals[270] Before the publication of his "Shepherd's Calendar" in 1579, he had made the acquaintance of Sir Philip Sidney, and was domiciled with him for a time at Penshurst, whether as guest or literary dependant is uncertain. In October, 1579, he is in the household of the Earl of Leicester. In July, 1580 he accompanied Lord Grey de Wilton to Ireland as Secretary, and in that country he spent the rest of his life, with occasional flying visits to England to publish poems or in search of preferment. His residence in that country has been compared to that of Ovid in Pontus. And, no doubt, there were certain outward points of likeness. The Irishry by whom he was surrounded were to the full as savage, as hostile, and as tenacious of their ancestral habitudes as the Scythians[271] who made Tomi a prison, and the descendants of the earlier English settlers had degenerated as much as the Mix-Hellenes who disgusted the Latin poet. Spenser himself looked on his life in Ireland as a banishment. In his "Colm Clout's come Home again" he tells us that Sir Walter Raleigh, who visited him in 1589, and heard what was then finished of the "Faery Queen,"-- "'Gan to cast great liking to my lore And great disliking to my luckless lot, That banisht had myself, like wight forlore, Into that waste, where I was quite forgot The which to leave thenceforth he counselled me, Unmeet for man in whom was aught regardful, And wend with him his Cynthia to see, Whose grace was great and bounty most rewardful." But Spenser was already living at Kilcolman Castle (which, with 3,028 acres of land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond, was confirmed to him by grant two years later), amid scenery at once placid and noble, whose varied charm he felt profoundly. He could not complain, with Ovid,-- "Non liber hie ullus, non qui mihi commodet aurem," for he was within reach of a cultivated society, which gave him the stimulus of hearty admiration both as poet and scholar. Above all, he was fortunate in a seclusion that prompted study and deepened meditation, while it enabled him to converse with his genius disengaged from those worldly influences which would have disenchanted it of its mystic enthusiasm, if they did not muddle it ingloriously away. Surely this sequestered nest was more congenial to the brooding of those ethereal visions of the "Faery Queen" and to giving his "soul a loose" than "The smoke, the wealth, and noise of Rome, And all the busy pageantry That wise men scorn and fools adore." Yet he longed for London, if not with the homesickness of Bussy-Rabutin in exile from the Parisian sun, yet enough to make him joyfully accompany Raleigh thither in the early winter of 1589, carrying with him the first three books of the great poem begun ten years before. Horace's _nonum prematur in annum_ had been more than complied with, and the success was answerable to the well-seasoned material and conscientious faithfulness of the work. But Spenser did not stay long in London to enjoy his fame. Seen close at hand, with its jealousies, intrigues, and selfish basenesses, the court had lost the enchantment lent by the distance of Kilcolman. A nature so prone to ideal contemplation as Spenser's would be profoundly shocked by seeing too closely the ignoble springs of contemporaneous policy, and learning by what paltry personal motives the noble opportunities of the world are at any given moment endangered. It is a sad discovery that history is so mainly made by ignoble men. "Vide questo globo Tal ch'ei sorrise del suo vil sembiante." In his "Colin Clout," written just after his return to Ireland, he speaks of the Court in a tone of contemptuous bitterness, in which, as it seems to me, there is more of the sorrow of disillusion than of the gall of personal disappointment. He speaks, so he tells us,-- "To warn young shepherds' wandering wit Which, through report of that life's painted bliss, Abandon quiet home to seek for it And leave their lambs to loss misled amiss; For, sooth to say, it is no sort of life For shepherd fit to live in that same place, Where each one seeks with malice and with strife To thrust down other into foul disgrace Himself to raise; and he doth soonest rise That best can handle his deceitful wit In subtle shifts.... To which him needs a guileful hollow heart Masked with fair dissembling courtesy, A filëd tongue furnisht with terms of art, No art of school, but courtiers' schoolery. For arts of school have there small countenance, Counted but toys to busy idle brains, And there professors find small maintenance, But to be instruments of others' gains, Nor is there place for any gentle wit Unless to please it can itself apply. * * * * * "Even such is all their vaunted vanity, Naught else but smoke that passeth soon away. * * * * * "So they themselves for praise of fools do sell, And all their wealth for painting on a wall. * * * * * "Whiles single Truth and simple Honesty Do wander up and down despised of all."[272] And again in his "Mother Hubberd's Tale," in the most pithy and masculine verses he ever wrote:-- "Most miserable man, whom wicked Fate Hath brought to Court to sue for _Had-I-wist_ That few have found and many one hath mist! Full httle knowest thou that hast not tried What hell it is in suing long to bide; To lose good days that might be better spent, To waste long nights in pensive discontent, To speed to day, to be put back to-morrow, To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow, To have thy prince's grace yet want her Peers', To have thy asking yet wait many years, To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares, To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs, To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, To spend, to give, to want, to be undone. * * * * * "Whoever leaves sweet home, where mean estate In safe assurance, without strife or hate, Finds all things needful for contentment meek, And will to court for shadows vain to seek, * * * * * "That curse God send unto mine enemy!"[273] When Spenser had once got safely back to the secure retreat and serene companionship of his great poem, with what profound and pathetic exultation must he have recalled the verses of Dante!-- "Chi dietro a jura, e chi ad aforismi Sen giva, e chi seguendo sacerdozio, E chi regnar per forza e per sofismi, E chi rubare, e chi civil negozio, Chi nei diletti della carne involto S' affaticava, e chi si dava all' ozio, Quando da tutte queste cose sciolto, Con Beatrice m' era suso in cielo Cotanto gloriosamente accolto."[274] What Spenser says of the indifference of the court to learning and literature is the more remarkable because he himself was by no means an unsuccessful suitor. Queen Elizabeth bestowed on him a pension of fifty pounds, and shortly after he received the grant of lands already mentioned. It is said, indeed, that Lord Burleigh in some way hindered the advancement of the poet, who more than once directly alludes to him either in reproach or remonstrance. In "The Ruins of Time," after speaking of the death of Walsingham, "Since whose decease learning lies unregarded, And men of armes do wander unrewarded," he gives the following reason for their neglect.-- "For he that now wields all things at his will, Scorns th' one and th' other in his deeper skill. O grief of griefs! O gall of all good hearts, To see that virtue should despisëd be Of him that first was raised for virtuous parts, And now, broad spreading like an aged tree, Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be: O let the man of whom the Muse is scorned Nor live nor dead be of the Muse adorned!" And in the introduction to the fourth book of the "Faery Queen," he says again:-- "The rugged forehead that with grave foresight Wields kingdoms' causes and affairs of state, My looser rhymes, I wot, doth sharply wite For praising Love, as I have done of late,-- * * * * * "By which frail youth is oft to folly led Through false allurement of that pleasing bait, That better were in virtues discipled Than with vain poems' weeds to have their fancies fed. "Such ones ill judge of love that cannot love Nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame; Forthy they ought not thing unknown reprove, Ne natural affection faultless blame For fault of few that have abused the same: For it of honor and all virtue is The root, and brings forth glorious flowers of fame That crown true lovers with immortal bliss, The meed of them that love and do not live amiss." If Lord Burleigh could not relish such a dish of nightingales' tongues as the "Faery Queen," he is very much more to be pitied than Spenser. The sensitive purity of the poet might indeed well be wounded when a poem in which he proposed to himself "to discourse at large" of "the ethick part of Moral Philosophy"[275] could be so misinterpreted. But Spenser speaks in the same strain and without any other than a general application in his "Tears of the Muses," and his friend Sidney undertakes the defence of poesy because it was undervalued. But undervalued by whom? By the only persons about whom he knew or cared anything, those whom we should now call Society and who were then called the Court. The inference I would draw is that, among the causes which contributed to the marvellous efflorescence of genius in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the influence of direct patronage from above is to be reckoned at almost nothing.[276] Then, as when the same phenomenon has happened elsewhere, there must have been a sympathetic public. Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of countless generations ([Greek: oiae per phullon geneae]), and not from any top-dressing capriciously scattered over the surface at some master's bidding.[277] England had long been growing more truly insular in language and political ideas when the Reformation came to precipitate her national consciousness by secluding her more completely from the rest of Europe. Hitherto there had been Englishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly hating foreigners, and reigned over by kings of whom they were proud or not as the case might be, but there was no England as a separate entity from the sovereign who embodied it for the time being.[278] But now an English people began to be dimly aware of itself. Their having got a religion to themselves must have intensified them much as the having a god of their own did the Jews. The exhilaration of relief after the long tension of anxiety, when the Spanish Armada was overwhelmed like the hosts of Pharaoh, while it confirmed their assurance of a provincial deity, must also have been like sunshine to bring into flower all that there was of imaginative or sentimental in the English nature, already just in the first flush of its spring. ("The yongë sonne Had in _the Bull_ half of his course yronne.") And just at this moment of blossoming every breeze was dusty with the golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and Italy. If Keats could say, when he first opened Chapman's Homer,-- "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise," if Keats could say this, whose mind had been unconsciously fed with the results of this culture,--results that permeated all thought, all literature, and all talk,--fancy what must have been the awakening shock and impulse communicated to men's brains by the revelation of this new world of thought and fancy, an unveiling gradual yet sudden, like that of a great organ, which discovered to them what a wondrous instrument was in the soul of man with its epic and lyric stops, its deep thunders of tragedy, and its passionate _vox humana!_ It might almost seem as if Shakespeare had typified all this in Miranda, when she cries out at first sight of the king and his courtiers, "O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world That hath such people in't!" The civil wars of the Roses had been a barren period in English literature, because they had been merely dynastic squabbles, in which no great principles were involved which could shake all minds with controversy and heat them to intense conviction. A conflict of opposing ambitions wears out the moral no less than the material forces of a people, but the ferment of hostile ideas and convictions may realize resources of character which before were only potential, may transform a merely gregarious multitude into a nation proud in its strength, sensible of the dignity and duty which strength involves, and groping after a common ideal. Some such transformation had been wrought or was going on in England. For the first time a distinct image of her was disengaging itself from the tangled blur of tradition and association in the minds of her children, and it was now only that her great poet could speak exultingly to an audience that would understand him with a passionate sympathy, of "This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in a silver sea, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, England, bound in with the triumphant sea!" Such a period can hardly recur again, but something like it, something pointing back to similar producing causes, is observable in the revival of English imaginative literature at the close of the last and in the early years of the present century. Again, after long fermentation, there was a war of principles, again the national consciousness was heightened and stung by a danger to the national existence, and again there was a crop of great poets and heroic men. Spenser once more visited England, bringing with him three more books of the "Faery Queen," in 1595. He is supposed to have remained there during the two following years.[279] In 1594 he had been married to the lady celebrated in his somewhat artificial _amoretti_. By her he had four children. He was now at the height of his felicity; by universal acclaim the first poet of his age, and the one obstacle to his material advancement (if obstacle it was) had been put out of the way by the death of Lord Burleigh, August, 1598. In the next month he was recommended in a letter from Queen Elizabeth for the shrievalty of the county of Cork. But alas for Polycrates! In October the wild kerns and gallowglasses rose in no mood for sparing the house of Pindarus. They sacked and burned his castle, from which he with his wife and children barely escaped.[280] He sought shelter in London and died there on the 16th January, 1599, at a tavern in King Street, Westminster. He was buried in the neighboring Abbey next to Chaucer, at the cost of the Earl of Essex, poets bearing his pall and casting verses into his grave. He died poor, but not in want. On the whole, his life may be reckoned a happy one, as in the main the lives of the great poets must have commonly been. If they feel more passionately the pang of the moment, so also the compensations are incalculable, and not the least of them this very capacity of passionate emotion. The real good fortune is to be measured, not by more or less of outward prosperity, but by the opportunity given for the development and free play of the genius. It should be remembered that the power of expression which exaggerates their griefs is also no inconsiderable consolation for them. We should measure what Spenser says of his worldly disappointments by the bitterness of the unavailing tears be shed for Rosalind. A careful analysis of these leaves no perceptible residuum of salt, and we are tempted to believe that the passion itself was not much more real than the pastoral accessories of pipe and crook. I very much doubt whether Spenser ever felt more than one profound passion in his life, and that luckily was for his "Faery Queen." He was fortunate in the friendship of the best men and women of his time, in the seclusion which made him free of the still better society of the past, in the loving recognition of his countrymen. All that we know of him is amiable and of good report. He was faithful to the friendships of his youth, pure in his loves, unspotted in his life. Above all, the ideal with him was not a thing apart and unattainable, but the sweetener and ennobler of the street and the fireside. There are two ways of measuring a poet, either by an absolute aesthetic standard, or relatively to his position in the literary history of his country and the conditions of his generation. Both should be borne in mind as coefficients in a perfectly fair judgment. If his positive merit is to be settled irrevocably by the former, yet an intelligent criticism will find its advantage not only in considering what he was, but what, under the given circumstances, it was possible for him to be. The fact that the great poem of Spenser was inspired by the Orlando of Ariosto, and written in avowed emulation of it, and that the poet almost always needs to have his fancy set agoing by the hint of some predecessor, must not lead us to overlook his manifest claim to originality. It is not what a poet takes, but what he makes out of what he has taken, that shows what native force is in him. Above all, did his mind dwell complacently in those forms and fashions which in their very birth are already obsolescent, or was it instinctively drawn to those qualities which are permanent in language and whatever is wrought in it? There is much in Spenser that is contemporary and evanescent; but the substance of him is durable, and his work was the deliberate result of intelligent purpose and ample culture. The publication of his "Shepherd's Calendar" in 1579 (though the poem itself be of little interest) is one of the epochs in our literature. Spenser had at least the originality to see clearly and to feel keenly that it was essential to bring poetry back again to some kind of understanding with nature. His immediate predecessors seem to have conceived of it as a kind of bird of paradise, born to float somewhere between heaven and earth, with no very well defined relation to either. It is true that the nearest approach they were able to make to this airy ideal was a shuttlecock, winged with a bright plume or so from Italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and feathers, which they bandied back and forth from one stanza to another, with the useful ambition of _keeping it up_ as long as they could. To my mind the old comedy of "Gammer Gurton's Needle" is worth the whole of them. It may be coarse, earthy, but in reading it one feels that he is at least a man among men, and not a humbug among humbugs. The form of Spenser's "Shepherd's Calendar," it is true, is artificial, absurdly so if you look at it merely from the outside,--not, perhaps, the wisest way to look at anything, unless it be a jail or a volume of the "Congressional Globe,"--but the spirit of it is fresh and original We have at last got over the superstition that shepherds and shepherdesses are any wiser or simpler than other people. We know that wisdom can be on only by wide commerce with men and books, and that simplicity, whether of manners or style, is the crowning result of the highest culture. But the pastorals of Spenser were very different things, different both in the moving spirit and the resultant form from the later ones of Browne or the "Piscatory Eclogues" of Phinehas Fletcher. And why? Browne and Fletcher wrote because Spenser had written, but Spenser wrote from a strong inward impulse--an instinct it might be called--to escape at all risks into the fresh air from that horrible atmosphere into which rhymer after rhymer had been pumping carbonic-acid gas with the full force of his lungs, and in which all sincerity was on the edge of suffocation. His longing for something truer and better was as honest as that which led Tacitus so long before to idealize the Germans, and Rousseau so long after to make an angel of the savage. Spenser himself supremely overlooks the whole chasm between himself and Chaucer, as Dante between himself and Virgil. He called Chaucer master, as Milton was afterwards to call _him_. And, even while he chose the most artificial of all forms, his aim--that of getting back to nature and life--was conscious, I have no doubt, to himself, and must be obvious to whoever reads with anything but the ends of his fingers. It is true that Sannazzaro had brought the pastoral into fashion again, and that two of Spenser's are little more than translations from Marot; but for manner he instinctively turned back to Chaucer, the first and then only great English poet. He has given common instead of classic names to his personages, for characters they can hardly be called. Above all, he has gone to the provincial dialects for words wherewith to enlarge and freshen his poetical vocabulary.[281] I look upon the "Shepherd's Calendar" as being no less a conscious and deliberate attempt at reform than Thomson's "Seasons" were in the topics, and Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads" in the language of poetry. But the great merit of these pastorals was not so much in their matter as their manner. They show a sense of style in its larger meaning hitherto displayed by no English poet since Chaucer. Surrey had brought back from Italy a certain inkling of it, so far as it is contained in decorum. But here was a new language, a choice and arrangement of words, a variety, elasticity, and harmony of verse most grateful to the ears of men. If not passion, there was fervor, which was perhaps as near it as the somewhat stately movement of Spenser's mind would allow him to come. Sidney had tried many experiments in versification, which are curious and interesting, especially his attempts to naturalize the _sliding_ rhymes of Sannazzaro in English. But there is everywhere the uncertainty of a 'prentice hand. Spenser shows himself already a master, at least in verse, and we can trace the studies of Milton, a yet greater master, in the "Shepherd's Calendar" as well as in the "Faery Queen." We have seen that Spenser, under the misleading influence of Sidney[282] and Harvey, tried his hand at English hexameters. But his great glory is that he taught his own language to sing and move to measures harmonious and noble. Chaucer had done much to vocalize it, as I have tried to show elsewhere,[283] but Spenser was to prove "That no tongue hath the muse's utterance heired For verse, and that sweet music to the ear Struck out of rhyme, so naturally as this." The "Shepherd's Calendar" contains perhaps the most picturesquely imaginative verse which Spenser has written. It is in the eclogue for February, where he tells us of the "Faded oak Whose body is sere, whose branches broke, Whose naked arms stretch unto the fire." It is one of those verses that Joseph Warton would have liked in secret, that Dr. Johnson would have proved to be untranslatable into reasonable prose, and which the imagination welcomes at once without caring whether it be exactly conformable to _barbara_ or _celarent_. Another pretty verse in the same eclogue, "But gently took that ungently came," pleased Coleridge so greatly that he thought it was his own. But in general it is not so much the sentiments and images that are new as the modulation of the verses in which they float. The cold obstruction of two centuries' thaws, and the stream of speech, once more let loose, seeks out its old windings, or overflows musically in unpractised channels. The service which Spenser did to our literature by this exquisite sense of harmony is incalculable. His fine ear, abhorrent of barbarous dissonance, his dainty tongue that loves to prolong the relish of a musical phrase, made possible the transition from the cast-iron stiffness of "Ferrex and Porrex" to the Damascus pliancy of Fletcher and Shakespeare. It was he that "Taught the dumb on high to sing, And heavy ignorance aloft to fly That added feathers to the learned's wing, And gave to grace a double majesty." I do not mean that in the "Shepherd's Calendar" he had already achieved that transmutation of language and metre by which he was afterwards to endow English verse with the most varied and majestic of stanzas, in which the droning old alexandrine, awakened for the first time to a feeling of the poetry that was in him, was to wonder, like M. Jourdain, that he had been talking prose all his life,--but already he gave clear indications of the tendency and premonitions of the power which were to carry it forward to ultimate perfection. A harmony and alacrity of language like this were unexampled in English verse:-- "Ye dainty nymphs, that in this blessed brook Do bathe your breast, Forsake your watery bowers and hither look At my request.... And eke you virgins that on Parnass dwell, Whence floweth Helicon, the learned well, Help me to blaze Her worthy praise, Which in her sex doth all excel." Here we have the natural gait of the measure, somewhat formal and slow, as befits an invocation; and now mark how the same feet shall be made to quicken their pace at the bidding of the tune:-- "Bring here the pink and purple columbine, With gilliflowers; Bring coronations and sops in wine, Worne of paramours; Strow me the ground with daffadowndillies, And cowslips and kingcúps and loved lilies; The pretty paunce And the chevisance Shall match with the fair flowërdelice."[284] The argument prefixed by E.K. to the tenth Eclogue has a special interest for us as showing how high a conception Spenser had of poetry and the poet's office. By Cuddy he evidently means himself, though choosing out of modesty another name instead of the familiar Colin. "In Cuddy is set forth the perfect pattern of a Poet, which finding no maintenance of his state and studies, complaineth of the contempt of Poetry and the causes thereof, specially having been in all ages, and even amongst the most barbarous, always of singular account and honor, _and being indeed so worthy and commendable an art, or rather no art, but a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to be gotten by labor and learning, but adorned with both, and poured into the wit by a certain Enthousiasmos and celestial inspiration_, as the author hereof elsewhere at large discourseth in his book called THE ENGLISH POET, which book being lately come into my hands, I mind also by God's grace, upon further advisement, to publish." E. K., whoever he was, never carried out his intention, and the book is no doubt lost; a loss to be borne with less equanimity than that of Cicero's treatise _De Gloria_, once possessed by Petrarch. The passage I have italicized is most likely an extract, and reminds one of the long-breathed periods of Milton. Drummond of Hawthornden tells us, "he [Ben Jonson] hath by heart some verses of Spenser's 'Calendar,' about wine, between Coline and Percye" (Cuddie and Piers).[285] These verses are in this eclogue, and are worth quoting both as having the approval of dear old Ben, the best critic of the day, and because they are a good sample of Spenser's earlier verse:-- "Thou kenst not, Percie, how the rhyme should rage; O, if my temples were distained with wine, And girt in garlands of wild ivy-twine, How I could rear the Muse on stately stage And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine With quaint Bellona in her equipage!" In this eclogue he gives hints of that spacious style which was to distinguish him, and which, like his own Fame, "With golden wings aloft doth fly Above the reach of ruinous decay, And with brave plumes doth beat the azure sky, Admired of base-born men from far away."[286] He was letting his wings grow, as Milton said, and foreboding the "Faery Queen":-- "Lift thyself up out of the lowly dust * * * * * "To 'doubted knights whose woundless armor rusts And helms unbruised waxen daily brown: There may thy Muse display her fluttering wing, And stretch herself at large from East to West." Verses like these, especially the last (which Dryden would have liked), were such as English ears had not yet heard, and curiously prophetic of the maturer man. The language and verse of Spenser at his best have an ideal lift in them, and there is scarce any of our poets who can so hardly help being poetical. It was this instantly felt if not easily definable charm that forthwith won for Spenser his never-disputed rank as the chief English poet of that age, and gave him a popularity which, during his life and in the following generation, was, in its select quality, without a competitor. It may be thought that I lay too much stress on this single attribute of diction. But apart from its importance in his case as showing their way to the poets who were just then learning the accidence of their art and leaving them a material to work in already mellowed to their hands, it should be remembered that it is subtle perfection of phrase and that happy coalescence of music and meaning, where each reinforces the other, that define a man as poet and make all ears converts and partisans. Spenser was an epicure in language. He loved "seld-seen costly" words perhaps too well, and did not always distinguish between mere strangeness and that novelty which is so agreeable as to cheat us with some charm of seeming association. He had not the concentrated power which can sometimes pack infinite riches in the little room of a single epithet, for his genius is rather for dilatation than compression.[287] But he was, with the exception of Milton and possibly Gray, the most learned of our poets. His familiarity with ancient and modern literature was easy and intimate, and as he perfected himself in his art, he caught the grand manner and high bred ways of the society he frequented. But even to the last he did not quite shake off the blunt rusticity of phrase that was habitual with the generation that preceded him. In the fifth book of the "Faery Queen," where he is describing the passion of Britomart at the supposed infidelity of Arthegall, he descends to a Teniers-like realism,[288]--he whose verses generally remind us of the dancing Hours of Guido, where we catch but a glimpse of the real earth and that far away beneath. But his habitual style is that of gracious loftiness and refined luxury. He shows his mature hand in the "Muiopotmos," the most airily fanciful of his poems, a marvel for delicate conception and treatment, whose breezy verse seems to float between a blue sky and golden earth in imperishable sunshine. No other English poet has found the variety and compass which enlivened the octave stanza under his sensitive touch. It can hardly be doubted that in Clarion the butterfly he has symbolized himself, and surely never was the poetic temperament so picturesquely exemplified:-- "Over the fields, in his frank lustiness, And all the champain o'er, he soared light, And all the country wide he did possess, Feeding upon their pleasures bounteously, That none gainsaid and none did him envy. "The woods, the rivers, and the meadows green, With his air-cutting wings he measured wide, Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen, Nor the rank grassy fens' delights untried; But none of these, however sweet they been, Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide; His choiceful sense with every change doth flit; No common things may please a wavering wit. "To the gay gardens his unstaid desire Him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights; There lavish Nature, in her best attire, Pours forth sweet odors and alluring sights, And Art, with her contending doth aspire, To excel the natural with made delights; And all that fair or pleasant may be found, In riotous excess doth there abound. "There he arriving, round about doth flie, From bed to bed, from one to the other border, And takes survey with curious busy eye, Of every flower and herb there set in order, Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly, Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder, Ne with his feet their silken leaves displace, But pastures on the pleasures of each place. "And evermore with most variety And change of sweetness (for all change is sweet) He casts his glutton sense to satisfy, Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet, Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie, Now in the same bathing his tender feet; And then he percheth on some branch thereby To weather him and his moist wings to dry. "And then again he turneth to his play, To spoil [plunder] the pleasures of that paradise; The wholesome sage, the lavender still gray, Rank-smelling rue, and cummin good for eyes, The roses reigning in the pride of May, Sharp hyssop good for green wounds' remedies Fair marigolds, and bees-alluring thyme, Sweet marjoram and daisies decking prime, "Cool violets, and orpine growing still, Embathed balm, and cheerful galingale, Fresh costmary and breathful camomill, Dull poppy and drink-quickening setuale, Vein-healing vervain and head-purging dill, Sound savory, and basil hearty-hale, Fat coleworts and comforting perseline, Cold lettuce, and refreshing rosemarine.[289] "And whatso else of virtue good or ill, Grew in this garden, fetched from far away, Of every one he takes and tastes at will, And on their pleasures greedily doth prey; Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill, In the warm sun he doth himself embay, And there him rests in riotous suffisance Of all his gladfulness and kingly joyance. "What more felicity can fall to creature Than to enjoy delight with liberty, And to be lord of all the works of nature? To reign in the air from earth to highest sky, To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature, To take whatever thing doth please the eye? Who rests not pleased with such happiness, Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness." The "Muiopotmos" pleases us all the more that it vibrates in us a string of classical association by adding an episode to Ovid's story of Arachne. "Talking the other day with a friend (the late Mr. Keats) about Dante, he observed that whenever so great a poet told us anything in addition or continuation of an ancient story, he had a right to be regarded as classical authority. For instance, said he, when he tells us of that characteristic death of Ulysses, ... we ought to receive the information as authentic, and be glad that we have more news of Ulysses than we looked for."[290] We can hardly doubt that Ovid would have been glad to admit this exquisitely fantastic illumination into his margin. No German analyzer of aesthetics has given us so convincing a definition of the artistic nature as these radiant verses. "To reign in the air" was certainly Spenser's function. And yet the commentators, who seem never willing to let their poet be a poet pure and simple, though, had he not been so, they would have lost their only hold upon life, try to make out from his "Mother Hubberd's Tale" that he might have been a very sensible matter of-fact man if he would. For my own part, I am quite willing to confess that I like him none the worse for being _un_practical, and that my reading has convinced me that being too poetical is the rarest fault of poets. Practical men are not so scarce, one would think, and I am not sure that the tree was a gainer when the hamadryad flitted and left it nothing but ship-timber. Such men as Spenser are not sent into the world to be part of its motive power. The blind old engine would not know the difference though we got up its steam with attar of roses, nor make one revolution more to the minute for it. What practical man ever left such an heirloom to his countrymen as the "Faery Queen"? Undoubtedly Spenser wished to be useful and in the highest vocation of all, that of teacher, and Milton calls him "our sage and serious poet, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." And good Dr. Henry More was of the same mind. I fear he makes his vices so beautiful now and then that we should not be very much afraid of them if we chanced to meet them; for he could not escape from his genius, which, if it led him as philosopher to the abstract contemplation of the beautiful, left him as poet open to every impression of sensuous delight. When he wrote the "Shepherd's Calendar" he was certainly a Puritan, and probably so by conviction rather than from any social influences or thought of personal interests. There is a verse, it is true, in the second of the two detached cantos of "Mutability," "Like that ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace," which is supposed to glance at the straiter religionists, and from which it has been inferred that he drew away from them as he grew older. It is very likely that years and widened experience of men may have produced in him their natural result of tolerant wisdom which revolts at the hasty destructiveness of inconsiderate zeal. But with the more generous side of Puritanism I think he sympathized to the last. His rebukes of clerical worldliness are in the Puritan tone, and as severe a one as any is in "Mother Hubberd's Tale," published in 1591.[291] There is an iconoclastic relish in his account of Sir Guyon's demolishing the Bower of Bliss that makes us think he would not have regretted the plundered abbeys as perhaps Shakespeare did when he speaks of the winter woods as "bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang";-- "But all those pleasant bowers and palace brave Guyon broke down with rigor pitiless, Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save Them from the tempest of his wrathfulness, But that their bliss he turned to balefulness; Their groves he felled, their gardens did deface, Their arbors spoil, their cabinets suppress, Their banquet-houses burn, their buildings rase, And of the fairest late now made the foulest place." But whatever may have been Spenser's religious opinions (which do not nearly concern us here), the bent of his mind was toward a Platonic mysticism, a supramundane sphere where it could shape universal forms out of the primal elements of things, instead of being forced to put up with their fortuitous combinations in the unwilling material of mortal clay. He who, when his singing robes were on, could never be tempted nearer to the real world than under some subterfuge of pastoral or allegory, expatiates joyously in this untrammelled ether:-- "Lifting himself out of the lowly dust On golden plumes up to the purest sky." Nowhere does his genius soar and sing with such continuous aspiration, nowhere is his phrase so decorously stately, though rising to an enthusiasm which reaches intensity while it stops short of vehemence, as in his Hymns to Love and Beauty, especially the latter. There is an exulting spurn of earth in it, as of a soul just loosed from its cage. I shall make no extracts from it, for it is one of those intimately coherent and transcendentally logical poems that "moveth altogether if it move at all," the breaking off a fragment from which would maim it as it would a perfect group of crystals. Whatever there is of sentiment and passion is for the most part purely disembodied and without sex, like that of angels,--a kind of poetry which has of late gone out of fashion, whether to our gain or not may be questioned. Perhaps one may venture to hint that the animal instincts are those that stand in least need of stimulation. Spenser's notions of love were so nobly pure, so far from those of our common ancestor who could hang by his tail, as not to disqualify him for achieving the quest of the Holy Grail, and accordingly it is not uninstructive to remember that he had drunk, among others, at French sources not yet deboshed with _absinthe_.[292] Yet, with a purity like that of thrice-bolted snow, he had none of its coldness. He is, of all our poets, the most truly sensuous, using the word as Milton probably meant it when he said that poetry should be "simple, sensuous, and passionate." A poet is innocently sensuous when his mind permeates and illumines his senses; when they, on the other hand, muddy the mind, he becomes sensual. Every one of Spenser's senses was as exquisitely alive to the impressions of material, as every organ of his soul was to those of spiritual beauty. Accordingly, if he painted the weeds of sensuality at all, he could not help making them "of glorious feature." It was this, it may be suspected, rather than his "praising love," that made Lord Burleigh shake his "rugged forehead." Spenser's gamut, indeed, is a wide one, ranging from a purely corporeal delight in "precious odors fetched from far away" upward to such refinement as "Upon her eyelids many graces sate Under the shadow of her even brows," where the eye shares its pleasure with the mind. He is court-painter in ordinary to each of the senses in turn, and idealizes these frail favorites of his majesty King Lusty Juventus, till they half believe themselves the innocent shepherdesses into which he travesties them.[293] In his great poem he had two objects in view: first the ephemeral one of pleasing the court, and then that of recommending himself to the permanent approval of his own and following ages as a poet, and especially as a moral poet. To meet the first demand, he lays the scene of his poem in contemporary England, and brings in all the leading personages of the day under the thin disguise of his knights and their squires and lady-loves. He says this expressly in the prologue to the second book:-- "Of Faery Land yet if he more inquire, By certain signs, here set in sundry place, He may it find; ... And thou, O fairest princess under sky, In this fair mirror mayst behold thy face And thine own realms in land of Faery." Many of his personages we can still identify, and all of them were once as easily recognizable as those of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. This, no doubt, added greatly to the immediate piquancy of the allusions. The interest they would excite may be inferred from the fact that King James, in 1596, wished to have the author prosecuted and punished for his indecent handling of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, under the name of Duessa.[294] To suit the wider application of his plan's other and more important half, Spenser made all his characters double their parts, and appear in his allegory as the impersonations of abstract moral qualities. When the cardinal and theological virtues tell Dante, "Noi siam qui ninfe e in ciel siamo stelle," the sweetness of the verse enables the fancy, by a slight gulp, to swallow without solution the problem of being in two places at the same time. But there is something fairly ludicrous in such a duality as that of Prince Arthur and the Earl of Leicester, Arthegall and Lord Grey, and Belphoebe and Elizabeth. "In this same interlude it doth befall That I, one Snout by name, present a wall." The reality seems to heighten the improbability, already hard enough to manage. But Spenser had fortunately almost as little sense of humor as Wordsworth,[295] or he could never have carried his poem on with enthusiastic good faith so far as he did. It is evident that to him the Land of Faery was an unreal world of picture and illusion, "The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil," in which he could shut himself up from the actual, with its shortcomings and failures. "The ways through which my weary steps I guide In this delightful land of Faery Are so exceeding spacious and wide, And sprinkled with such sweet variety Of all that pleasant is to ear and eye, That I, nigh ravisht with rare thoughts' delight, My tedious travail do forget thereby, And, when I 'gin to feel decay of might, It strength to me supplies, and cheers my dullëd spright." Spenser seems here to confess a little weariness; but the alacrity of his mind is so great that, even where his invention fails a little, we do not share his feeling nor suspect it, charmed as we are by the variety and sweep of his measure, the beauty or vigor of his similes, the musical felicity of his diction, and the mellow versatility of his pictures. In this last quality Ariosto, whose emulous pupil he was, is as Bologna to Venice in the comparison. That, when the personal allusions have lost their meaning and the allegory has become a burden, the book should continue to be read with delight, is proof enough, were any wanting, how full of life and light and the other-worldliness of poetry it must be. As a narrative it has, I think, every fault of which that kind of writing is capable. The characters are vague, and, even were they not, they drop out of the story so often and remain out of it so long, that we have forgotten who they are when we meet them again; the episodes hinder the advance of the action instead of relieving it with variety of incident or novelty of situation; the plot, if plot it may be called, "That shape has none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb," recalls drearily our ancient enemy, the Metrical Romance; while the fighting, which, in those old poems, was tediously sincere, is between shadow and shadow, where we know that neither can harm the other, though are tempted to wish he might. Hazlitt bids us not mind the allegory, and says that it won't bite us nor meddle with us if we do not meddle with it. But how if it bore us, which after all is the fatal question? The truth is that it is too often forced upon us against our will, as people were formerly driven to church till they began to look on a day of rest as a penal institution, and to transfer to the Scriptures that suspicion of defective inspiration which was awakened in them by the preaching. The true type of the allegory is the Odyssey, which we read without suspicion as pure poem, and then find a new pleasure in divining its double meaning, as if we somehow got a better bargain of our author than he meant to give us. But this complex feeling must not be so exacting as to prevent our lapsing into the old Arabian Nights simplicity of interest again. The moral of a poem should be suggested, as when in some mediaeval church we cast down our eyes to muse over a fresco of Giotto, and are reminded of the transitoriness of life by the mortuary tablets under our feet. The vast superiority of Bunyan over Spenser lies in the fact that we help make his allegory out of our own experience. Instead of striving to embody abstract passions and temptations, he has given us his own in all their pathetic simplicity. He is the Ulysses of his own prose-epic. This is the secret of his power and his charm, that, while the representation of what may happen to all men comes home to none of us in particular, the story of any one man's real experience finds its startling parallel in that of every one of us. The very homeliness of Bunyan's names and the everydayness of his scenery, too, put us off our guard, and we soon find ourselves on as easy a footing with his allegorical beings as we might be with Adam or Socrates in a dream. Indeed, he has prepared us for such incongruities by telling us at setting out that the story was of a dream. The long nights of Bedford jail had so intensified his imagination, and made the figures with which it peopled his solitude so real to him, that the creatures of his mind become _things_, as clear to the memory as if we had seen them. But Spenser's are too often mere names, with no bodies to back them, entered on the Muses' musterroll by the specious trick of personification. There is likewise, in Bunyan, a childlike simplicity and taking-for-granted which win our confidence. His Giant Despair,[296] for example, is by no means the Ossianic figure into which artists who mistake the vague for the sublime have misconceived it. He is the ogre of the fairy-tales, with his malicious wife; and he comes forth to us from those regions of early faith and wonder as something beforehand accepted by the imagination. These figures of Bunyan's are already familiar inmates of the mind, and, if there be any sublimity in him, it is the daring frankness of his verisimilitude. Spenser's giants are those of the later romances, except that grand figure with the balances in the second Canto of Book V., the most original of all his conceptions, yet no real giant, but a pure eidolon of the mind. As Bunyan rises not seldom to a natural poetry, so Spenser sinks now and then, through the fault of his topics, to unmistakable prose. Take his description of the House of Alma,[297] for instance:-- "The master cook was cald Concoctiön, A careful man, and full of comely guise; The kitchen-clerk, that hight Digestion, Did order all the achates in seemly wise." And so on through all the organs of the body. The author of Ecclesiastes understood these matters better in that last pathetic chapter of his, blunderingly translated as it apparently is. This, I admit, is the worst failure of Spenser in this kind; though, even here, when he gets on to the organs of the mind, the enchantments of his fancy and style come to the rescue and put us in good-humor again, hard as it is to conceive of armed knights entering the chamber of the mind, and talking with such visionary damsels as Ambition and Shamefastness. Nay, even in the most prosy parts, unless my partiality deceive me, there is an infantile confidence in the magical powers of Prosopopoeia which half beguiles us as of children who _play_ that everything is something else, and are quite satisfied with the transformation. The problem for Spenser was a double one: how to commend poetry at all to a generation which thought it effeminate trifling,[298] and how he, Master Edmund Spenser, of imagination all compact, could commend _his_ poetry to Master John Bull, the most practical of mankind in his habitual mood, but at that moment in a passion of religious anxiety about his soul. _Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci_ was not only an irrefragable axiom because a Latin poet had said it, but it exactly met the case in point. He would convince the scorners that poetry might be seriously useful, and show Master Bull his new way of making fine words butter parsnips, in a rhymed moral primer. Allegory, as then practised, was imagination adapted for beginners, in words of one syllable and illustrated with cuts, and would thus serve both his ethical and pictorial purpose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of it, he proceeded to put forth; but he so bordered it with bright-colored fancies, he so often filled whole pages and crowded the text hard in others with the gay frolics of his pencil, that, as in the Grimani missal, the holy function of the book is forgotten in the ecstasy of its adornment. Worse than all, does not his brush linger more lovingly along the rosy contours of his sirens than on the modest wimples of the Wise Virgins? "The general end of the book," he tells us in his Dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh, "is to fashion a gentleman of noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." But a little further on he evidently has a qualm, as he thinks how generously he had interpreted his promise of cuts: "To some I know this method will seem displeasant, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts or sermoned at large,[299] as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devices." Lord Burleigh was of this way of thinking, undoubtedly, but how could poor Clarion help it? Has he not said, "And whatso else, _of virtue good or ill,_ Grew in that garden, fetcht from far away, Of every one he takes and tastes at will, And on their pleasures greedily doth prey"? One sometimes feels in reading him as if he were the pure sense of the beautiful incarnated to the one end that he might interpret it to our duller perceptions So exquisite was his sensibility,[300] that with him sensation and intellection seem identical, and we "can almost say his body thought." This subtle interfusion of sense with spirit it is that gives his poetry a crystalline purity without lack of warmth. He is full of feeling, and yet of such a kind that we can neither say it is mere intellectual perception of what is fair and good, nor yet associate it with that throbbing fervor which leads us to call sensibility by the physical name of heart. Charles Lamb made the most pithy criticism of Spenser when he called him the poets' poet. We may fairly leave the allegory on one side, for perhaps, after all, he adopted it only for the reason that it was in fashion, and put it on as he did his ruff, not because it was becoming, but because it was the only wear. The true use of him is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two at a time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as to cloy them. He makes one think always of Venice; for not only is his style Venetian,[301] but as the gallery there is housed in the shell of an abandoned convent, so his in that of a deserted allegory. And again, as at Venice you swim in a gondola from Gian Bellini to Titian, and from Titian to Tintoret, so in him, where other cheer is wanting, the gentle sway of his measure, like the rhythmical impulse of the oar, floats you lullingly along from picture to picture. "If all the pens that ever poet held Had fed the feeling of their master's thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts Their minds and muses on admired themes, If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy, If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness; Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder at the best, Which into words no virtue can digest."[302] Spenser, at his best, has come as near to expressing this unattainable something as any other poet. He is so purely poet that with him the meaning does not so often modulate the music of the verse as the music makes great part of the meaning and leads the thought along its pleasant paths. No poet is so splendidly superfluous as he; none knows so well that in poetry enough is not only not so good as a feast, but is a beggarly parsimony. He spends himself in a careless abundance only to be justified by incomes of immortal youth. "Pensier canuto nè molto nè poco Si può quivi albergare in alcun cuore; Non entra quivi disagio nè inopia, Ma vi sta ogn'or col corno pien la Copia."[303] This delicious abundance and overrunning luxury of Spenser appear in the very structure of his verse. He found the _ottava rima_ too monotonously iterative; so, by changing the order of his rhymes, he shifted the let from the end of the stave, where it always seems to put on the brakes with a jar, to the middle, where it may serve at will as a brace or a bridge; he found it not roomy enough, so first ran it over into another line, and then ran that added line over into an alexandrine, in which the melody of one stanza seems forever longing and feeling forward after that which is to follow. There is no ebb and flow in his metre more than on the shores of the Adriatic, but wave follows wave with equable gainings and recessions, the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled with and carried forward by the next. In all this there is soothingness indeed, but no slumberous monotony; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but a great composer. By the variety of his pauses--now at the close of the first or second foot, now of the third, and again of the fourth--he gives spirit and energy to a measure whose tendency it certainly is to become languorous. He knew how to make it rapid and passionate at need, as in such verses as, "But he, my lion, and my noble lord, How does he find in cruel heart to hate Her that him loved and ever most adored As the God of my life? Why hath he me abhorred?"[304] or this, "Come hither, come hither, O, come hastily!"[305] Joseph Warton objects to Spenser's stanza, that its "constraint led him into many absurdities." Of these he instances three, of which I shall notice only one, since the two others (which suppose him at a loss for words and rhymes) will hardly seem valid to any one who knows the poet. It is that it "obliged him to dilate the thing to be expressed, however unimportant with trifling and tedious circumlocutions, namely, Faery Queen, II. ii. 44:-- "'Now hath fair Phoebe with her silver face Thrice seen the shadows of this nether world, Sith last I left that honorable place, In which her royal presence is enrolled.' "That is, it is three months since I left her palace."[306] But Dr. Warton should have remembered (what he too often forgets in his own verses) that, in spite of Dr. Johnson's dictum, poetry is not prose, and that verse only loses its advantage over the latter by invading its province.[307] Verse itself is an absurdity except as an expression of some higher movement of the mind, or as an expedient to lift other minds to the same ideal level. It is the cothurnus which gives language an heroic stature. I have said that one leading characteristic of Spenser's style was its spaciousness, that he habitually dilates rather than compresses. But his way of measuring time was perfectly natural in an age when everybody did not carry a dial in his poke as now. He is the last of the poets, who went (without affectation) by the great clock of the firmament. Dante, the miser of words, who goes by the same timepiece, is full of these roundabout ways of telling us the hour. It had nothing to do with Spenser's stanza, and I for one should be sorry to lose these stately revolutions of the _superne ruote_. Time itself becomes more noble when so measured; we never knew before of how precious a commodity we had the wasting. Who would prefer the plain time of day to this? "Now when Aldebaran was mounted high Above the starry Cassiopeia's chair"; or this? "By this the northern wagoner had set His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star That was in ocean's waves yet never wet, But firm is fixt and sendeth light from far To all that in the wide deep wandering are"; or this? "At last the golden oriental gate Of greatest heaven gan to open fair, And Phoebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate, Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair And hurls his glistening beams through dewy air." The generous indefiniteness, which treats an hour more or less as of no account, is in keeping with that sense of endless leisures which it is one chief merit of the poem to suggest. But Spenser's dilatation extends to thoughts as well as to phrases and images. He does not love the concise. Yet his dilatation is not mere distension, but the expansion of natural growth in the rich soil of his own mind, wherein the merest stick of a verse puts forth leaves and blossoms. Here is one of his, suggested by Homer:[308] "Upon the top of all his lofty crest A bunch of hairs discolored diversly, With sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest, Did shake, and seemed to dance for jollity; Like to an almond-tree mounted high On top of green Selinus all alone With blossoms brave bedeckëd daintily, Whose tender locks do tremble every one At every little breath that under heaven is blown." And this is the way he reproduces five pregnant verses of Dante:-- "Seggendo in piume In fama non si vien, nè sotto coltre, Senza la qual chi sua vita consuma, Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia Qual fumo in aere ed in acqua la schiuma."[309] "Whoso in pomp of proud estate, quoth she, Does swim, and bathes himself in courtly bliss, Does waste his days in dark obscurity And in oblivion ever buried is; Where ease abounds it's eath to do amiss: But who his limbs with labors and his mind Behaves with cares, cannot so easy miss. Abroad in arms, at home in studious kind, Who seeks with painful toil shall Honor soonest find. "In woods, in waves, in wars, she wonts to dwell, And will be found with peril and with pain, Ne can the man that moulds in idle cell Unto her happy mansiön attain; Before her gate high God did Sweat ordain, And wakeful watches ever to abide; But easy is the way and passage plain To pleasure's palace; it may soon be spied, And day and night her doors to all stand open wide."[310] Spenser's mind always demands this large elbow-room. His thoughts are never pithily expressed, but with a stately and sonorous proclamation, as if under the open sky, that seems to me very noble. For example,-- "The noble heart that harbors virtuous thought And is with child of glorious-great intent Can never rest until it forth have brought The eternal brood of glory excellent."[311] One's very soul seems to dilate with that last verse. And here is a passage which Milton had read and remembered:-- "And is there care in Heaven? and is there love In heavenly spirits to these creatures base, That may compassion of their evils move? There is: else much more wretched were the case Of men than beasts: but O, the exceeding grace Of highest God, that loves his creatures so, And all his works with mercy doth embrace, That blessed angels he sends to and fro, To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe! "How oft do they their silver bowers leave, To come to succor us that succor want! How oft do they with golden pinions cleave The fleeting skies like flying pursuivant, Against foul fiends to aid us militant! They for us fight, they watch and duly ward, And their bright squadrons round about us plant; And all for love and nothing for reward; O, why should heavenly God to men have such regard?"[312] His natural tendency is to shun whatever is sharp and abrupt. He loves to prolong emotion, and lingers in his honeyed sensations like a bee in the translucent cup of a lily. So entirely are beauty and delight in it the native element of Spenser, that, whenever in the "Faery Queen" you come suddenly on the moral, it gives you a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as when one's teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of strawberries and cream. He is the most fluent of our poets. Sensation passing through emotion into revery is a prime quality of his manner. And to read him puts one in the condition of revery, a state of mind in which our thoughts and feelings float motionless, as one sees fish do in a gentle stream, with just enough vibration of their fins to keep themselves from going down with the current, while their bodies yield indolently to all its soothing curves. He chooses his language for its rich canorousness rather than for intensity of meaning. To characterize his style in a single word, I should call it _costly_. None but the daintiest and nicest phrases will serve him, and he allures us from one to the other with such cunning baits of alliteration, and such sweet lapses of verse, that never any word seems more eminent than the rest, nor detains the feeling to eddy around it, but you must go on to the end before you have time to stop and muse over the wealth that has been lavished on you. But he has characterized and exemplified his own style better than any description could do:-- "For round about the walls yclothed were With goodly arras of great majesty, Woven with gold and silk so close and near That the rich metal lurked privily As faining to be hid from envious eye; Yet here and there and everywhere, unwares It showed itself and shone unwillingly Like to a discolored snake whose hidden snares Through the green grass his long bright-burnished back declares."[313] And of the lulling quality of his verse take this as a sample:-- "And, more to lull him in his slumber soft, A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down And ever drizzling rain upon the loft, Mixt with the murmuring wind much like the soun Of swarming bees did cast him in a swoon. No other noise, nor peoples' troublous cries, As still are wont to annoy the walled town, Might there be heard: but careless quiet lies Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies."[314] In the world into which Spenser carries us there is neither time nor space, or rather it is outside of and independent of them both, and so is purely ideal, or, more truly, imaginary; yet it is full of form, color, and all earthly luxury, and so far, if not real, yet apprehensible by the senses. There are no men and women in it, yet it throngs with airy and immortal shapes that have the likeness of men and women, and hint at some kind of foregone reality. Now this place, somewhere between mind and matter, between soul and sense, between the actual and the possible, is precisely the region which Spenser assigns (if I have rightly divined him) to the poetic susceptibility of impression,-- "To reign in the air from the earth to highest sky." Underneath every one of the senses lies the soul and spirit of it, dormant till they are magnetized by some powerful emotion. Then whatever is imperishable in us recognizes for an instant and claims kindred with something outside and distinct from it, yet in some inconceivable way a part of it, that flashes back on it an ideal beauty which impoverishes all other companionship. This exaltation with which love sometimes subtilizes the nerves of coarsest men so that they feel and see, not the thing as it seems to others, but the beauty of it, the joy of it, the soul of eternal youth that is in it, would appear to have been the normal condition of Spenser. While the senses of most men live in the cellar, his "were laid in a large upper chamber which opened toward the sunrising." "His birth was of the womb of morning dew, And his conception of the joyous prime." The very greatest poets (and is there, after all, more than one of them?) have a way, I admit, of getting within our inmost consciousness and in a manner betraying us to ourselves. There is in Spenser a remoteness very different from this, but it is also a seclusion, and quite as agreeable, perhaps quite as wholesome in certain moods when we are glad to get away from ourselves and those importunate trifles which we gravely call the realities of life. In the warm Mediterranean of his mind everything "Suffers a sea change Into something rich and strange." He lifts everything, not beyond recognition, but to an ideal distance where no mortal, I had almost said human, fleck is visible. Instead of the ordinary bridal gifts, he hallows his wife with an Epithalamion fit for a conscious goddess, and the "savage soil"[315] of Ireland becomes a turf of Arcady under her feet, where the merchants' daughters of the town are no more at home than the angels and the fair shapes of pagan mythology whom they meet there. He seems to have had a common-sense side to him, and could look at things (if we may judge by his tract on Irish affairs) in a practical and even hard way; but the moment he turned toward poetry he fulfilled the condition which his teacher Plato imposes on poets, and had not a particle of prosaic understanding left. His fancy, habitually moving about in worlds not realized, unrealizes everything at a touch. The critics blame him because in his Prothalamion the subjects of it enter on the Thames as swans and leave it at Temple Gardens as noble damsels; but to those who are grown familiar with his imaginary world such a transformation seems as natural as in the old legend of the Knight of the Swan. "Come now ye damsels, daughters of Delight, Help quickly her to dight: But first come ye, fair Hours, which were begot In Jove's sweet paradise of Day and Night, ... And ye three handmaids of the Cyprian Queen, The which do still adorn her beauty's pride, Help to adorn my beautifulest bride. * * * * * "Crown ye god Bacchus with a coronal, And Hymen also crown with wreaths of vine, And let the Graces dance unto the rest,-- For they can do it best. The whiles the maidens do their carols sing, To which the woods shall answer and their echo ring." The whole Epithalamion is very noble, with an organ-like roll and majesty of numbers, while it is instinct with the same joyousness which must have been the familiar mood of Spenser. It is no superficial and tiresome merriment, but a profound delight in the beauty of the universe and in that delicately surfaced nature of his which was its mirror and counterpart. Sadness was alien to him, and at funerals he was, to be sure, a decorous mourner, as could not fail with so sympathetic a temperament; but his condolences are graduated to the unimpassioned scale of social requirement. Even for Sir Philip Sidney his sighs are regulated by the official standard. It was in an unreal world that his affections found their true object and vent, and it is in an elegy of a lady whom he had never known that he puts into the mouth of a husband whom he has evaporated into a shepherd, the two most naturally pathetic verses he ever penned:-- "I hate the day because it lendeth light To see all things, but not my love to see."[316] In the Epithalamion there is an epithet which has been much admired for its felicitous tenderness:-- "Behold, whiles she before the altar stands, Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes And blesseth her with his two _happy_ hands." But the purely impersonal passion of the artist had already guided him to this lucky phrase. It is addressed by Holiness--a dame surely as far abstracted from the enthusiasms of love as we can readily conceive of--to Una, who, like the visionary Helen of Dr. Faustus, has every charm of womanhood, except that of being alive as Juliet and Beatrice are. "O happy earth, Whereon thy innocent feet do ever tread!"[317] Can we conceive of Una, the fall of whose foot would be as soft as that of a rose-leaf upon its mates already fallen,--can we conceive of her treading anything so sordid? No; it is only on some unsubstantial floor of dream that she walks securely, herself a dream. And it is only when Spenser has escaped thither, only when this glamour of fancy has rarefied his wife till she is grown almost as purely a creature of the imagination as the other ideal images with which he converses, that his feeling becomes as nearly passionate--as nearly human, I was on the point of saying--as with him is possible. I am so far from blaming this idealizing property of his mind, that I find it admirable in him. It is his quality, not his defect. Without some touch of it life would be unendurable prose. If I have called the world to which he transports us a world of unreality, I have wronged him. It is only a world of unrealism. It is from pots and pans and stocks and futile gossip and inch-long politics that he emancipates us, and makes us free of that to-morrow, always coming and never come, where ideas shall reign supreme.[318] But I am keeping my readers from the sweetest idealization that love ever wrought:-- "Unto this place whenas the elfin knight Approached, him seemëd that the merry sound Of a shrill pipe, he playing heard on height, And many feet fast thumping the hollow ground, That through the woods their echo did rebound; He nigher drew to wit what it mote be. There he a troop of ladies dancing found Full merrily and making gladful glee; And in the midst a shepherd piping he did see. "He durst not enter into the open green For dread of them unwares to be descried, For breaking of their dance, if he were seen; But in the covert of the wood did bide Beholding all, yet of them unespied; There he did see that pleased so much his sight That even he himself his eyes envied, A hundred naked maidens lily-white, All ranged in a ring and dancing in delight. "All they without were ranged in a ring, And danced round; but in the midst of them Three other ladies did both dance and sing, The while the rest them round about did hem, And like a garland did in compass stem. And in the midst of these same three was placed Another damsel, as a precious gem Amidst a ring most richly well enchased, That with her goodly presence all the rest much graced. "Look how the crown which Ariadne wove Upon her ivory forehead that same day, That Theseus her unto his bridal bore, (When the bold Centaurs made that bloody fray, With the fierce Lapithes, that did them dismay) Being now placëd in the firmament, Through the bright heaven doth her beams display, And is unto the stars an ornament, Which round about her move in order excellent; "Such was the beauty of this goodly band, Whose sundry parts were here too long to tell, But she that in the midst of them did stand, Seemed all the rest in beauty to excel, Crowned with a rosy garland that right well Did her beseem. And, ever as the crew About her danced, sweet flowers that far did smell, And fragrant odors they upon her threw; But most of all those three did her with gifts endue. "Those were the graces, Daughters of Delight, Handmaids of Venus, which are wont to haunt Upon this hill and dance there, day and night; Those three to men all gifts of grace do grant And all that Venus in herself doth vaunt Is borrowed of them; but that fair one That in the midst was placed paravant, Was she to whom that shepherd piped alone, That made him pipe so merrily, as never none. "She was, to weet, that jolly shepherd's lass Which pipëd there unto that merry rout; That jolly shepherd that there pipëd was Poor Colin Clout; (who knows not Colin Clout?) He piped apace while they him danced about; Pipe, jolly shepherd, pipe thou now apace, Unto thy love that made thee low to lout; Thy love is present there with thee in place, Thy love is there advanced to be another Grace."[319] Is there any passage in any poet that so ripples and sparkles with simple delight as this? It is a sky of Italian April full of sunshine and the hidden ecstasy of larks. And we like it all the more that it reminds us of that passage in his friend Sidney's _Arcadia_, where the shepherd-boy pipes "as if he would never be old." If we compare it with the mystical scene in Dante,[320] of which it is a reminiscence, it will seem almost like a bit of real life; but taken by itself it floats as unconcerned in our cares and sorrows and vulgarities as a sunset cloud. The sound of that pastoral pipe seems to come from as far away as Thessaly when Apollo was keeping sheep there. Sorrow, the great idealizer, had had the portrait of Beatrice on her easel for years, and every touch of her pencil transfigured the woman more and more into the glorified saint. But Elizabeth Nagle was a solid thing of flesh and blood, who would sit down at meat with the poet on the very day when he had thus beatified her. As Dante was drawn upward from heaven to heaven by the eyes of Beatrice, so was Spenser lifted away from the actual by those of that ideal Beauty whereof his mind had conceived the lineaments in its solitary musings over Plato, but of whose haunting presence the delicacy of his senses had already premonished him. The intrusion of the real world upon this supersensual mood of his wrought an instant disenchantment:-- "Much wondered Calidore at this strange sight Whose like before his eye had never seen, And, standing long astonished in sprite And rapt with pleasance, wist not what to ween, Whether it were the train of Beauty's Queen, Or Nymphs, or Fairies, or enchanted show With which his eyes might have deluded been, Therefore resolving what it was to know, Out of the woods he rose and toward them did go. "But soon as he appearëd to their view They vanished all away out of his sight And clean were gone, which way he never knew, All save the shepherd, who, for fell despite Of that displeasure, broke his bagpipe quite." Ben Jonson said that "he had consumed a whole night looking to his great toe, about which he had seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination"; and Coleridge has told us how his "eyes made pictures when they were shut" This is not uncommon, but I fancy that Spenser was more habitually possessed by his imagination than is usual even with poets. His visions must have accompanied him "in glory and in joy" along the common thoroughfares of life and seemed to him, it may be suspected, more real than the men and women he met there. His "most fine spirit of sense" would have tended to keep him in this exalted mood. I must give an example of the sensuousness of which I have spoken :-- "And in the midst of all a fountain stood Of richest substance that on earth might be, So pure and shiny that the crystal flood Through every channel running one might see; Most goodly it with curious imagery Was overwrought, and shapes of naked boys, Of which some seemed with lively jollity To fly about, playing their wanton toys, Whilst others did themselves embay in liquid joys. "And over all, of purest gold was spread A trail of ivy in his native hue; For the rich metal was so colorëd That he who did not well avised it view Would surely deem it to be ivy true; Low his lascivious arms adown did creep That themselves dipping in the silver dew Their fleecy flowers they tenderly did steep, Which drops of crystal seemed for wantonness to weep. "Infinite streams continually did well Out of this fountain, sweet and fair to see, The which into an ample laver fell, And shortly grew to so great quantity That like a little lake it seemed to be Whose depth exceeded not three cubits' height, That through the waves one might the bottom see All paved beneath with jasper shining bright, That seemed the fountain in that sea did sail upright. "And all the margent round about was set With shady laurel-trees, thence to defend The sunny beams which on the billows bet, And those which therein bathed mote offend. As Guyou happened by the same to wend Two naked Damsels he therein espied, Which therein bathing seemed to contend And wrestle wantonly, ne cared to hide Their dainty parts from view of any which them eyed. "Sometimes the one would lift the other quite Above the waters, and then down again Her plunge, as overmasterëd by might, Where both awhile would coverëd remain, And each the other from to rise restrain; The whiles their snowy limbs, as through a veil, So through the crystal waves appeared plain: Then suddenly both would themselves unhele, And the amorous sweet spoils to greedy eyes reveal. "As that fair star, the messenger of morn, His dewy face out of the sea doth rear; Or as the Cyprian goddess, newly born Of the ocean's fruitful froth, did first appear; Such seemed they, and so their yellow hear Crystalline humor dropped down apace. Whom such when Guyon saw, he drew him near, And somewhat gan relent his earnest pace; His stubborn breast gan secret pleasance to embrace. "The wanton Maidens him espying, stood Gazing awhile at his unwonted guise; Then the one herself low duckéd in the flood, Abashed that her a stranger did avise; But the other rather higher did arise, And her two lily paps aloft displayed, And all that might his melting heart entice To her delights, she unto him bewrayed; The rest, hid underneath, him more desirous made. "With that the other likewise up arose, And her fair locks, which formerly were bound Up in one knot, she low adown did loose, Which flowing long and thick her clothed around, And the ivory in golden mantle gowned: So that fair spectacle from him was reft, Yet that which reft it no less fair was found; So hid in locks and waves from lookers' theft, Naught but her lovely face she for his looking left. "Withal she laughëd, and she blushed withal, That blushing to her laughter gave more grace, And laughter to her blushing, as did fall. * * * * * "Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound, Of all that mote delight a dainty ear, Such as at once might not on living ground, Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere: Right hard it was for wight which did it hear To read what manner music that mote be; For all that pleasing is to living ear Was there consorted in one harmony; Birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree. "The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade, Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet; The angelical soft trembling voices made To the instruments divine respondence mete; The silver-sounding instruments did meet With the base murmur of the water's fall; The water's fall with difference discreet, Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call; The gentle warbling wind low answerëd to all." Spenser, in one of his letters to Harvey, had said, "Why, a God's name, may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language?" This is in the tone of Bellay, as is also a great deal of what is said in the epistle prefixed to the "Shepherd's Calendar." He would have been wiser had he followed more closely Bellay's advice about the introduction of novel words: "Fear not, then, to innovate somewhat, particularly in a long poem, with modesty, however, with analogy, and judgment of ear; and trouble not thyself as to who may think it good or bad, hoping that posterity will approve it,--she who gives faith to doubtful, light to obscure, novelty to antique, usage to unaccustomed, and sweetness to harsh and rude things." Spenser's innovations were by no means always happy, as not always according with the genius of the language, and they have therefore not prevailed. He forms English words out of French or Italian ones, sometimes, I think, on a misapprehension of their true meaning; nay, he sometimes makes new ones by unlawfully grafting a scion of Romance on a Teutonic root. His theory, caught from Bellay, of rescuing good archaisms from unwarranted oblivion, was excellent; not so his practice of being archaic for the mere sake of escaping from the common and familiar. A permissible archaism is a word or phrase that has been supplanted by something less apt, but has not become unintelligible; and Spenser's often needed a glossary, even in his own day.[321] But he never endangers his finest passages by any experiments of this kind. There his language is living, if ever any, and of one substance with the splendor of his fancy. Like all masters of speech, he is fond of toying with and teasing it a little; and it may readily be granted that he sometimes "hunted the letter," as it was called, out of all cry. But even where his alliteration is tempted to an excess, its prolonged echoes caress the ear like the fading and gathering reverberations of an Alpine horn, and one can find in his heart to forgive even such a debauch of initial assonances as "Eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide, More swift than swallow shears the liquid sky." Generally, he scatters them at adroit intervals, reminding us of the arrangement of voices in an ancient catch, where one voice takes up the phrase another has dropped, and thus seems to give the web of harmony a firmer and more continuous texture. Other poets have held their mirrors up to nature, mirrors that differ very widely in the truth and beauty of the images they reflect; but Spenser's is a magic glass in which we see few shadows cast back from actual life, but visionary shapes conjured up by the wizard's art from some confusedly remembered past or some impossible future; it is like one of those still pools of mediaeval legend which covers some sunken city of the antique world; a reservoir in which all our dreams seem to have been gathered. As we float upon it, we see that it pictures faithfully enough the summer-clouds that drift over it, the trees that grow about its margin, but in the midst of these shadowy echoes of actuality we catch faint tones of bells that seem blown to us from beyond the horizon of time, and looking down into the clear depths, catch glimpses of towers and far-shining knights and peerless dames that waver and are gone. Is it a world that ever was, or shall be, or can be, or but a delusion? Spenser's world, real to him, is real enough for us to take a holiday in, and we may well be content with it when the earth we dwell on is so often too real to allow of such vacations. It is the same kind of world that Petrarca's Laura has walked in for five centuries with all ears listening for the music of her footfall. The land of Spenser is the land of Dream, but it is also the land of Rest. To read him is like dreaming awake, without even the trouble of doing it yourself, but letting it be done for you by the finest dreamer that ever lived, who knows how to color his dreams like life and make them move before you in music. They seem singing to you as the sirens to Guyon, and we linger like him:-- "O, thou fair son of gentle Faery That art in mighty arms most magnified Above all knights that ever battle tried, O, turn thy rudder hitherward awhile, Here may thy storm-beat vessel safely ride, This is the port of rest from troublous toil, The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil.[322] "With that the rolling sea, resounding swift In his big bass, them fitly answered, And on the rock the waves, breaking aloft, A solemn mean unto them measured, The whiles sweet Zephyrus loud whisteled His treble, a strange kind of harmony Which Guyon's senses softly tickeled That he the boatman bade row easily And let him hear some part of their rare melody." Despite Spenser's instinctive tendency to idealize, and his habit of distilling out of the actual an ethereal essence in which very little of the possible seems left, yet his mind, as is generally true of great poets, was founded on a solid basis of good-sense. I do not know where to look for a more cogent and at the same time picturesque confutation of Socialism than in the Second Canto of the Fifth Book. If I apprehend rightly his words and images, there is not only subtile but profound thinking here. The French Revolution is prefigured in the well-meaning but too theoretic giant, and Rousseau's fallacies exposed two centuries in advance. Spenser was a conscious Englishman to his inmost fibre, and did not lack the sound judgment in politics which belongs to his race. He was the more English for living in Ireland, and there is something that moves us deeply in the exile's passionate cry:-- "Dear Country! O how dearly dear Ought thy remembrance and perpetual band Be to thy foster-child that from thy hand Did common breath and nouriture receive! How brutish is it not to understand How much to her we owe that all us gave, That gave unto us all whatever good we have!" His race shows itself also where he tells us that "chiefly skill to ride seems a science Proper to gentle blood," which reminds one of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's saying that the finest sight God looked down on was a fine man on a fine horse. Wordsworth, in the supplement to his preface, tells us that the "Faery Queen" "faded before" Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas. But Wordsworth held a brief for himself in this case, and is no exception to the proverb about men who are their own attorneys. His statement is wholly unfounded. Both poems, no doubt, so far as popularity is concerned, yielded to the graver interests of the Civil War. But there is an appreciation much weightier than any that is implied in mere popularity, and the vitality of a poem is to be measured by the kind as well as the amount of influence it exerts. Spenser has _coached_ more poets and more eminent ones than any other writer of English verse. I need say nothing of Milton, nor of professed disciples like Browne, the two Fletchers, and More. Oowley tells us that he became "irrecoverably a poet" by reading the "Faery Queen" when a boy. Dryden, whose case is particularly in point because he confesses having been seduced by Du Bartas, tells us that Spenser had been his master in English. He regrets, indeed, comically enough, that Spenser could not have read the rules of Bossu, but adds that "no man was ever born with a greater genius or more knowledge to support it." Pope says, "There is something in Spenser that pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it did in one's youth. I read the _Faery Queen_ when I was about twelve with a vast deal of delight; and I think it gave me as much when I read it over about a year or two ago." Thomson wrote the most delightful of his poems in the measure of Spenser; Collins, Gray, and Akenside show traces of him; and in our own day his influence reappears in Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Landor is, I believe, the only poet who ever found him tedious. Spenser's mere manner has not had so many imitators as Milton's, but no other of our poets has given an impulse, and in the right direction also, to so many and so diverse minds; above all, no other has given to so many young souls a consciousness of their wings and a delight in the use of them. He is a standing protest against the tyranny of Commonplace, and sows the seeds of a noble discontent with prosaic views of life and the dull uses to which it may be put. Three of Spenser's own verses best characterize the feeling his poetry gives us:-- "Among wide waves set like a little nest," "Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies," "The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil." We are wont to apologize for the grossness of our favorite authors sometimes by saying that their age was to blame and not they; and the excuse is a good one, for often it is the frank word that shocks us while we tolerate the thing. Spenser needs no such extenuations. No man can read the "Faery Queen" and be anything but the better for it. Through that rude age, when Maids of Honor drank beer for breakfast and Hamlet could say a gross thing to Ophelia, he passes serenely abstracted and high, the Don Quixote of poets. Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the "Faery Queen." There is the land of pure heart's ease, where no ache or sorrow of spirit can enter. Footnotes: [263] Though always misapplied in quotation, as if he had used the word in that generalized meaning which is common now, but which could not without an impossible anachronism have been present to his mind. He meant merely freedom from prison. [264] In his "Defence of Poesy" he condemns the archaisms and provincialisms of the "Shepherd's Calendar." [265] "There is, as you must have heard Wordsworth point out, a language of pure, intelligible English, which was spoken in Chaucer's time, and is spoken in ours; equally understood then and now; and of which the Bible is the written and permanent standard, as it has undoubtedly been the great means of preserving it." (Southey's Life and Correspondence, III. 193, 194.) [266] Nash, who has far better claims than Swift to be called the English Rabelais, thus at once describes and parodies Harvey's hexameters in prose, "that drunken, staggering kind of verse, which is all up hill and down hill, like the way betwixt Stamford and Beechneld, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire in the deep of winter, now soused up to the saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes." It was a happy thought to satirize (in this inverted way) prose written in the form of verse. [267] Edmund Bolton in his _Hypercritica_ says, "The works of Sam Daniel contained somewhat a flat, but yet withal a very pure and copious English, and words as warrantable as any man's, and _fitter perhaps for prose than measure_." I have italicized his second thought, which chimes curiously with the feeling Daniel leaves in the mind. (See Haslewood's Ancient Crit. Essays, Vol. II.) Wordsworth, an excellent judge, much admired Daniel's poem to the Countess of Cumberland. [268] Mr. Hales, in the excellent memoir of the poet prefixed to the Globe edition of his works, puts his birth a year earlier, on the strength of a line in the sixtieth sonnet. But it is not established that this sonnet was written in 1593, and even if it were, a sonnet is not upon oath, and the poet would prefer the round number forty, which suited the measure of his verse, to thirty-nine or forty-one, which might have been truer to the measure of his days. [269] This has been inferred from a passage in one of Gabriel Harvey's letters to him. But it would seem more natural, from the many allusions in Harvey's pamphlets against Nash, that it was his own wrongs which he had in mind, and his self-absorption would take it for granted that Spenser sympathized with him in all his grudges. Harvey is a remarkable instance of the refining influence of classical studies. Amid the pedantic farrago of his omni-sufficiency (to borrow one of his own words) we come suddenly upon passages whose gravity of sentiment, stateliness of movement, and purity of diction remind us of Landor. These lucid intervals in his overweening vanity explain and justify the friendship of Spenser. Yet the reiteration of emphasis with which he insists on all the world's knowing that Nash had called him an ass, probably gave Shakespeare the hint for one of the most comic touches in the character of Dogberry. [270] The late Major C. G. Halpine, in a very interesting essay, makes it extremely probable that Rosalinde is the anagram of Rose Daniel, sister of the poet and married to John Florio He leaves little doubt, also, that the name of Spenser's wife (hitherto unknown) was Elizabeth Nagle. (See "Atlantic Monthly," Vol II 674 November, 1858.) Mr. Halpine informed me that he found the substance of his essay among the papers of his father, the late Rev. N. J. Halpine, of Dublin. The latter published in the series of the Shakespeare Society a sprightly little tract entitled "Oberon," which, if not quite convincing, is well worth reading for its ingenuity and research. [271] In his prose tract on Ireland, Spenser, perhaps with some memory of Ovid in his mind, derives the Irish mainly from the Scythians. [272] Compare Shakespeare's LXVI. Sonnet. [273] This poem, published in 1591, was, Spenser tells us in his dedication, "long sithens composed in the raw conceit of my youth." But he had evidently retouched it. The verses quoted show a firmer hand than is generally seen in it, and we are safe in assuming that they were added after his visit to England. Dr. Johnson epigrammatized Spenser's indictment into "There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail," but I think it loses in pathos more than it gains in point. [274] Paradiso, XI. 4-12 Spenser was familiar with the "Divina Commedia," though I do not remember that his commentators have pointed out his chief obligations to it. [275] His own words as reported by Lodowick Bryskett. (Todd's Spenser, I. lx.) The whole passage is very interesting as giving us the only glimpse we get of the living Spenser in actual contact with his fellow-men. It shows him to us, as we could wish to see him, surrounded with loving respect, companionable and helpful. Bryskett tells us that he was "perfect in the Greek tongue," and "also very well read in philosophy both moral and natural." He encouraged Bryskett in the study of Greek, and offered to help him in it. Comparing the last verse of the above citation of the "Faery Queen" with other passages in Spenser, I cannot help thinking that he wrote, "do not love amiss." [276] "And know, sweet prince, when you shall come to know, That 'tis not in the power of kings to raise A spirit for verse that is not born thereto; Nor are they born in every prince's days" _Daniel's Dedic Trag. of "Philotas."_ [277] Louis XIV. is commonly supposed in some miraculous way to have created French literature. He may more truly be said to have petrified it so far as his influence went. The French _renaissance_ in the preceding century was produced by causes similar in essentials to those which brought about that in England not long after. The _grand siècle_ grew by natural processes of development out of that which had preceded it, and which, to the impartial foreigner at least, has more flavor, and more French flavor too, than the Gallo-Roman usurper that pushed it from its stool. The best modern French poetry has been forced to temper its verses in the colder natural springs of the ante-classic period. [278] In the Elizabethan drama the words "England" and "France" we constantly used to signify the kings of those countries. [279] I say supposed, for the names of his two sons, Sylvanus and Peregrine, indicate that they were born in Ireland, and that Spenser continued to regard it as a wilderness and his abode there as exile. The two other children are added on the authority of a pedigree drawn up by Sir W. Betham and cited in Mr. Hales's Life of Spenser prefixed to the Globe edition. [280] Ben Jonson told Drummond that one child perished in the flames. But he was speaking after an interval of twenty-one years, and, of course, from hearsay. Spenser's misery was exaggerated by succeeding poets, who used him to point a moral, and from the shelter of his tomb launched many a shaft of sarcasm at an unappreciative public. Giles Fletcher in his "Purple Island" (a poem which reminds us of the "Faery Queen" by the supreme tediousness of its allegory, but in nothing else) set the example in the best verse he ever wrote:-- "Poorly, poor man, he lived; poorly, poor man, he died." Gradually this poetical tradition established itself firmly as authentic history. Spenser could never have been poor, except by comparison. The whole story of his later days has a strong savor of legend. He must have had ample warning of Tyrone's rebellion, and would probably have sent away his wife and children to Cork, if he did not go thither himself. I am inclined to think that he did, carrying his papers with him, and among them the two cantos of Mutability, first published in 1611. These, it is most likely, were the only ones he ever completed, for, with all his abundance, he was evidently a laborious finisher. When we remember that ten years were given to the elaboration of the first three books, and that five more elapsed before the next three were ready, we shall waste no vain regrets on the six concluding books supposed to have been lost by the carelessness of an imaginary servant on their way from Ireland. [281] Sir Philip Sidney did not approve of this. "That same framing of his style to an old rustic language I dare not allow, since neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazzaro in Italian did affect it." ("Defence of Poesy.") Ben Jonson, on the other hand, said that Guarini "kept not decorum in making shepherds speak as well as himself could." ("Conversations with Drummond.") I think Sidney was right, for the poets' Arcadia is a purely ideal world, and should be treated accordingly. But whoever looks into the glossary appended to the "Calendar" by E.K., will be satisfied that Spenser's object was to find unhackneyed and poetical words rather than such as should seem more on a level with the speakers. See also the "Epistle Dedicatory." I cannot help thinking that E.K. was Spenser himself, with occasional interjections of Harvey. Who else could have written such English as many passages in this Epistle? [282] It was at Penshurst that he wrote the only specimen that has come down to us, and bad enough it is. I have said that some of Sidney's are pleasing. [283] See "My Study Windows," 264 _seqq_. [284] Of course _dillies_ and _lilies_ must be read with a slight accentuation of the last syllable (permissible then), in order to chime with _delice_. In the first line I have put _here_ instead of _hether_, which (like other words where _th_ comes between two vowels) was then very often a monosyllable, in order to throw the accent back more strongly on _bring_, where it belongs. Spenser's innovation lies in making his verses by ear instead of on the finger-tips, and in valuing the stave more than any of the single verses that compose it. This is the secret of his easy superiority to all others in the stanza which he composed, and which bears his name. Milton (who got more of his schooling in these matters from Spenser than anywhere else) gave this principle a greater range, and applied it with more various mastery. I have little doubt that the tune of the last stanza cited above was clinging in Shakespeare's ear when he wrote those exquisite verses in "Midsummer Night's Dream" ("I know a bank"), where our grave pentameter is in like manner surprised into a lyrical movement. See also the pretty song in the eclogue for August. Ben Jonson, too, evidently caught some cadences from Spenser for his lyrics. I need hardly say that in those eclogues (May, for example) where Spenser thought he was imitating what wiseacres used to call the _riding-rhyme_ of Chaucer, he fails most lamentably. He had evidently learned to scan his master's verses better when he wrote his "Mother Hubberd's Tale." [285] Drummond, it will be remarked, speaking from memory, takes Cuddy to be Colin. In Milton's "Lycidas" there are reminiscences of this eclogue as well as of that for May. The latter are the more evident, but I think that Spenser's "Cuddie, the praise is better than the price," suggested Milton's "But not the praise, Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears." Shakespeare had read and remembered this pastoral. Compare "But, ah, Mecaenas is yclad in clay, And great Augustus long ago is dead, And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead," with "King Pandion, he is dead; All thy friends are lapt in lead." It is odd that Shakespeare, in his "lapt in lead," is more Spenserian than Spenser himself, from whom he caught this "hunting of the letter." [286] "Ruins of Time." It is perhaps not considering too nicely to remark how often this image of _wings_ recurred to Spenser's mind. A certain aerial latitude was essential to the large circlings of his style. [287] Perhaps his most striking single epithet is the "sea-shouldering whales," B. II 12, xxiii. His ear seems to delight in prolongations For example, he makes such words as _glorious_, _gratious_, _joyeous_, _havior_, _chapelet_ dactyles, and that, not at the end of verses, where it would not have been unusual, but in the first half of them. Milton contrives a break (a kind of heave, as it were) in the uniformity of his verse by a practice exactly the opposite of this. He also shuns a _hiatus_ which does not seem to have been generally dipleasing to Spenser's ear, though perhaps in the compound epithet _bees-alluring_ he intentionally avoids it by the plural form. [288] "Like as a wayward child, whose sounder sleep Is broken with some fearful dream's affright, With froward will doth set himself to weep Ne can be stilled for all his nurse's might, But kicks and squalls and shrieks for fell despight, Now scratching her and her loose locks misusing, Now seeking darkness and now seeking light, Then craving suck, and then the suck refusing." He would doubtless have justified himself by the familiar example of Homer's comparing Ajax to a donkey in the eleventh book of the Illiad. So also in the "Epithalamion" it grates our nerves to hear, "Pour not by cups, but by the bellyful, Pour out to all that wull." Such examples serve to show how strong a dose of Spenser's _aurum potabile_ the language needed. [289] I could not bring myself to root out this odorous herb-garden, though it make my extract too long. It is a pretty reminiscence of his master Chaucer, but is also very characteristic of Spenser himself. He could not help planting a flower or two among his serviceable plants, and after all this abundance he is not satisfied, but begins the next stanza with "And whatso _else_." [290] Leigh Hunt's Indicator, XVII. [291] Ben Jonson told Drummond "that in that paper Sir W. Raleigh had of the allegories of his Faery Queen, by the Blatant Beast the Puritans were understood." But this is certainly wrong. There were very different shades of Puritanism, according to individual temperament. That of Winthrop and Higginson had a mellowness of which Endicott and Standish were incapable The gradual change of Milton's opinions was similar to that which I suppose in Spenser. The passage in Mother Hubberd may have been aimed at the Protestant clergy of Ireland (for he says much the same thing in his "View of the State of Ireland"), but it is general in its terms. [292] Two of his eclogues, as I have said, are from Marot, and his earliest known verses are translations from Bellay, a poet who was charming whenever he had the courage to play truant from a bad school. We must not suppose that an analysis of the literature of the _demi-monde_ will give us all the elements of the French character. It has been both grave and profound; nay, it has even contrived to be wise and lively at the same time, a combination so incomprehensible by the Teutonic races that they have labelled it levity. It puts them out as nature did Fuseli. [293] Taste must be partially excepted. It is remarkable how little eating and drinking there is in the "Faery Queen." The only time he fairly sets a table is in the house of Malbecco, where it is necessary to the conduct of the story. Yet taste is not wholly forgotten:-- "In her left hand a cup of gold she held, And with her right the riper fruit did reach, Whose sappy liquor, that with fulness sweld, Into her cup she scruzed with dainty breach Of her fine fingers without foul impeach, That so fair wine-press made the wine more sweet." B. II c. xii. 56. Taste can hardly complain of unhandsome treatment! [294] Had the poet lived longer, he might perhaps have verified his friend Raleigh's saying, that "whosoever in writing modern history shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth." The passage is one of the very few disgusting ones in the "Faery Queen." Spenser was copying Ariosto; but the Italian poet, with the discreeter taste of his race, keeps to generalities. Spenser goes into particulars which can only be called nasty. He did this, no doubt, to pleasure his mistress, Mary's rival; and this gives us a measure of the brutal coarseness of contemporary manner. It becomes only the more marvellous that the fine flower of his genius could have transmuted the juices of such a soil into the purity and sweetness which are its own peculiar properties. [295] There is a gleam of humor in one of the couplets of "Mother Hubberd's Tale," where the Fox, persuading the Ape that they should disguise themselves as discharged soldiers in order to beg the more successfully, says,-- "Be you the soldier, for you likest are For manly semblance _and small skill in war."_ [296] Bunyan probably took the hint of the Giants suicidal offer of "knife, halter, or poison," from Spenser's "swords, ropes, poison," in Faery Queen, B. I. c. ix. 1. [297] Book II. c. 9. [298] See Sidney's "Defence," and Puttenham's "Art of English Poesy," Book I. c. 8. [299] We can fancy how he would have done this by Jeremy Taylor, who was a kind of Spenser in a cassock. [300] Of this he himself gives a striking hint, when speaking in his own person he suddenly breaks in on his narrative with the passionate cry, "Ah, dearest God, me grant I dead be not defouled." _Faery Queen_, B. I. c. x. 43. [301] Was not this picture painted by Paul Veronese, for example? "Arachne figured how Jove did abuse Europa like a bull, and on his back Her through the sea did bear: ... She seemed still back unto the land to look, And her playfellows' aid to call, and fear The dashing of the waves, that up she took Her dainty feet, and garments gathered near.... Before the bull she pictured winged Love, With his young brother Sport, ... And many nymphs about them flocking round, And many Tritons which their horns did sound." _Muiopotmos_, 281-296. Spenser begins a complimentary sonnet prefixed to the "Commonwealth and Government of Venice" (1599) with this beautiful verse, "Fair Venice, flower of the last world's delight." Perhaps we should read "lost"? [302] Marlowe's "Tamburlaine," Part I. Act V. 2. [303] Grayheaded Thought, nor much nor little, may Take up its lodging here in any heart; Unease nor Lack can enter at this door; But here dwells full-horned Plenty evermore. _Orl. Fur._, e. vi. 78. [304] B. I. c. iii. 7. Leigh Hunt, one of the most sympathetic of critics, has remarked the passionate change from the third to the first person in the last two verses. [305] B. II. c. viii. 3. [306] Observations on Faery Queen, Vol. I pp. 158, 159. Mr. Hughes also objects to Spenser's measure, that it is "closed always by a fullstop, in the same place, by which every stanza is made as it were a distinct paragraph." (Todd's Spenser, II. xli.) But he could hardly have read the poem attentively, for there are numerous instances to the contrary. Spenser was a consummate master of versification, and not only did Marlowe and Shakespeare learn of him, but I have little doubt that, but for the "Faery Queen," we should never have had the varied majesty of Milton's blank verse. [307] As where Dr. Warton himself says:-- "How nearly had my spirit past, Till stopt by Metcalf's skilful hand, To death's dark regions wide and waste And the black river's mournful strand, Or to," etc., to the end of the next stanza. That is, I had died but for Dr. Metcalf 's boluses. [308] Iliad, XVII. 55 _seqq_. Referred to in Upton's note on Faery Queen, B. I. c. vii. 32. Into what a breezy couplet trailing off with an alexandrine has Homer's [Greek: pnoiai pantoion anemon] expanded! Chaplin unfortunately has slurred this passage in his version, and Pope _tittivated_ it more than usual in his. I have no other translation at hand. Marlowe was so taken by this passage in Spenser that he put it bodily into his _Tamburlaine_. [309] Inferno, XXIV. 46-52. "For sitting upon down, Or under quilt, one cometh not to fame, Withouten which whoso his life consumeth Such vestige leaveth of himself on earth As smoke in air or in the water foam." _Longfellow._ It shows how little Dante was read during the last century that none of the commentators on Spenser notice his most important obligations to the great Tuscan. [310] Faery Queen, B. II. c. iii. 40, 41. [311] Ibid., B. I. c. v. 1. [312] Ibid., B. II. c. viii. 1,2. [313] B. III. c. xi. 28. [314] B. I. c. i. 41. [315] This phrase occurs in the sonnet addressed to the Earl of Ormond and in that to Lord Grey de Wilton in the series prefixed to the "Faery Queen". These sonnets are of a much stronger build than the "Amoretti", and some of them (especially that to Sir John Norris) recall the firm tread of Milton's, though differing in structure. [316] Daphnaida, 407, 408. [317] Faery Queen, B. I. c. x. 9. [318] Strictly taken, perhaps his world is not _much_ more imaginary than that of other epic poets, Homer (in the Iliad) included. He who is familiar with mediaeval epics will be extremely cautious in drawing inferences as to contemporary manners from Homer. He evidently _archaizes_ like the rest. [319] Faery Queen, B. VI. c. x. 10-16. [320] Purgatorio, XXIX., XXX. [321] I find a goodly number of Yankeeisms in him, such as _idee_ (not as a rhyme); but the oddest is his twice spelling _dew deow_, which is just as one would spell it who wished to phonetize its sound in rural New England. [322] This song recalls that in Dante's Purgatorio (XIX. 19--24), in which the Italian tongue puts forth all its siren allurements. Browne's beautiful verses ("Turn, hither turn your winged pines") were suggested by these of Spenser. It might almost seem as if Spenser had here, in his usual way, expanded the sweet old verses:-- "Merry sungen the monks binnen Ely When Knut king rew thereby; 'Roweth knightes near the loud, That I may hear these monkes song.'" WORDSWORTH. A generation has now passed away since Wordsworth was laid with the family in the churchyard at Grasmere.[323] Perhaps it is hardly yet time to take a perfectly impartial measure of his value as a poet. To do this is especially hard for those who are old enough to remember the last shot which the foe was sullenly firing in that long war of critics which began when he published his manifesto as Pretender, and which came to a pause rather than end when they flung up their caps with the rest at his final coronation. Something of the intensity of the _odium theologicum_ (if indeed the _aestheticum_ be not in these days the more bitter of the two) entered into the conflict. The Wordsworthians were a sect, who, if they had the enthusiasm, had also not a little of the exclusiveness and partiality to which sects are liable. The verses of the master had for them the virtue of religious canticles stimulant of zeal and not amenable to the ordinary tests of cold-blooded criticism. Like the hymns of the Huguenots and Covenanters, they were songs of battle no less than of worship, and the combined ardors of conviction and conflict lent them a fire that was not naturally their own. As we read them now, that virtue of the moment is gone out of them, and whatever of Dr. Wattsiness there is gives us a slight shock of disenchantment. It is something like the difference between the _Marseillaise_ sung by armed propagandists on the edge of battle, or by Brissotins in the tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in the closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy of Thérèse. It was natural in the early days of Wordsworth's career to dwell most fondly on those profounder qualities to appreciate which settled in some sort the measure of a man's right to judge of poetry at all. But now we must admit the shortcomings, the failures, the defects, as no less essential elements in forming a sound judgment as to whether the seer and artist were so united in him as to justify the claim first put in by himself and afterwards maintained by his sect to a place beside the few great poets who exalt men's minds, and give a right direction and safe outlet to their passions through the imagination, while insensibly helping them toward balance of character and serenity of judgment by stimulating their sense of proportion, form, and the nice adjustment of means to ends. In none of our poets has the constant propulsion of an unbending will, and the concentration of exclusive, if I must not say somewhat narrow, sympathies done so much to make the original endowment of nature effective, and in none accordingly does the biography throw so much light on the works, nor enter so largely into their composition as an element whether of power or of weakness. Wordsworth never saw, and I think never wished to see, beyond the limits of his own consciousness and experience. He early conceived himself to be, and through life was confirmed by circumstances in the faith that he was, a "dedicated spirit,"[324] a state of mind likely to further an intense but at the same time one-sided development of the intellectual powers. The solitude in which the greater part of his mature life was passed, while it doubtless ministered to the passionate intensity of his musings upon man and nature, was, it may be suspected, harmful to him as an artist, by depriving him of any standard of proportion outside himself by which to test the comparative value of his thoughts, and by rendering him more and more incapable of that urbanity of mind which could be gained only by commerce with men more nearly on his own level, and which gives tone without lessening individuality. Wordsworth never quite saw the distinction between the eccentric and the original. For what we call originality seems not so much anything peculiar, much less anything odd, but that quality in a man which touches human nature at most points of its circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of our own powers by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings, and adequate utterance to our own stammering conceptions or emotions. The poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one crying in the wilderness to a knot of already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid the throng of men and lifting their common aspirations and sympathies (so first clearly revealed to themselves) on the wings of his song to a purer ether and a wider reach of view. We cannot, if we would, read the poetry of Wordsworth as mere poetry; at every other page we find ourselves entangled in a problem of aesthetics. The world-old question of matter and form of whether nectar _is_ of precisely the same flavor when served to us from a Grecian chalice or from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up for decision anew. The Teutonic nature has always shown a sturdy preference of the solid bone with a marrow of nutritious moral to any shadow of the same on the flowing mirror of sense. Wordsworth never lets us long forget the deeply rooted stock from which he sprang,--_vien ben dà lui_. * * * * * William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland on the 7th of April, 1770, the second of five children. His father was John Wordsworth, an attorney-at-law, and agent of Sir James Lowther, afterwards first Earl of Lonsdale. His mother was Anne Cookson, the daughter of a mercer in Penrith. His paternal ancestors had been settled immemorially at Penistone in Yorkshire, whence his grandfather had emigrated to Westmoreland. His mother, a woman, of piety and wisdom, died in March, 1778, being then in her thirty-second year. His father, who never entirely cast off the depression occasioned by her death, survived her but five years, dying in December, 1783, when William was not quite fourteen years old. The poet's early childhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, and partly with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher appears to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone's Schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her pupils, teaching them chiefly by rote, and not endeavoring to cultivate their reasoning faculties, a process by which children are apt to be converted from natural logicians into impertinent sophists. Among his schoolmates here was Mary Hutchinson, who afterwards became his wife. In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, in the year 1585, at Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawkshead is a small market-town in the vale of Esthwaite, about a third of a mile northwest of the lake. Here Wordsworth passed nine years, among a people of simple habits and scenery of a sweet and pastoral dignity. His earliest intimacies were with the mountains, lakes, and streams of his native district, and the associations with which his mind was stored during its most impressible period were noble and pure. The boys were boarded among the dames of the village, thus enjoying a freedom from scholastic restraints, which could be nothing but beneficial in a place where the temptations were only to sports that hardened the body, while they fostered a love of nature in the spirit and habits of observation in the mind. Wordsworth's ordinary amusements here were hunting and fishing, rowing, skating, and long walks around the lake and among the hills, with an occasional scamper on horseback.[325] His life as a school-boy was favorable also to his poetic development, in being identified with that of the people among whom he lived. Among men of simple habits, and where there are small diversities of condition, the feelings and passions are displayed with less restraint, and the young poet grew acquainted with that primal human basis of character where the Muse finds firm foothold, and to which he ever afterward cleared his way through all the overlying drift of conventionalism. The dalesmen were a primitive and hardy race who kept alive the traditions and often the habits of a more picturesque time. A common level of interests and social standing fostered unconventional ways of thought and speech, and friendly human sympathies. Solitude induced reflection, a reliance of the mind on its own resources, and individuality of character. Where everybody knew everybody, and everybody's father had known everybody's father, the interest of man in man was not likely to become a matter of cold hearsay and distant report When death knocked at any door in the hamlet, there was an echo from every fireside, and a wedding dropt its white flowers at every threshold. There was not a grave in the churchyard but had its story, not a crag or glen or aged tree untouched with some ideal hue of legend It was here that Wordsworth learned that homely humanity which gives such depth and sincerity to his poems. Travel, society, culture, nothing could obliterate the deep trace of that early training which enables him to speak directly to the primitive instincts of man. He was apprenticed early to the difficult art of being himself. At school he wrote some task-verses on subjects imposed by the master, and also some voluntaries of his own, equally undistinguished by any peculiar merit. But he seems to have made up his mind as early as in his fourteenth year to become a poet.[326] "It is recorded," says his biographer vaguely, "that the poet's father set him very early to learn portions of the best English poets by heart, so that at an early age he could repeat large portions of Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser."[327] The great event of Wordsworth's school days was the death of his father, who left what may be called a hypothetical estate, consisting chiefly of claims upon the first Earl of Lonsdale, the payment of which, though their justice was acknowledged, that nobleman contrived in some unexplained way to elude so long as he lived. In October, 1787, he left school for St. John's College, Cambridge. He was already, we are told, a fair Latin scholar, and had made some progress in mathematics. The earliest books we hear of his reading were Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Gulliver's Travels, and the Tale of a Tub; but at school he had also become familiar with the works of some English poets, particularly Goldsmith and Gray, of whose poems he had learned many by heart. What is more to the purpose, he had become, without knowing it, a lover of Nature in all her moods, and the same mental necessities of a solitary life which compel men to an interest in the transitory phenomena of scenery, had made him also studious of the movements of his own mind, and the mutual interaction and dependence of the external and internal universe. Doubtless his early orphanage was not without its effect in confirming a character naturally impatient of control, and his mind, left to itself, clothed itself with an indigenous growth, which grew fairly and freely, unstinted by the shadow of exotic plantations. It has become a truism, that remarkable persons have remarkable mothers; but perhaps this is chiefly true of such as have made themselves distinguished by their industry, and by the assiduous cultivation of faculties in themselves of only an average quality. It is rather to be noted how little is known of the parentage of men of the first magnitude, how often they seem in some sort foundlings, and how early an apparently adverse destiny begins the culture of those who are to encounter and master great intellectual or spiritual experiences. Of his disposition as a child little is known, but that little is characteristic. He himself tells us that he was "stiff, moody, and of violent temper." His mother said of him that he was the only one of her children about whom she felt any anxiety,--for she was sure that he would be remarkable for good or evil. Once, in resentment at some fancied injury, he resolved to kill himself but his heart failed him. I suspect that few boys of passionate temperament have escaped these momentary suggestions of despairing helplessness. "On another occasion," he says, "while I was at my grandfather's house at Penrith, along with my eldest brother Richard we were whipping tops together in the long drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid down on particular occasions. The walls were hung round with family pictures, and I said to my brother, 'Dare you strike your whip through that old lady's petticoat?' He replied, 'No, I won't.' 'Then,' said I, 'here goes,' and I struck my lash through her hooped petticoat, for which, no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was properly punished. But, possibly from some want of judgment in punishments inflicted, I had become perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather proud of it than otherwise." This last anecdote is as happily typical as a bit of Greek mythology which always prefigured the lives of heroes in the stories of their childhood. Just so do we find him afterward striking his defiant lash through the hooped petticoat of the artificial style of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the punishment of the Reviewers. Of his college life the chief record is to be found in "The Prelude." He did not distinguish himself as a scholar, and if his life had any incidents, they were of that interior kind which rarely appear in biography, though they may be of controlling influence upon the life. He speaks of reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton while at Cambridge,[328] but no reflection from them is visible in his earliest published poems. The greater part of his vacations was spent in his native Lake-country, where his only sister, Dorothy, was the companion of his rambles. She was a woman of large natural endowments, chiefly of the receptive kind, and had much to do with the formation and tendency of the poet's mind. It was she who called forth the shyer sensibilities of his nature, and taught an originally harsh and austere imagination to surround itself with fancy and feeling, as the rock fringes itself with a sun-spray of ferns. She was his first public, and belonged to that class of prophetically appreciative temperaments whose apparent office it is to cheer the early solitude of original minds with messages from the future. Through the greater part of his life she continued to be a kind of poetical conscience to him. Wordsworth's last college vacation was spent in a foot journey upon the Continent (1790). In January, 1791, he took his degree of B.A., and left Cambridge. During the summer of this year he visited Wales, and, after declining to enter upon holy orders under the plea that he was not of age for ordination, went over to France in November, and remained during the winter at Orleans. Here he became intimate with the republican General Beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations he ardently sympathized. In the spring of 1792 he was at Blois, and returned thence to Orleans, which he finally quitted in October for Paris. He remained here as long as he could with safety, and at the close of the year went back to England, thus, perhaps, escaping the fate which soon after overtook his friends the Brissotins. As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be called a fortunate one, not less so in the training and expansion of his faculties was this period of his stay in France. Born and reared in a country where the homely and familiar nestles confidingly amid the most savage and sublime forms of nature, he had experienced whatever impulses the creative faculty can receive from mountain and cloud and the voices of winds and waters, but he had known man only as an actor in fireside histories and tragedies, for which the hamlet supplied an ample stage. In France he first felt the authentic beat of a nation's heart; he was a spectator at one of those dramas where the terrible footfall of the Eumenides is heard nearer and nearer in the pauses of the action; and he saw man such as he can only be when he is vibrated by the orgasm of a national emotion. He sympathized with the hopes of France and of mankind deeply, as was fitting in a young man and a poet; and if his faith in the gregarious advancement of men was afterward shaken, he only held the more firmly by his belief in the individual, and his reverence for the human as something quite apart from the popular and above it. Wordsworth has been unwisely blamed, as if he had been recreant to the liberal instincts of his youth. But it was inevitable that a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind which always compensated itself for its artistic radicalism by an involuntary leaning toward external respectability, should recoil from whatever was convulsionary and destructive in politics, and above all in religion. He reads the poems of Wordsworth without understanding, who does not find in them the noblest incentives to faith in man and the grandeur of his destiny, founded always upon that personal dignity and virtue, the capacity for whose attainment alone makes universal liberty possible and assures its permanence. He was to make men better by opening to them the sources of an inalterable well-being; to make them free, in a sense higher than political, by showing them that these sources are within them, and that no contrivance of man can permanently emancipate narrow natures and depraved minds. His politics were always those of a poet, circling in the larger orbit of causes and principles, careless of the transitory oscillation of events. The change in his point of view (if change there was) certainly was complete soon after his return from France, and was perhaps due in part to the influence of Burke. "While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth, Against all systems built on abstract rights, Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims Of institutes and laws hallowed by time; Declares the vital power of social ties Endeared by custom; and with high disdain, Exploding upstart theory, insists Upon the allegiance to which men are born. .... Could a youth, and one In ancient story versed, whose breast hath heaved Under the weight of classic eloquence, Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired?"[329] He had seen the French for a dozen years eagerly busy in tearing up whatever had roots in the past, replacing the venerable trunks of tradition and orderly growth with liberty-poles, then striving vainly to piece together the fibres they had broken, and to reproduce artificially that sense of permanence and continuity which is the main safeguard of vigorous self-consciousness in a nation. He became a Tory through intellectual conviction, retaining, I suspect, to the last, a certain radicalism of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells us that in 1809 Sir George Beaumont said to him and Wilkie, "Wordsworth may perhaps walk in; if he do I caution you both against his terrific democratic notions"; and it must have been many years later that Wordsworth himself told Crabb Eobinson, "I have no respect whatever for Whigs, but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me." In 1802, during his tour in Scotland, he travelled on Sundays as on the other days of the week.[330] He afterwards became a theoretical churchgoer. "Wordsworth defended earnestly the Church establishment. He even said he would shed his blood for it. Nor was he disconcerted by a laugh raised against him on account of his having confessed that he knew not when he had been in a church in his own country. 'All our ministers are so vile,' said he. The mischief of allowing the clergy to depend on the caprice of the multitude he thought more than outweighed all the evils of an establishment."[331] In December, 1792, Wordsworth had returned to England, and in the following year published "Descriptive Sketches" and the "Evening Walk." He did this, as he says in one of his letters, to show that, although he had gained no honors at the University, he _could_ do something. They met with no great success, and he afterward corrected them so much as to destroy all their interest as juvenile productions, without communicating to them any of the merits of maturity. In commenting, sixty years afterward, on a couplet in one of these poems,-- "And, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines,"-- he says: "This is feebly and imperfectly expressed, but I recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me.... The moment was important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them, and I made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency." It is plain that Wordsworth's memory was playing him a trick here, misled by that instinct (it may almost be called) of consistency which leads men first to desire that their lives should have been without break or seam, and then to believe that they have been such. The more distant ranges of perspective are apt to run together in retrospection. How far could Wordsworth at fourteen have been acquainted with the poets of all ages and countries,--he who to his dying day could not endure to read Goethe and knew nothing of Calderon? It seems to me rather that the earliest influence traceable in him is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and it is, perhaps, some slight indication of its having already begun that his first volume of "Descriptive Sketches" (1793) was put forth by Johnson, who was Cowper's publisher. By and by the powerful impress of Burns is seen both in the topics of his verse and the form of his expression. But whatever their ultimate effect upon his style, certain it is that his juvenile poems were clothed in the conventional habit of the eighteenth century. "The first verses from which he remembered to have received great pleasure were Miss Carter's 'Poem on Spring,' a poem in the six-line stanza which he was particularly fond of and had composed much in,--for example, 'Ruth.'" This is noteworthy, for Wordsworth's lyric range, especially so far as tune is concerned, was always narrow. His sense of melody was painfully dull, and some of his lighter effusions, as he would have called them, are almost ludicrously wanting in grace of movement. We cannot expect in a modern poet the thrush-like improvisation, the impulsively bewitching cadences, that charm us in our Elizabethan drama and whose last warble died with Herrick; but Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have shown that the simple pathos of their music was not irrecoverable, even if the artless poignancy of their phrase be gone beyond recall. We feel this lack in Wordsworth all the more keenly if we compare such verses as "Like an army defeated The snow hath retreated And now doth fare ill On the top of the bare hill," with Goethe's exquisite _Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh_, in which the lines (as if shaken down by a momentary breeze of emotion) drop lingeringly one after another like blossoms upon turf. "The Evening Walk" and "Descriptive Sketches" show plainly the prevailing influence of Goldsmith, both in the turn of thought and the mechanism of the verse. They lack altogether the temperance of tone and judgment in selection which have made the "Traveller" and the "Deserted Village," perhaps, the most truly classical poems in the language. They bear here and there, however, the unmistakable stamp of the maturer Wordsworth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in the intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. Of this realism, from which Wordsworth never wholly freed himself, the following verses may suffice as a specimen. After describing the fate of a chamois-hunter killed by falling from a crag, his fancy goes back to the bereaved wife and son:-- "Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze, Passing his father's bones in future days, Start at the reliques of that very thigh On which so oft he prattled when a boy." In these poems there is plenty of that "poetic diction" against which Wordsworth was to lead the revolt nine years later. "To wet the peak's impracticable sides He opens of his feet the sanguine tides, Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies." Both of these passages have disappeared from the revised edition, as well as some curious outbursts of that motiveless despair which Byron made fashionable not long after. Nor are there wanting touches of fleshliness which strike us oddly as coming from Wordsworth.[332] "Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade Rest near their little plots of oaten glade, Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire To throw the 'sultry ray' of young Desire; Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow; Those shadowy breasts in love's soft light arrayed, And rising by the moon of passion swayed." The political tone is also mildened in the revision, as where he changes "despot courts" into "tyranny." One of the alterations is interesting. In the "Evening Walk" he had originally written "And bids her soldier come her wars to share Asleep on Minden's charnel hill afar." An _erratum_ at the end directs us to correct the second verse, thus:-- "Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar."[333] Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for making the owl a bodeful bird. He had himself done so in the "Evening Walk," and corrects his epithets to suit his later judgment, putting "gladsome" for "boding," and replacing "The tremulous sob of the complaining owl" by "The sportive outcry of the mocking owl." Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much changed in the revision as to make the dates appended to them a misleading anachronism. But there is one truly Wordsworthian passage which already gives us a glimpse of that passion with which he was the first to irradiate descriptive poetry and which sets him on a level with Turner. "'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour All day the floods a deepening murmur pour: The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight; Dark is the region as with coming night; But what a sudden burst of overpowering light! Triumphant on the bosom of the storm, Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form; Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline; Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold, At once to pillars turned that flame with gold; Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun The West that burns like one dilated sun, Where in a mighty crucible expire The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire." Wordsworth has made only one change in these verses, and that for the worse, by substituting "glorious" (which was already implied in "glances" and "fire-clad") for "wheeling." In later life he would have found it hard to forgive the man who should have made cliffs recline over a lake. On the whole, what strikes us as most prophetic in these poems is their want of continuity, and the purple patches of true poetry on a texture of unmistakable prose; perhaps we might add the incongruous clothing of prose thoughts in the ceremonial robes of poesy. During the same year (1793) he wrote, but did not publish, a political tract, in which he avowed himself opposed to monarchy and to the hereditary principle, and desirous of a republic, if it could be had without a revolution. He probably continued to be all his life in favor of that ideal republic "which never was on laud or sea," but fortunately he gave up politics that he might devote himself to his own nobler calling, to which politics are subordinate, and for which he found freedom enough in England as it was.[334] Dr. Wordsworth admits that his uncle's opinions were democratical so late as 1802. I suspect that they remained so in an esoteric way to the end of his days. He had himself suffered by the arbitrary selfishness of a great landholder, and he was born and bred in a part of England where there is a greater social equality than elsewhere. The look and manner of the Cumberland people especially are such as recall very vividly to a New-Englander the associations of fifty years ago, ere the change from New England to New Ireland had begun. But meanwhile, Want, which makes no distinctions of Monarchist or Republican, was pressing upon him. The debt due to his father's estate had not been paid, and Wordsworth was one of those rare idealists who esteem it the first duty of a friend of humanity to live for, and not on, his neighbor. He at first proposed establishing a periodical journal to be called "The Philanthropist," but luckily went no further with it, for the receipts from an organ of opinion which professed republicanism, and at the same time discountenanced the plans of all existing or defunct republicans, would have been necessarily scanty. There being no appearance of any demand, present or prospective, for philanthropists, he tried to get employment as correspondent of a newspaper. Here also it was impossible that he should succeed; he was too great to be merged in the editorial We, and had too well defined a private opinion on all subjects to be able to express that average of public opinion which constitutes able editorials. But so it is that to the prophet in the wilderness the birds of ill omen are already on the wing with food from heaven; and while Wordsworth's relatives were getting impatient at what they considered his waste of time, while one thought he had gifts enough to make a good parson, and another lamented the rare attorney that was lost in him,[335] the prescient muse guided the hand of Raisley Calvert while he wrote the poet's name in his will for a legacy of £900. By the death of Calvert, in 1795, this timely help came to Wordsworth at the turning point of his life and made it honest for him to write poems that will never die, instead of theatrical critiques as ephemeral as play bills, or leaders that led only to oblivion. In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sister took up their abode at Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. Here nearly two years were passed, chiefly in the study of poetry, and Wordsworth to some extent recovered from the fierce disappointment of his political dreams, and regained that equable tenor of mind which alone is consistent with a healthy productiveness. Here Coleridge, who had contrived to see something more in the "Descriptive Sketches" than the public had discovered there, first made his acquaintance. The sympathy and appreciation of an intellect like Coleridge's supplied him with that external motive to activity which is the chief use of popularity, and justified to him his opinion of his own powers It was now that the tragedy of "The Borderers" was for the most part written, and that plan of the "Lyrical Ballads" suggested which gave Wordsworth a clew to lead him out of the metaphysical labyrinth in which he was entangled. It was agreed between the two young friends, that Wordsworth was to be a philosophic poet, and, by a good fortune uncommon to such conspiracies, Nature had already consented to the arrangement. In July, 1797, the two Wordsworths removed to Allfoxden in Somersetshire, that they might be near Coleridge, who in the mean while had married and settled himself at Nether-Stowey. In November "The Borderers" was finished, and Wordsworth went up to London with his sister to offer it for the stage. The good Genius of the poet again interposing, the play was decisively rejected, and Wordsworth went back to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first tragi-comedy so common to young authors. The play has fine passages, but is as unreal as Jane Eyre. It shares with many of Wordsworth's narrative poems the defect of being written to illustrate an abstract moral theory, so that the overbearing thesis is continually thrusting the poetry to the wall. Applied to the drama, such predestination makes all the personages puppets and disenables them for being characters. Wordsworth seems to have felt this when he published "The Borderers" in 1842, and says in a note that it was "at first written ... without any view to its exhibition upon the stage." But he was mistaken. The contemporaneous letters of Coleridge to Cottle show that he was long in giving up the hope of getting it accepted by some theatrical manager. He now applied himself to the preparation of the first volume of the "Lyrical Ballads" for the press, and it was published toward the close of 1798. The book, which contained also "The Ancient Mariner" of Coleridge, attracted little notice, and that in great part contemptuous. When Mr. Cottle, the publisher, shortly after sold his copyrights to Mr. Longman, that of the "Lyrical Ballads" was reckoned at _zero_, and it was at last given up to the authors. A few persons were not wanting however, who discovered the dawn-streaks of a new day in that light which the critical fire-brigade thought to extinguish with a few contemptuous spurts of cold water.[336] Lord Byron describes himself as waking one morning and finding himself famous, and it is quite an ordinary fact, that a blaze may be made with a little saltpetre that will be stared at by thousands who would have thought the sunrise tedious. If we may believe his biographer, Wordsworth might have said that he awoke and found himself in-famous, for the publication of the "Lyrical Ballads" undoubtedly raised him to the distinction of being the least popular poet in England. Parnassus has two peaks; the one where improvising poets cluster; the other where the singer of deep secrets sits alone,--a peak veiled sometimes from the whole morning of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke of kitchen fires, only to glow the more consciously at sunset, and after nightfall to crown itself with imperishable stars. Wordsworth had that self-trust which in the man of genius is sublime, and in the man of talent insufferable. It mattered not to him though all the reviewers had been in a chorus of laughter or conspiracy of silence behind him. He went quietly over to Germany to write more Lyrical Ballads, and to begin a poem on the growth of his own mind, at a time when there were only two men in the world (himself and Coleridge) who were aware that he had one, or at least one anywise differing from those mechanically uniform ones which are stuck drearily, side by side, in the great pin-paper of society. In Germany Wordsworth dined in company with Klopstock, and after dinner they had a conversation, of which Wordsworth took notes. The respectable old poet, who was passing the evening of his days by the chimney-corner, Darby and Joan like, with his respectable Muse, seems to have been rather bewildered by the apparition of a living genius. The record is of value now chiefly for the insight it gives us into Wordsworth's mind. Among other things he said, "that it was the province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs,"--memorable words, the more memorable that a literary life of sixty years was in keeping with them. It would be instructive to know what were Wordsworth's studies during his winter in Goslar. De Quincey's statement is mere conjecture. It may be guessed fairly enough that he would seek an entrance to the German language by the easy path of the ballad, a course likely to confirm him in his theories as to the language of poetry. The Spinosism with which he has been not unjustly charged was certainly not due to any German influence, for it appears unmistakably in the "Lines composed at Tintern Abbey" in July, 1798. It is more likely to have been derived from his talks with Coleridge in 1797.[337] When Emerson visited him in 1833, he spoke with loathing of "Wilhelm Meister," a part of which he had read in Carlyle's translation apparently. There was some affectation in this, it should seem, for he had read Smollett. On the whole, it may be fairly concluded that the help of Germany in the development of his genius may be reckoned as very small, though there is certainly a marked resemblance both in form and sentiment between some of his earlier lyrics and those of Goethe. His poem of the "Thorn," though vastly more imaginative, may have been suggested by Bürger's _Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain_. The little grave _drei Spannen lang_, in its conscientious measurement, certainly recalls a famous couplet in the English poem. After spending the winter at Goslar, Wordsworth and his sister returned to England in the spring of 1799, and settled at Grasmere in Westmoreland. In 1800, the first edition of the "Lyrical Ballads" being exhausted, it was republished with the addition of another volume, Mr. Longman paying £100 for the copyright of two editions. The book passed to a second edition in 1802, and to a third in 1805.[338] Wordsworth sent a copy of it, with a manly letter, to Mr. Fox, particularly recommending to his attention the poems "Michael" and "The Brothers," as displaying the strength and permanence among a simple and rural population of those domestic affections which were certain to decay gradually under the influence of manufactories and poor houses. Mr. Fox wrote a civil acknowledgment, saying that his favorites among the poems were "Harry Gill," "We are Seven," "The Mad Mother," and "The Idiot," but that he was prepossessed against the use of blank verse for simple subjects. Any political significance in the poems he was apparently unable to see. To this second edition Wordsworth prefixed an argumentative Preface, in which he nailed to the door of the cathedral of English song the critical theses which he was to maintain against all comers in his poetry and his life. It was a new thing for an author to undertake to show the goodness of his verses by the logic and learning of his prose; but Wordsworth carried to the reform of poetry all that fervor and faith which had lost their political object, and it is another proof of the sincerity and greatness of his mind, and of that heroic simplicity which is their concomitant, that he could do so calmly what was sure to seem ludicrous to the greater number of his readers. Fifty years have since demonstrated that the true judgment of one man outweighs any counterpoise of false judgment, and that the faith of mankind is guided to a man only by a well-founded faith in himself. To this _Defensio_ Wordsworth afterward added a supplement, and the two form a treatise of permanent value for philosophic statement and decorous English. Their only ill effect has been, that they have encouraged many otherwise deserving young men to set a Sibylline value on their verses in proportion as they were unsalable. The strength of an argument for self reliance drawn from the example of a great man depends wholly on the greatness of him who uses it; such arguments being like coats of mail, which, though they serve the strong against arrow-flights and lance-thrusts, may only suffocate the weak or sink him the sooner in the waters of oblivion. An advertisement prefixed to the "Lyrical Ballads," as originally published in one volume, warned the reader that "they were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far _the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes_ of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." In his preface to the second edition, in two volumes, Wordsworth already found himself forced to shift his ground a little (perhaps in deference to the wider view and finer sense of Coleridge), and now says of the former volume that "it was published as an experiment which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement, _a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation_, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted which a poet may _rationally endeavor_ to impart."[339] Here is evidence of a retreat towards a safer position, though Wordsworth seems to have remained unconvinced at heart, and for many years longer clung obstinately to the passages of bald prose into which his original theory had betrayed him. In 1815 his opinions had undergone a still further change, and an assiduous study of the qualities of his own mind and of his own poetic method (the two subjects in which alone he was ever a thorough scholar) had convinced him that poetry was in no sense that appeal to the understanding which is implied by the words "rationally endeavor to impart." In the preface of that year he says, "The observations prefixed to that portion of these volumes which was published many years ago under the title of 'Lyrical Ballads' have so little of special application to the greater part of the present enlarged and diversified collection, that they could not with propriety stand as an introduction to it." It is a pity that he could not have become an earlier convert to Coleridge's pithy definition, that "prose was words in their best order and poetry the _best_ words in the best order." But idealization was something that Wordsworth was obliged to learn painfully. It did not come to him naturally as to Spenser and Shelley and to Coleridge in his higher moods. Moreover, it was in the too frequent choice of subjects incapable of being idealized without a manifest jar between theme and treatment that Wordsworth's great mistake lay. For example, in "The Blind Highland Boy" he had originally the following stanzas:-- "Strong is the current, but be mild, Ye waves, and spare the helpless child! If ye in anger fret or chafe, A bee-hive would be ship as safe As that in which he sails. "But say, what was it? Thought of fear! Well may ye tremble when ye hear! --A household tub like one of those Which women use to wash their clothes, This carried the blind boy." In endeavoring to get rid of the downright vulgarity of phrase in the last stanza, Wordsworth invents an impossible tortoise-shell, and thus robs his story of the reality which alone gave it a living interest. Any extemporized raft would have floated the boy down to immortality. But Wordsworth never quite learned the distinction between Fact, which suffocates the Muse, and Truth, which is the very breath of her nostrils. Study and self-culture did much for him, but they never quite satisfied him that he was capable of making a mistake. He yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on certain points, and gave up, for example, the ludicrous exactness of "I've measured it from side to side, 'T is three feet long and two feet wide." But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to his dying day he could never quite shake off that habit of over-minute detail which renders the narratives of uncultivated people so tedious, and sometimes so distasteful.[340] "Simon Lee," after his latest revision, still contains verses like these:-- "And he is lean and he is sick; His body, dwindled and awry, Rests upon ankles swollen and thick; His legs are thin and dry; * * * * * "Few months of life he has in store, As he to you will tell, For still, the more he works, the more Do his weak ankles swell,"-- which are not only prose, but _bad_ prose, and moreover guilty of the same fault for which Wordsworth condemned Dr. Johnson's famous parody on the ballad-style,--that their "_matter_ is contemptible." The sonorousness of conviction with which Wordsworth sometimes gives utterance to commonplaces of thought and trivialities of sentiment has a ludicrous effect on the profane and even on the faithful in unguarded moments. We are reminded of a passage in the "Excursion":-- "List! I heard From yon huge breast of rock _a solemn bleat, Sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice_." In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with Lamb began, and was thenceforward never interrupted. He continued to live at Grasmere, conscientiously diligent in the composition of poems, secure of finding the materials of glory within and around him; for his genius taught him that inspiration is no product of a foreign shore, and that no adventurer ever found it, though he wandered as long as Ulysses. Meanwhile the appreciation of the best minds and the gratitude of the purest hearts gradually centred more and more towards him. In 1802 he made a short visit to France, in company with Miss Wordsworth, and soon after his return to England was married to Mary Hutchinson, on the 4th of October of the same year. Of the good fortune of this marriage no other proof is needed than the purity and serenity of his poems, and its record is to be sought nowhere else. On the 18th of June, 1803, his first child, John, was born, and on the 14th of August of the same year he set out with his sister on a foot journey into Scotland Coleridge was their companion during a part of this excursion, of which Miss Wordsworth kept a full diary. In Scotland he made the acquaintance of Scott, who recited to him a part of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," then in manuscript. The travellers returned to Grasmere on the 25th of September. It was during this year that Wordsworth's intimacy with the excellent Sir George Beaumont began. Sir George was an amateur painter of considerable merit, and his friendship was undoubtedly of service to Wordsworth in making him familiar with the laws of a sister art and thus contributing to enlarge the sympathies of his criticism, the tendency of which was toward too great exclusiveness. Sir George Beaumont, dying in 1827, did not forego his regard for the poet, but contrived to hold his affection in mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of £100, to defray the charges of a yearly journey. In March, 1805, the poet's brother, John, lost his life by the shipwreck of the Abergavenny East-Indiaman, of which he was captain. He was a man of great purity and integrity, and sacrificed himself to his sense of duty by refusing to leave the ship till it was impossible to save him. Wordsworth was deeply attached to him, and felt such grief at his death as only solitary natures like his are capable of, though mitigated by a sense of the heroism which was the cause of it. The need of mental activity as affording an outlet to intense emotion may account for the great productiveness of this and the following year. He now completed "The Prelude," wrote "The Wagoner," and increased the number of his smaller poems enough to fill two volumes, which were published in 1807. This collection, which contained some of the most beautiful of his shorter pieces, and among others the incomparable Odes to Duty and on Immortality, did not reach a second edition till 1815. The reviewers had another laugh, and rival poets pillaged while they scoffed, particularly Byron, among whose verses a bit of Wordsworth showed as incongruously as a sacred vestment on the back of some buccaneering plunderer of an abbey.[341] There was a general combination to put him down, but on the other hand there was a powerful party in his favor, consisting of William Wordsworth. He not only continued in good heart himself, but, reversing the order usual on such occasions, kept up the spirits of his friends.[342] Wordsworth passed the winter of 1806-7 in a house of Sir George Beaumont's, at Coleorton in Leicestershire, the cottage at Grasmere having become too small for his increased family. On his return to the Vale of Grasmere he rented the house at Allan Bank, where he lived three years. During this period he appears to have written very little poetry, for which his biographer assigns as a primary reason the smokiness of the Allan Bank chimneys. This will hardly account for the failure of the summer crop, especially as Wordsworth composed chiefly in the open air. It did not prevent him from writing a pamphlet upon the Convention of Cintra, which was published too late to attract much attention, though Lamb says that its effect upon him was like that which one of Milton's tracts might have had upon a contemporary.[343] It was at Allan Bank that Coleridge dictated "The Friend," and Wordsworth contributed to it two essays, one in answer to a letter of Mathetes[344] (Professor Wilson), and the other on Epitaphs, republished in the Notes to "The Excursion." Here also he wrote his "Description of the Scenery of the Lakes." Perhaps a truer explanation of the comparative silence of Wordsworth's Muse during these years is to be found in the intense interest which he took in current events, whose variety, picturesqueness, and historical significance were enough to absorb all the energies of his imagination. In the spring of 1811 Wordsworth removed to the Parsonage at Grasmere. Here he remained two years, and here he had his second intimate experience of sorrow in the loss of two of his children, Catharine and Thomas, one of whom died 4th June, and the other 1st December, 1812.[345] Early in 1813 he bought Rydal Mount, and, having removed thither, changed his abode no more during the rest of his life. In March of this year he was appointed Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland, an office whose receipts rendered him independent, and whose business he was able to do by deputy, thus leaving him ample leisure for nobler duties. De Quincey speaks of this appointment as an instance of the remarkable good luck which waited upon Wordsworth through his whole life. In our view it is only another illustration of that scripture which describes the righteous as never forsaken. Good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty. Wordsworth owed his nomination to the friendly exertions of the Earl of Lonsdale, who desired to atone as far as might be for the injustice of the first Earl, and who respected the honesty of the man more than he appreciated the originality of the poet.[346] The Collectorship at Whitehaven (a more lucrative office) was afterwards offered to Wordsworth, and declined. He had enough for independence, and wished nothing more. Still later, on the death of the Stamp-Distributor for Cumberland, a part of that district was annexed to Westmoreland, and Wordsworth's income was raised to something more than £1,000 a year. In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland, visiting Yarrow in company with the Ettrick Shepherd. During this year "the Excursion" was published, in an edition of five hundred copies, which supplied the demand for six years. Another edition of the same number of copies was published in 1827, and not exhausted till 1834. In 1815 "The White Doe of Rylstone" appeared, and in 1816 "A Letter to a Friend of Burns," in which Wordsworth gives his opinion upon the limits to be observed by the biographers of literary men. It contains many valuable suggestions, but allows hardly scope enough for personal details, to which he was constitutionally indifferent.[347] Nearly the same date may be ascribed to a rhymed translation of the first three books of the Aeneid, a specimen of which was printed in the Cambridge "Philological Museum" (1832). In 1819 "Peter Bell," written twenty years before, was published, and, perhaps in consequence of the ridicule of the reviewers, found a more rapid sale than any of his previous volumes. "The Wagoner," printed in the same year, was less successful. His next publication was the volume of Sonnets on the river Duddon, with some miscellaneous poems, 1820. A tour on the Continent in 1820 furnished the subjects for another collection, published in 1822. This was followed in the same year by the volume of "Ecclesiastical Sketches." His subsequent publications were "Yarrow Revisited," 1835, and the tragedy of "The Borderers," 1842. During all these years his fame was increasing slowly but steadily, and his age gathered to itself the reverence and the troops of friends which his poems and the nobly simple life reflected in them deserved. Public honors followed private appreciation. In 1838 the University of Dublin conferred upon him the degree of D.C.L. In 1839 Oxford did the same, and the reception of the poet (now in his seventieth year) at the University was enthusiastic. In 1842 he resigned his office of Stamp-Distributor, and Sir Robert Peel had the honor of putting him upon the civil list for a pension of £300. In 1843 he was appointed Laureate, with the express understanding that it was a tribute of respect, involving no duties except such as might be self-imposed. His only official production was an Ode for the installation of Prince Albert as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. His life was prolonged yet seven years, almost, it should seem, that he might receive that honor which he had truly conquered for himself by the unflinching bravery of a literary life of half a century, unparalleled for the scorn with which its labors were received, and the victorious acknowledgment which at last crowned them. Surviving nearly all his contemporaries, he had, if ever any man had, a foretaste of immortality, enjoying in a sort his own posthumous renown, for the hardy slowness of its growth gave a safe pledge of its durability. He died on the 23d of April, 1850, the anniversary of the death of Shakespeare. We have thus briefly sketched the life of Wordsworth,--a life uneventful even for a man of letters, a life like that of an oak, of quiet self development, throwing out stronger roots toward the side whence the prevailing storm-blasts blow, and of tougher fibre in proportion to the rocky nature of the soil in which it grows. The life and growth of his mind, and the influences which shaped it, are to be looked for, even more than is the case with most poets, in his works, for he deliberately recorded them there. Of his personal characteristics little is related. He was somewhat above the middle height, but, according to De Quincey, of indifferent figure, the shoulders being narrow and drooping. His finest feature was the eye, which was gray and full of spiritual light. Leigh Hunt says: "I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired, so supernatural. They were like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes." Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and Haydon that he had none of form. The best likeness of him, in De Quincey's judgment, is the portrait of Milton prefixed to Richardson's notes on Paradise Lost. He was active in his habits, composing in the open air, and generally dictating his poems. His daily life was regular, simple, and frugal; his manners were dignified and kindly; and in his letters and recorded conversations it is remarkable how little that was personal entered into his judgment of contemporaries. The true rank of Wordsworth among poets is, perhaps, not even yet to be fairly estimated, so hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of judgment uninflamed by the tumult of partisanship which besets the doors. Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great poet, at a time when the artificial school of poetry was enthroned with all the authority of long succession and undisputed legitimacy, it was almost inevitable that Wordsworth, who, both by nature and judgment was a rebel against the existing order, should become a partisan. Unfortunately, he became not only the partisan of a system, but of William Wordsworth as its representative. Right in general principle, he thus necessarily became wrong in particulars. Justly convinced that greatness only achieves its ends by implicitly obeying its own instincts, he perhaps reduced the following his instincts too much to a system, mistook his own resentments for the promptings of his natural genius, and, compelling principle to the measure of his own temperament or even of the controversial exigency of the moment, fell sometimes into the error of making naturalness itself artificial. If a poet resolve to be original, it will end commonly in his being merely peculiar. Wordsworth himself departed more and more in practice, as he grew older, from the theories which he had laid down in his prefaces;[348] but those theories undoubtedly had a great effect in retarding the growth of his fame. He had carefully constructed a pair of spectacles through which his earlier poems were to be studied, and the public insisted on looking through them at his mature works, and were consequently unable to see fairly what required a different focus. He forced his readers to come to his poetry with a certain amount of conscious preparation, and thus gave them beforehand the impression of something like mechanical artifice, and deprived them of the contented repose of implicit faith. To the child a watch seems to be a living creature; but Wordsworth would not let his readers be children, and did injustice to himself by giving them an uneasy doubt whether creations which really throbbed with the very heart's-blood of genius, and were alive with nature's life of life, were not contrivances of wheels and springs. A naturalness which we are told to expect has lost the crowning grace of nature. The men who walked in Cornelius Agrippa's visionary gardens had probably no more pleasurable emotion than that of a shallow wonder, or an equally shallow self-satisfaction in thinking they had hit upon the secret of the thaumaturgy; but to a tree that has grown as God willed we come without a theory and with no botanical predilections, enjoying it simply and thankfully; or the Imagination recreates for us its past summers and winters, the birds that have nested and sung in it, the sheep that have clustered in its shade, the winds that have visited it, the cloud-bergs that have drifted over it, and the snows that have ermined it in winter. The Imagination is a faculty that flouts at foreordination, and Wordsworth seemed to do all he could to cheat his readers of her company by laying out paths with a peremptory _Do not step off the gravel!_ at the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every conceivable emotion, with guide-boards to tell each when and where it must be caught. But if these things stood in the way of immediate appreciation, he had another theory which interferes more seriously with the total and permanent effect of his poems. He was theoretically determined not only to be a philosophic poet, but to be a _great_ philosophic poet, and to this end he must produce an epic. Leaving aside the question whether the epic be obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether the history of a single man's mind is universal enough in its interest to furnish all the requirements of the epic machinery, and it may be more than doubted whether a poet's philosophy be ordinary metaphysics, divisible into chapter and section. It is rather something which is more energetic in a word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts unclose themselves instinctively at its simple _Open sesame!_ while they would stand firm against the reading of the whole body of philosophy. In point of fact, the one element of greatness which "The Excursion" possesses indisputably is heaviness. It is only the episodes that are universally read, and the effect of these is diluted by the connecting and accompanying lectures on metaphysics. Wordsworth had his epic mould to fill, and, like Benvenuto Cellini in casting his Perseus, was forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal, lest it should run short. Separated from the rest, the episodes are perfect poems in their kind, and without example in the language. Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong minds, was a good critic of the substance of poetry, but somewhat niggardly in the allowance he made for those subsidiary qualities which make it the charmer of leisure and the employment of minds without definite object. It may be doubted, indeed, whether he set much store by any contemporary writing but his own, and whether he did not look upon poetry too exclusively as an exercise rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the imagination.[349] He says of himself, speaking of his youth:-- "In fine, I was a better judge of thoughts than words, Misled in estimating words, not only By common inexperience of youth, But by the trade in classic niceties, The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase From languages that want the living voice To carry meaning to the natural heart; To tell us what is passion, what is truth, What reason, what simplicity and sense."[350] Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this was always true of him, and his thought seems often to lean upon a word too weak to bear its weight. No reader of adequate insight can help regretting that he did not earlier give himself to "the trade of classic niceties." It was precisely this which gives to the blank-verse of Landor the severe dignity and reserved force which alone among later poets recall the tune of Milton, and to which Wordsworth never attained. Indeed, Wordsworth's blank-verse (though the passion be profounder) is always essentially that of Cowper. They were alike also in their love of outward nature and of simple things. The main difference between them is one of scenery rather than of sentiment, between the life-long familiar of the mountains and the dweller on the plain. It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest powers of the poetic mind were associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and commonplace. It is in the understanding (always prosaic) that the great golden veins of his imagination are imbedded.[351] He wrote too much to write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes-army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand, that march safely down to posterity. He set tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to make Jove's eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout "The Prelude" and "The Excursion" he seems striving to bind the wizard Imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the particles cohere. There is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress wearisome. Yet with what splendors as of mountain-sunsets are we rewarded! what golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching heavenward with angels ascending and descending! what haunting harmonies hover around us deep and eternal like the undying barytone of the sea! and if we are compelled to fare through sands and desert wildernesses, how often do we not hear airy shapes that syllable our names with a startling personal appeal to our highest consciousness and our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for in vain in any other poet! Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot but allow, and what is left will show how truly great he was. He had no humor, no dramatic power, and his temperament was of that dry and juiceless quality, that in all his published correspondence you shall not find a letter, but only essays. If we consider carefully where he was most successful, we shall find that it was not so much in description of natural scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid expression of the effect produced by external objects and events upon his own mind, and of the shape and hue (perhaps momentary) which they in turn took from his mood or temperament. His finest passages are always monologues. He had a fondness for particulars, and there are parts of his poems which remind us of local histories in the undue relative importance given to trivial matters. He was the historian of Wordsworthshire. This power of particularization (for it is as truly a power as generalization) is what gives such vigor and greatness to single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single thought or sentiment. It was this that made him so fond of the sonnet. That sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was never self-denying enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary and meditative temper, and it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of what was permanent in literature) liked him best. Its narrow bounds, but fourteen paces from end to end, turn into a virtue his too common fault of giving undue prominence to every passing emotion. He excels in monologue, and the law of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy. In "The Excursion" we are driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict of extenuating circumstances. His mind had not that reach and elemental movement of Milton's, which, like the tradewind, gathered to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter; some deep with silks and spicery, some brooding over the silent thunders of their battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of canvas strained by the unifying breath of their common epic impulse. It was an organ that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable equally of the trumpet's ardors or the slim delicacy of the flute, and sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his prose, as if he touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. If Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral reed. And it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream, but that which Apollo breathed through, tending the flocks of Admetus,--that which Pan endowed with every melody of the visible universe,--the same in which the soul of the despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her dual nature,--so that ever and anon, amid the notes of human joy or sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone, thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity. Wordsworth's absolute want of humor, while it no doubt confirmed his self-confidence by making him insensible both to the comical incongruity into which he was often led by his earlier theory concerning the language of poetry and to the not unnatural ridicule called forth by it, seems to have been indicative of a certain dulness of perception in other directions.[352] We cannot help feeling that the material of his nature was essentially prose, which, in his inspired moments, he had the power of transmuting, but which, whenever the inspiration failed or was factitious, remained obstinately leaden. The normal condition of many poets would seem to approach that temperature to which Wordsworth's mind could be raised only by the white heat of profoundly inward passion. And in proportion to the intensity needful to make his nature thoroughly aglow is the very high quality of his best verses. They seem rather the productions of nature than of man, and have the lastingness of such, delighting our age with the same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed forever in immutable grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavoring it, falls more below himself, and is, more even than many poets his inferiors in imaginative quality, a poet of passages. Indeed, one cannot help having the feeling sometimes that the poem is there for the sake of these passages, rather than that these are the natural jets and elations of a mind energized by the rapidity of its own motion. In other words, the happy couplet or gracious image seems not to spring from the inspiration of the poem conceived as a whole, but rather to have dropped of itself into the mind of the poet in one of his rambles, who then, in a less rapt mood, has patiently built up around it a setting of verse too often ungraceful in form and of a material whose cheapness may cast a doubt on the priceless quality of the gem it encumbers.[353] During the most happily productive period of his life, Wordsworth was impatient of what may be called the mechanical portion of his art. His wife and sister seem from the first to have been his scribes. In later years, he had learned and often insisted on the truth that poetry was an art no less than a gift, and corrected his poems in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment. But he certainly had more of the vision than of the faculty divine, and was always a little numb on the side of form and proportion. Perhaps his best poem in these respects is the "Laodamia," and it is not uninstructive to learn from his own lips that "it cost him more trouble than almost anything of equal length he had ever written." His longer poems (miscalled epical) have no more intimate bond of union than their more or less immediate relation to his own personality. Of character other than his own he had but a faint conception, and all the personages of "The Excursion" that are not Wordsworth are the merest shadows of himself upon mist, for his self-concentrated nature was incapable of projecting itself into the consciousness of other men and seeing the springs of action at their source in the recesses of individual character. The best parts of these longer poems are bursts of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers were always clumsy at the _callida junctura_. The stream of narration is sluggish, if varied by times with pleasing reflections (_viridesque placido aequore sylvas_); we are forced to do our own rowing, and only when the current is hemmed in by some narrow gorge of the poet's personal consciousness do we feel ourselves snatched along on the smooth but impetuous rush of unmistakable inspiration. The fact that what is precious in Wordsworth's poetry was (more truly even than with some greater poets than he) a gift rather than an achievement should always be borne in mind in taking the measure of his power. I know not whether to call it height or depth, this peculiarity of his, but it certainly endows those parts of his work which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian with an unexpectedness and impressiveness of originality such as we feel in the presence of Nature herself. He seems to have been half conscious of this, and recited his own poems to all comers with an enthusiasm of wondering admiration that would have been profoundly comic[354] but for its simple sincerity and for the fact that William Wordsworth, Esquire, of Rydal Mount, was one person, and the William Wordsworth whom he so heartily reverenced quite another. We recognize two voices in him, as Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch. If the prophet cease from dictating, the amanuensis, rather than be idle, employs his pen in jotting down some anecdotes of his master, how he one day went out and saw an old woman, and the next day did _not_, and so came home and dictated some verses on this ominous phenomenon, and how another day he saw a cow. These marginal annotations have been carelessly taken up into the text, have been religiously held by the pious to be orthodox scripture, and by dexterous exegesis have been made to yield deeply oracular meanings. Presently the real prophet takes up the word again and speaks as one divinely inspired, the Voice of a higher and invisible power. Wordsworth's better utterances have the bare sincerity, the absolute abstraction from time and place, the immunity from decay, that belong to the grand simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more his own than ours and every man's, the word of the inalterable Mind. This gift of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament, and accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product belongs to the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.[355] He did not grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant. One of the most delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is the poet Albert, who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly idealizing hand, does his best afterwards to look like it. Many of Wordsworth's later poems seem like rather unsuccessful efforts to resemble his former self. They would never, as Sir John Harrington says of poetry, "keep a child from play and an old man from the chimney-corner."[356] Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted a junior counsel who was arguing certain obvious points of law at needless length, by saying, "Brother Jones, there are _some_ things which a Supreme Court of the United States sitting in equity may be presumed to know." Wordsworth has this fault of enforcing and restating obvious points till the reader feels as if his own intelligence were somewhat underrated. He is over-conscientious in giving us full measure, and once profoundly absorbed in the sound of his own voice, he knows not when to stop. If he feel himself flagging, he has a droll way of keeping the floor, as it were, by asking himself a series of questions sometimes not needing, and often incapable of answer. There are three stanzas of such near the close of the First Part of "Peter Bell," where Peter first catches a glimpse of the dead body in the water, all happily incongruous, and ending with one which reaches the height of comicality:-- "Is it a fiend that to a stake Of fire his desperate self is tethering? Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell, In solitary ward or cell, Ten thousand miles from all his brethren?" The same want of humor which made him insensible to incongruity may perhaps account also for the singular unconsciousness of disproportion which so often strikes us in his poetry. For example, a little farther on in "Peter Bell" we find:-- "_Now_--like a tempest-shattered bark That overwhelmed and prostrate lies, And in a moment to the verge Is lifted of a foaming surge-- Full suddenly the Ass doth rise!" And one cannot help thinking that the similes of the huge stone, the sea-beast, and the cloud, noble as they are in themselves, are somewhat too lofty for the service to which they are put.[357] The movement of Wordsworth's mind was too slow and his mood to meditative for narrative poetry. He values his own thoughts and reflections too much to sacrifice the least of them to the interests of his story. Moreover, it is never action that interests him, but the subtle motives that lead to or hinder it. "The Wagoner" involuntarily suggests a comparison with "Tam O'Shanter" infinitely to its own disadvantage. "Peter Bell," full though it be of profound touches and subtle analysis, is lumbering and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced to confess that he did not like it. "The White Doe," the most Wordsworthian of them all in the best meaning of the epithet, is also only the more truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What charms in Wordsworth and will charm forever is the "Happy tone Of meditation slipping in between The beauty coming and the beauty gone," A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their words to the tune of our own feelings and fancies, in the charm of their manner, indefinable as the sympathetic grace of woman, _are_ everything to us without our being able to say that they are much in themselves. They rather narcotize than fortify. Wordsworth must subject our mood to his own before he admits us to his intimacy; but, once admitted, it is for life, and we find ourselves in his debt, not for what he has been to us in our hours of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a reinforcement of faltering purpose and personal independence of character. His system of a Nature-cure, first professed by Dr. Jean Jaques and continued by Cowper, certainly breaks down as a whole. The Solitary of "The Excursion," who has not been cured of his scepticism by living among the medicinal mountains, is, so far as we can see, equally proof against the lectures of Pedler and Parson. Wordsworth apparently felt that this would be so, and accordingly never saw his way clear to finishing the poem. But the treatment, whether a panacea or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as it inculcates abstinence, exercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure, indeed, that the Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in constitutions less vigorous than Wordsworth's what Milton would call a fugitive and cloistered virtue at a dear expense of manlier qualities. The ancients and our own Elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by taking a frank delight in its action and passion and by grappling with the facts of this world, rather than muddling themselves over the insoluble problems of another. If they had not discovered the picturesque, as we understand it, they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his destiny, and would have seen something ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the spectacle of a grown man running to hide his head in the apron of the Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in the tussle for existence. But when, as I have said, our impartiality has made all those qualifications and deductions against which even the greatest poet may not plead his privilege, what is left to Wordsworth is enough to justify his fame. Even where his genius is wrapped in clouds, the unconquerable lightning of imagination struggles through, flashing out unexpected vistas, and illuminating the humdrum pathway of our daily thought with a radiance of momentary consciousness that seems like a revelation. If it be the most delightful function of the poet to set our lives to music, yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our maturer gratitude if he do his part also as moralist and philosopher to purify and enlighten; if he define and encourage our vacillating perceptions of duty; if he piece together our fragmentary apprehensions of our own life and that larger life whose unconscious instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected map of experience a coherent chart. In the great poets there is an exquisite sensibility both of soul and sense that sympathizes like gossamer sea-moss with every movement of the element in which it floats, but which is rooted on the solid rock of our common sympathies. Wordsworth shows less of this finer feminine fibre of organization than one or two of his contemporaries, notably than Coleridge or Shelley; but he was a masculine thinker, and in his more characteristic poems there is always a kernel of firm conclusion from far-reaching principles that stimulates thought and challenges meditation. Groping in the dark passages of life, we come upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall that gives us our bearings and enables us to find an outlet. Compared with Goethe we feel that he lacks that serene impartiality of mind which results from breadth of culture; nay, he seems narrow, insular, almost provincial. He reminds us of those saints of Dante who gather brightness by revolving on their own axis. But through this very limitation of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the impressiveness which results from eagerness of personal conviction. If we read Wordsworth through, as I have just done, we find ourselves changing our mind about him at every other page, so uneven is he. If we read our favorite poems or passages only, he will seem uniformly great. And even as regards "The Excursion" we should remember how few long poems will bear consecutive reading. For my part I know of but one,--the Odyssey. None of our great poets can be called popular in any exact sense of the word, for the highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that shore between our abiding divine and our fluctuating human nature, rooted in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid bare, and otherwise visible only at exceptional moments of entire calm and clearness. Of no other poet except Shakespeare have so many phrases become household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those faint and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentle ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won for himself a secure immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds at their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs not to bid "Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh To rare Beaumond, and learned Beaumond lie A little nearer Spenser"; for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with whom he is now enrolled as fifth in the succession of the great English Poets. Footnotes: [323] "I pay many little visits to the family in the churchyard at Grasmere," writes James Dixon (an old servant of Wordsworth) to Crabb Robinson, with a simple, one might almost say canine pathos, thirteen years after his master's death. Wordsworth was always considerate and kind with his servants, Robinson tells us. [324] In the Prelude he attributes this consecreation to a sunrise seen (during a college vacation) as he walked homeward from some village festival where he had danced all night-- "My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me; bond unknown to me Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated spirit."--B. IV. [325] Prelude, Book II. [326] "I to the muses have been bound, These fourteen years, by strong indentures." _Idiot Boy_ (1798). [327] I think this more than doubtful, for I find no traces of the influence of any of these poets in his earlier writings. Goldsmith was evidently his model in the Descriptive Sketches and the Evening Walk. I speak of them as originally printed. [328] Prelude, Book III. He studied Italian also at Cambridge, his teacher, whose name was Isola, had formerly taught the poet Gray. It may be pretty certainly inferred, however, that his first systematic study of English poetry was due to the copy of Andersen's British Poets, left with him by his sailor brother John on setting out for his last voyage in 1805. [329] Prelude, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring to a still earlier date. "Wordsworth went in powder, and with cocked hat under his arm, to the Marchioness of Stafford's rout." (Southey to Miss Barker, May, 1806.) [330] This was probably one reason for the long suppression of Miss Wordsworth's journal, which she had evidently prepared for publication as early as 1805. [331] Crabb Robinson, I. 250, Am. Ed. [332] Wordsworth's purity afterwards grew sensitive almost to prudery. The late Mr. Clough told me that he heard him at Dr. Arnold's table denounce the first line in Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn as indecent, and Haydon records that when he saw the group of Cupid and Psyche he exclaimed, "The dev-ils!" [333] The whole passage is omitted in the revised edition. The original, a quarto pamphlet, is now very rare, but fortunately Charles Lamb's copy of it is now owned by my friend Professor C. E. Norton. [334] Wordsworth showed his habitual good sense in never sharing, so far as is known, the communistic dreams of his friends Coleridge and Southey. The latter of the two had, to be sure, renounced them shortly after his marriage, and before his acquaintance with Wordsworth began. But Coleridge seems to have clung to them longer. There is a passage in one of his letters to Cottle (without date, but apparently written in the spring of 1798) which would imply that Wordsworth had been accused of some kind of social heresy. "Wordsworth has been caballed against _so long and so loudly_ that he has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden estate to let him the house after their first agreement is expired." Perhaps, after all, it was Wordsworth's insulation of character and habitual want of sympathy with anything but the moods of his own mind that rendered him incapable of this copartnery of enthusiasm. He appears to have regarded even his sister Dora (whom he certainly loved as much as it was possible for him to love anything but his own poems) as a kind of tributary dependency of his genius, much as a mountain might look down on one of its ancillary spurs. [335] Speaking to one of his neighbors in 1845 he said, "that, after he had finished his college course, he was in great doubt as to what his future employment should be. He did not feel himself good enough for the Church; he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined for that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience and his impulses would have made life a torture. He also shrank from the Law, although Southey often told him that he was well fitted for the higher parts of the profession. He had studied military history with great interest, and the strategy of war, and he always fancied that he had talents for command, and he at one time thought of a military life, but then he was without connections, and he felt, if he were ordered to the West Indies, his talents would not save him from the yellow fever, and he gave that up." (Memoirs, II. 466.) It is curious to fancy Wordsworth a soldier. Certain points of likeness between him and Wellington have often struck me. They resemble each other in practical good sense, fidelity to duty, courage, and also in a kind of precise uprightness which made their personal character somewhat uninteresting. But what was decorum in Wellington was piety in Woidsworth, and the entire absence of imagination (the great point of dissimilarity) perhaps helped as much as anything to make Wellington a great commander. [336] Cottle says, "The sale was so slow and the severity of most of the reviews so great that its progress to oblivion seemed to be certain." But the notices in the Monthly and Critical Reviews (then the most influential) were fair, and indeed favorable, especially to Wordsworth's share in the volume. The Monthly says, "So much genius and originality are discovered in this publication that we wish to see another from the same hand." The Critical, after saying that "in the whole range of English, poetry we scarcely recollect anything superior to a passage in Lines written near Tintern Abbey," sums up thus: "Yet every piece discovers genius; and ill as the author has frequently employed his talents, they certainly rank him with the best of living poets." Such treatment cannot surely be called discouraging. [337] A very improbable story of Coleridge's in the Biographia Literaria represents the two friends as having incurred a suspicion of treasonable dealings with the French enemy by their constant references to a certain "Spy Nosey." The story at least seems to show how they pronounced the name, which was exactly in accordance with the usage of the last generation in New England. [338] Wordsworth found (as other original minds have since done) a hearing in America sooner than in England. James Humphreys, a Philadelphia bookseller, was encouraged by a sufficient _list of subscribers_ to reprint the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads. The second English edition, however, having been published before he had wholly completed his reprinting, was substantially followed in the first American, which was published in 1802. [339] Some of the weightiest passages in this Preface, as it is now printed, were inserted without notice of date in the edition of 1815. [340] "On my alluding to the line, "'Three feet long and two feet wide,' "and confessing that I dared not read them aloud in company, he said, 'They ought to be liked.'" (Crabb Robinson, 9th May, 1815.) His ordinary answer to criticisms was that he considered the power to appreciate the passage criticised as a test of the critic's capacity to judge of poetry at all. [341] Byron, then in his twentieth year, wrote a review of these volumes not, on the whole, unfair. Crabb Robinson is reported as saying that Wordsworth was indignant at the Edinburgh Review's attack on Hours of Idleness. "The young man will do something if he goes on," he said. [342] The Rev. Dr. Wordsworth has encumbered the memory of his uncle with two volumes of Memoirs, which for confused dreariness are only matched by the Rev. Mark Noble's "History of the Protectorate House of Cromwell." It is a misfortune that his materials were not put into the hands of Professor Reed, whose notes to the American edition are among the most valuable parts of it, as they certainly are the clearest. The book contains, however, some valuable letters of Wordsworth, and those relating to this part of his life should be read by every student of his works, for the light they throw upon the principles which governed him in the composition of his poems. In a letter to Lady Beaumont (May 21, 1807) he says, "Trouble not yourself upon their present reception, of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny!--to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that is all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves.... To conclude, my ears are stone dead to this idle buzz [of hostile criticism] and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings and; after what I have said, I am sure yours will be the same I doubt not that you will share with me an invincible confidence that my writings (and among them these little poems) will co-operate with the benign tendencies in human nature and society wherever found; and that they will in their degree be efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier." Here is an odd reversal of the ordinary relation between an unpopular poet and his little public of admirers; it is he who keeps up their spirits, and supplies them with faith from his own inexhaustible cistern. [343] "Wordsworth's pamphlet will fail of producing any general effect, because the sentences are long and involved; and his friend De Quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered them more obscure by an unusual system of punctuation." (Southey to Scott, 30th July, 1809.) The tract is, as Southey hints, heavy. [344] The first essay in the third volume of the second edition. [345] Wordsworth's children were,-- John, born 18th June, 1803; still living; a clergyman. Dorothy, born 16th August, 1804; died 9th July, 1847. Thomas, born 16th June, 1806; died 1st December, 1812. Catharine, born 6th September, 1808; died 4th June, 1812. William, born 12th May, 1810; succeeded his father as Stamp-Distributor. [346] Good luck (in the sense of _Chance_) seems properly to be the occurrence of Opportunity to one who has neither deserved nor knows how to use it. In such hands it commonly turns to ill luck. Moore's Bermudan appointment is an instance of it Wordsworth had a sound common-sense and practical conscientiousness, which enabled him to fil his office as well as Dr. Franklin could have done. A fitter man could not have been found in Westmoreland. [347] "I am not one who much or oft delight In personal talk." [348] How far he swung backward toward the school under whose influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his Thanksgiving Ode which, if one met with it by itself, he would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope:-- "While the _tubed engine_ [the organ] feels the inspiring blast." And in "The Italian Itinerant" and "The Swiss Goatherd" we find a thermometer or barometer called "The well-wrought scale Whose sentient tube instructs to time A purpose to a fickle clime." Still worse in the "Eclipse of the Sun," 1821:-- "High on her speculative tower Stood Science, waiting for the hour When Sol was destined to endure That darkening." So in "The Excursion," "The cold March wind raised in her tender throat Viewless obstructions." [349] According to Landor, he pronounced all Scott's poetry to be "not worth five shillings." [350] Prelude, Book VI. [351] This was instinctively felt, even by his admirers. Miss Martineau said to Crabb Robinson in 1839, speaking of Wordsworth's conversation: "Sometimes he is annoying from the pertinacity with which he dwells on trifles; at other times he flows on in the utmost grandeur, leaving a strong impression of inspiration." Robinson tells us that he read "Resolution" and "Independence" to a lady who was affected by it even to tears, and then said, "I have not heard anything for years that so much delighted me; but, _after all, it is not poetry_." [352] Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency than when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of Helen of Kirconnel,--a poem hardly to be matched in any language for swiftness of movement and savage sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly. Compare "Curst be the heart that thought the thought, And curst the hand that fired the shot, When in my arms burd Helen dropt, That died to succor me! O, think ye not my heart was sair When my love dropt down and spake na mair?" compare this with,-- "Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts That through his brain are travelling, And, starting up, to Bruce's heart He launched a deadly javelin: Fair Ellen saw it when it came, And, _stepping forth to meet the same_, Did with her body cover The Youth, her chosen lover. * * * * * "And Bruce (_as soon, as he had slain The Gordon_) sailed away to Spain, And fought with rage incessant Against the Moorish Crescent." These are surely the verses of an attorney's clerk "penning a stanza when he should engross." It will be noticed that Wordsworth here also departs from his earlier theory of the language of poetry by substituting a javelin for a bullet as less modern and familiar. Had he written,-- "And Gordon never gave a hint, But, having somewhat picked his flint, Let fly the fatal bullet That killed that lovely pullet," it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest. He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the Ancient Mariner in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads: "The poem of my friend has indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of mariner, or as a human being who, having been long under the control of supernatural impressions, might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary connection, do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat laboriously accumulated." Here is an indictment, to be sure, and drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney's clerk aforenamed. One would think that the strange charm of Coleridge's most truly original poems lay in this very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect. [353] "A hundred times when, roving high and low, I have been harassed with the toil of verse, Much pains and little progress, and at once Some lovely Image in the song rose up, Full formed, like Venus rising from the sea." _Prelude_, Book IV. [354] Mr. Emerson tells us that he was at first tempted to smile, and Mr. Ellis Yarnall (who saw him in his eightieth year) says, "These quotations [from his own works] he read in a way that much impressed me; it seemed almost as if he were _awed by the greatness of his own power, the gifts with which he had been endowed_." (The italics are mine.) [355] His best poetry was written when he was under the immediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when he speaks of "those who have been so well pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into _their_ main stream." (Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S.T.C., Vol. I. pp. 5-6.) "Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees: "'The singing masons building roofs of gold.' "This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers." (Leigh Hunt's Autobiography.) Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in 1837, "My ear is susceptible to the clashing of sounds almost to disease." One cannot help thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by Coleridge. [356] In the Preface to his translation of the Orlando Furioso. [357] In "Resolution" and "Independence". MILTON.[358] If the biographies of literary men are to assume the bulk which Mr. Masson is giving to that of Milton, their authors should send a phial of _elixir vitae_ with the first volume, that a purchaser might have some valid assurance of surviving to see the last. Mr. Masson has already occupied thirteen hundred and seventy-eight pages in getting Milton to his thirty-fifth year, and an interval of eleven years stretches between the dates of the first and second instalments of his published labors. As Milton's literary life properly begins at twenty-one, with the "Ode on the Nativity," and as by far the more important part of it lies between the year at which we are arrived and his death at the age of sixty-six, we might seem to have the terms given us by which to make a rough reckoning of how soon we are likely to see land. But when we recollect the baffling character of the winds and currents we have already encountered, and the eddies that may at any time slip us back to the reformation in Scotland or the settlement of New England; when we consider, moreover, that Milton's life overlapped the _grand siècle_ of French literature, with its irresistible temptations to digression and homily for a man of Mr Masson's temperament, we may be pardoned if a sigh of doubt and discouragement escape us. We envy the secular leisures of Methusaleh, and are thankful that _his_ biography at least (if written in the same longeval proportion) is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject would that have been for a person of Mr. Masson's spacious predilections! Even if he himself can count on patriarchal prorogations of existence, let him hang a print of the Countess of Desmond in his study to remind him of the ambushes which Fate lays for the toughest of us. For myself, I have not dared to climb a cherry-tree since I began to read his work. Even with the promise of a speedy third volume before me, I feel by no means sure of living to see Mary Powell back in her husband's house; for it is just at this crisis that Mr. Masson, with the diabolical art of a practised serial writer, leaves us while he goes into an exhaustive account of the Westminster Assembly and the political and religious notions of the Massachusetts Puritans. One could not help thinking, after having got Milton fairly through college, that he was never more mistaken in his life than when he wrote, "How _soon_ hath Time, that subtle thief of youth, Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!" Or is it Mr. Masson who has scotched Time's wheels? It is plain from the Preface to the second volume that Mr. Masson himself has an uneasy consciousness that something is wrong, and that Milton ought somehow to be more than a mere incident of his own biography. He tells us that, "whatever may be thought by a hasty person looking in on the subject from the outside, no one can study the life of Milton as it ought to be studied without being obliged to study extensively and intimately the contemporary history of England, and even incidentally of Scotland and Ireland too.... Thus on the very compulsion, or at least the suasion, of the biography, a history grew on my hands. It was not in human nature to confine the historical inquiries, once they were in progress, within the precise limits of their demonstrable bearing on the biography, even had it been possible to determine these limits beforehand; and so the history assumed a co-ordinate importance with me, was pursued often for its own sake, and became, though always with a sense of organic relation to the biography, continuous in itself." If a "hasty person" be one who thinks eleven years rather long to have his button held by a biographer ere he begin his next sentence, I take to myself the sting of Mr. Masson's covert sarcasm. I confess with shame a pusillanimity that is apt to flag if a "to be continued" do not redeem its promise before the lapse of a quinquennium. I could scarce await the "Autocrat" himself so long. The heroic age of literature is past, and even a duodecimo may often prove too heavy [Greek: oion nun brotoi] for the descendants of men to whom the folio was a pastime. But what does Mr. Masson mean by "continuous"? To me it seems rather as if his somewhat rambling history of the seventeenth century were interrupted now and then by an unexpected apparition of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just pops in and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us what _he_ has been doing in the mean while. The reader, immersed in Scottish politics or the schemes of Archbishop Laud, is a little puzzled at first, but reconciles himself on being reminded that this fair-haired young man is the protagonist of the drama. _Pars minima est ipsa puella sui_. If Goethe was right in saying that every man was a citizen of his age as well as of his country, there can be no doubt that in order to understand the motives and conduct of the man we must first make ourselves intimate with the time in which he lived. We have therefore no fault to find with the thoroughness of Mr. Masson's "historical inquiries." The more thorough the better, so far as they were essential to the satisfactory performance of his task. But it is only such contemporary events, opinions, or persons as were really operative on the character of the man we are studying that are of consequence, and we are to familiarize ourselves with them, not so much for the sake of explaining them as of understanding him. The biographer, especially of a literary man, need only mark the main currents of tendency, without being officious to trace out to its marshy source every runlet that has cast in its tiny pitcherful with the rest. Much less should he attempt an analysis of the stream and to classify every component by itself, as if each were ever effectual singly and not in combination. Human motives cannot be thus chemically cross-examined, nor do we arrive at any true knowledge of character by such minute subdivision of its ingredients. Nothing is so essential to a biographer as an eye that can distinguish at a glance between real events that are the levers of thought and action, and what Donne calls "unconcerning things, matters of fact,"--between substantial personages, whose contact or even neighborhood is influential, and the supernumeraries that serve first to fill up a stage and afterwards the interstices of a biographical dictionary. "Time hath a wallet at his back Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion." Let the biographer keep his fingers off that sacred and merciful deposit, and not renew for us the bores of a former generation as if we had not enough of our own. But if he cannot forbear that unwise inquisitiveness, we may fairly complain when he insists on taking us along with him in the processes of his investigation, instead of giving us the sifted results in their bearing on the life and character of his subject, whether for help or hindrance. We are blinded with the dust of old papers ransacked by Mr. Masson to find out that they have no relation whatever to his hero. He had been wise if he had kept constantly in view what Milton himself says of those who gathered up personal traditions concerning the Apostles: "With less fervency was studied what Saint Paul or Saint John had written than was listened to one that could say, 'Here he taught, here he stood, this was his stature, and thus he went habited; and O, happy this house that harbored him, and that cold stone whereon he rested, this village where he wrought such a miracle.'.... Thus while all their thoughts were poured out upon circumstances and the gazing after such men as had sat at table with the Apostles, ... by this means they lost their time and truanted on the fundamental grounds of saving knowledge, as was seen shortly in their writings." Mr. Masson has so _poured out his mind upon circumstances_, that his work reminds us of Allston's picture of Elijah in the Wilderness, where a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape where the very ravens could scarce have found him out, except by divine commission. The figure of Milton becomes but a speck on the enormous canvas crowded with the scenery through which he may by any possibility be conjectured to have passed. I will cite a single example of the desperate straits to which Mr. Masson is reduced in order to hitch Milton on to his own biography. He devotes the first chapter of his Second Book to the meeting of the Long Parliament. "Already," he tells us, "in the earlier part of the day, the Commons had gone through the ceremony of hearing the writ for the Parliament read, and the names of the members that had been returned called over by Thomas Wyllys, Esq., the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery. His deputy, _Agar, Milton's brother-in-law, may have been in attendance on such an occasion_. During the preceding month or two, _at all events_, Agar and his subordinates in the Crown Office had been unusually busy with the issue of the writs and with the other work connected with the opening of Parliament." (Vol. II. p. 150.) Mr. Masson's resolute "at all events" is very amusing. Meanwhile "The hungry sheep look up and are not fed." Augustine Thierry has a great deal to answer for, if to him we owe the modern fashion of writing history picturesquely. At least his method leads to most unhappy results when essayed by men to whom nature has denied a sense of what the picturesque really is. The historical picturesque does not consist, in truth of costume and similar accessaries, but in the grouping, attitude, and expression of the figures, caught when they are unconscious that the artist is sketching them. The moment they are posed for a composition, unless by a man of genius, the life has gone out of them. In the hands of an inferior artist, who fancies that imagination is something to be squeezed out of color-tubes, the past becomes a phantasmagoria of jackboots, doublets, and flap-hats, the mere property-room of a deserted theatre, as if the light had been scenical and illusory, the world an unreal thing that vanished with the foot-lights. It is the power of catching the actors in great events at unawares that makes the glimpses given us by contemporaries so vivid and precious. And St. Simon, one of the great masters of the picturesque, lets us into the secret of his art when he tells us how, in that wonderful scene of the death of Monseigneur, he saw "_du premier coup d'oeil vivement porté_, tout ce qui leur échappoit et tout ce qui les accableroit." It is the gift of producing this reality that almost makes us blush, as if we had been caught peeping through a keyhole, and had surprised secrets to which we had no right,--it is this only that can justify the pictorial method of narration. Mr. Carlyle has this power of contemporizing himself with bygone times, he cheats us to "Play with our fancies and believe we see"; but we find the _tableaux vivants_ of the apprentices who "deal in his command without his power," and who compel us to work very hard indeed with our fancies, rather wearisome. The effort of weaker arms to shoot with his mighty bow has filled the air of recent literature with more than enough fruitless twanging. Mr. Masson's style, at best cumbrous, becomes intolerably awkward when he strives to make up for the want of St. Simon's _premier coup d'oeil_ by impertinent details of what we must call the pseudo-dramatic kind. For example, does Hall profess to have traced Milton from the University to a "suburb sink" of London? Mr. Masson fancies he hears Milton saying to himself, "A suburb sink! has Hall or his son taken the trouble to walk all the way down to Aldersgate here, to peep up the entry where I live, and so have an exact notion of my whereabouts? There has been plague in the neighborhood certainly; and I hope Jane Yates had my doorstep tidy for the visit." Does Milton, answering Hall's innuendo that he was courting the graces of a rich widow, tell us that he would rather "choose a virgin of mean fortunes honestly bred"? Mr. Masson forthwith breaks forth in a paroxysm of what we suppose to be picturesqueness in this wise: "What have we here? Surely nothing less, if we choose so to construe it, than a marriage advertisement! Ho, all ye virgins of England (widows need not apply), here is an opportunity such as seldom occurs: a bachelor, unattached; age, thirty-three years and three or four months; height [Milton, by the way, would have said _highth_] middle or a little less; personal appearance unusually handsome, with fair complexion and light auburn hair; circumstances independent; tastes intellectual and decidedly musical; principles Root-and-Branch! Was there already any young maiden in whose bosom, had such an advertisement come in her way, it would have raised a conscious flutter? If so, did she live near Oxford?" If there _is_ anything worse than an unimaginative man trying to write imaginatively, it is a heavy man when he fancies he is being facetious. He tramples out the last spark of cheerfulness with the broad damp foot of a hippopotamus. I am no advocate of what is called the dignity of history, when it means, as it too often does, that dulness has a right of sanctuary in gravity. Too well do I recall the sorrows of my youth, when I was shipped in search of knowledge on the long Johnsonian swell of the last century, favorable to anything but the calm digestion of historic truth. I had even then an uneasy suspicion, which has ripened into certainty, that thoughts were never draped in long skirts like babies, if they were strong enough to go alone. But surely there should be such a thing as good taste, above all a sense of self-respect, in the historian himself, that should not allow him to play any tricks with the dignity of his subject. A halo of sacredness has hitherto invested the figure of Milton, and our image of him has dwelt securely in ideal remoteness from the vulgarities of life. No diaries, no private letters, remain to give the idle curiosity of after-times the right to force itself on the hallowed seclusion of his reserve. That a man whose familiar epistles were written in the language of Cicero, whose sense of personal dignity was so great that, when called on in self-defence to speak of himself, he always does it with an epical stateliness of phrase, and whose self-respect even in youth was so profound that it resembles the reverence paid by other men to a far-off and idealized character,--that he should be treated in this offhand familiar fashion by his biographer seems to us a kind of desecration, a violation of good manners no less than of the laws of biographic art. Milton is the last man in the world to be slapped on the back with impunity. Better the surly injustice of Johnson than such presumptuous friendship as this. Let the seventeenth century, at least, be kept sacred from the insupportable foot of the interviewer! But Mr. Masson, in his desire to be (shall I say) idiomatic, can do something worse than what has been hitherto quoted. He can be even vulgar. Discussing the motives of Milton's first marriage, he says, "Did he come seeking his £500, and did Mrs. Powell _heave a daughter at him?_" We have heard of a woman throwing herself at a man's head, and the image is a somewhat violent one; but what is this to Mr. Masson's improvement on it? It has been sometimes affirmed that the fitness of an image may be tested by trying whether a picture could be made of it or not. Mr. Masson has certainly offered a new and striking subject to the historical school of British art. A little further on, speaking of Mary Powell, he says, "We have no portrait of her, nor any account of her appearance; but on the usual rule of the elective affinities of opposites, Milton being fair, _we will vote her_ to have been dark-haired." I need say nothing of the good taste of this sentence, but its absurdity is heightened by the fact that Mr. Masson himself had left us in doubt whether the match was one of convenience or inclination. I know not how it may be with other readers, but for myself I feel inclined to resent this hail-fellow-well-met manner with its jaunty "_we_ will vote." In some cases, Mr. Masson's indecorums in respect of style may possibly be accounted for as attempts at humor by one who has an imperfect notion of its ingredients. In such experiments, to judge by the effect, the pensive element of the compound enters in too large an excess over the hilarious. Whether I have hit upon the true explanation, or whether the cause lie not rather in a besetting velleity of the picturesque and vivid, I shall leave the reader to judge by an example or two. In the manuscript copy of Milton's sonnet in which he claims for his own house the immunity which the memory of Pindar and Euripides secured for other walls, the title had originally been, "_On his Door when the City expected an Assault_." Milton has drawn a line through this and substituted "_When the Assault was intended to the City_." Mr. Masson fancies "a mood of jest or semi-jest in the whole affair"; but we think rather that Milton's quiet assumption of equality with two such famous poets was as seriously characteristic as Dante's ranking himself _sesto tra cotanto senno_. Mr. Masson takes advantage of the obliterated title to imagine one of Prince Rupert's troopers entering the poet's study and finding some of his "Anti-Episcopal pamphlets that had been left lying about inadvertently. 'Oho!' the Cavalier Captain might then have said, 'Pindar and Euripides are all very well, by G----! I've been at college myself; and when I meet a gentleman and scholar, I hope I know how to treat him; but neither Pindar nor Euripides ever wrote pamphlets against the Church of England, by G----! It won't do, Mr. Milton!'" This, it may be supposed, is Mr. Masson's way of being funny and dramatic at the same time. Good taste is shocked with this barbarous dissonance. Could not the Muse defend her son? Again, when Charles I., at Edinburgh, in the autumn and winter of 1641, fills the vacant English sees, we are told, "It was more than an insult; it was a sarcasm! It was as if the King, while giving Alexander Henderson his hand to kiss, had winked his royal eye over that reverend Presbyter's back!" Now one can conceive Charles II. winking when he took the Solemn League and Covenant, but never his father under any circumstances. He may have been, and I believe he was, a bad king, but surely we may take Marvell's word for it, that "He nothing common did or mean," upon any of the "memorable scenes" of his life. The image is, therefore, out of all imaginative keeping, and vulgarizes the chief personage in a grand historical tragedy, who, if not a great, was at least a decorous actor. But Mr. Masson can do worse than this. Speaking of a Mrs. Katherine Chidley, who wrote in defence of the Independents against Thomas Edwards, he says, "People wondered who this she-Brownist, Katherine Chidley, was, and did not quite lose their interest in her when they found that she was an oldish woman, and a member of some hole-and-corner congregation in London. Indeed, _she put her nails into Mr. Edwards with some effect_." Why did he not say at once, after the good old fashion, that she "set her ten commandments in his face"? In another place he speaks of "Satan standing with his _staff_ around him." Mr. Masson's style, a little Robertsonian at best, naturally grows worse when forced to condescend to every-day matters. He can no more dismount and walk than the man in armor on a Lord Mayor's day. "It [Aldersgate Street] stretches away northwards a full fourth of a mile as one continuous thoroughfare, until, crossed by Long Lane and the Barbican, it parts with the name of Aldersgate Street, and, under the new names of Goswell Street and Goswell Road, _completes its tendency towards the suburbs_ and fields about Islington." What a noble work might not the Directory be if composed on this scale! The imagination even of an alderman might well be lost in that full quarter of a mile of continuous thoroughfare. Mr. Masson is very great in these passages of civic grandeur; but he is more surprising, on the whole, where he has an image to deal with. Speaking of Milton's "two-handed engine" in Lycidas, he says: "May not Milton, whatever else he meant, have meant a coming English Parliament with its two Houses? Whatever he meant, his prophecy had come true. As he sat among his books in Aldersgate Street, the two-handed engine at the door of the English Church was on the swing. Once, twice, thrice, it had swept its arcs to gather energy; now it was on the backmost poise, and the blow was to descend." One cannot help wishing that Mr. Masson would try his hand on the tenth horn of the beast in Revelation, or on the time and half a time of Daniel. There is something so consoling to a prophet in being told that, no matter what he meant, his prophecy had come true, and that he might mean "whatever else" he pleased, so long as he _may_ have meant what we choose to think he did, reasoning backward from the assumed fulfilment! But perhaps there may be detected in Mr. Masson's "swept its arcs" a little of that prophetic hedging-in vagueness to which he allows so generous a latitude. How if the "two-handed engine," after all, were a broom (or besom, to be more dignified), "Sweeping--vehemently sweeping, No pause admitted, no design avowed," like that wielded by the awful shape which Dion the Syracusan saw? I make the suggestion modestly, though somewhat encouraged by Mr. Masson's system of exegesis, which reminds one of the casuists' doctrine of probables, in virtue of which a man may be _probabiliter obligatus_ and _probabiliter deobligatus_ at the same time. But perhaps the most remarkable instance of Mr. Masson's figures of speech is where we are told that the king might have established a _bona fide_ government "by giving public ascendency to the popular or Parliamentary element in his Council, and _inducing the old leaven in it either to accept the new policy, or to withdraw and become inactive."_ There is something consoling in the thought that yeast should be accessible to moral suasion. It is really too bad that bread should ever be heavy for want of such an appeal to its moral sense as should "induce it to accept the new policy." Of Mr. Masson's unhappy infection with the _vivid_ style an instance or two shall be given in justification of what has been alleged against him in that particular. He says of London that "he was committed to the Tower, where for more than two months he lay, with as near a prospect as ever prisoner had of a _chop_ with the executioner's axe on a scaffold on Tower Hill." I may be over-fastidious, but the word "chop" offends my ears with its coarseness, or if that be too strong, has certainly the unpleasant effect of an emphasis unduly placed. Old Auchinleck's saying of Cromwell, that "he gart kings ken they had a lith in their necks," is a good example of really vivid phrase, suggesting the axe and the block, and giving one of those dreadful hints to the imagination which are more powerful than any amount of detail, and whose skilful use is the only magic employed by the masters of truly picturesque writing. The sentence just quoted will serve also as an example of that tendency to _surplusage_, which adds to the bulk of Mr. Masson's sentences at the cost of their effectiveness. If he had said simply "chop on Tower Hill" (if chop there must be), it had been quite enough, for we all know that the executioner's axe and the scaffold are implied in it. Once more, and I have done with the least agreeable part of my business. Mr. Masson, after telling over again the story of Strafford with needless length of detail, ends thus: "On Wednesday, the 12th of May, that proud _curly_ head, the casket of that brain of power, rolled on the scaffold of Tower Hill." Why _curly_? Surely it is here a ludicrous impertinence. This careful thrusting forward of outward and unmeaning particulars, in the hope of giving that reality to a picture which genius only has the art to do, is becoming a weariness in modern descriptive writing. It reminds one of the Mrs. Jarley expedient of dressing the waxen effigies of murderers in the very clothes they wore when they did the deed, or with the real halter round their necks wherewith they expiated it. It is probably very effective with the torpid sensibilities of the class who look upon wax figures as works of art. True imaginative power works with other material. Lady Macbeth striving to wash away from her hands the damned spot that is all the more there to the mind of the spectator because it is not there at all, is a type of the methods it employs and the intensity of their action. Having discharged my duty in regard to Mr. Masson's faults of manner, which I should not have dwelt on so long had they not greatly marred a real enjoyment in the reading, and were they not the ear-mark of a school which has become unhappily numerous, I turn to a consideration of his work as a whole. I think he made a mistake in his very plan, or else was guilty of a misnomer in his title. His book is not so much a life of Milton as a collection of materials out of which a careful reader may sift the main facts of the poet's biography. His passion for minute detail is only to be equalled by his diffuseness on points mainly if not altogether irrelevant. He gives us a Survey of British Literature, occupying one hundred and twenty-eight pages of his first volume, written in the main with good judgment, and giving the average critical opinion upon nearly every writer, great and small, who was in any sense a contemporary of Milton. I have no doubt all this would be serviceable and interesting to Mr. Masson's classes in Edinburgh University, and they may well be congratulated on having so competent a teacher; but what it has to do with Milton, unless in the case of such authors as may be shown to have influenced his style or turn of thought, one does not clearly see. Most readers of a life of Milton may be presumed to have some knowledge of the general literary history of the time, or at any rate to have the means of acquiring it, and Milton's manner (his style was his own) was very little affected by any of the English poets, with the single exception, in his earlier poems, of George Wither. Mr. Masson also has something to say about everybody, from Wentworth to the obscurest Brownist fanatic who was so much as heard of in England during Milton's lifetime. If this theory of a biographer's duty should hold, our grandchildren may expect to see "A Life of Thackeray, or who was who in England, France, and Germany during the first Half of the Nineteenth Century." These digressions of Mr. Masson's from what should have been his main topic (he always seems somehow to be "completing his tendency towards the suburbs" of his subject), give him an uneasy feeling that he must get Milton in somehow or other at intervals, if it were only to remind the reader that he has a certain connection with the book. He is eager even to discuss a mere hypothesis, though an untenable one, if it will only increase the number of pages devoted specially to Milton, and thus lessen the apparent disproportion between the historical and the biographical matter. Milton tells us that his morning wont had been "to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have his full fraught; then with useful and generous labors preserving the body's health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion and our country's liberty when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover their stations rather than see the rum of our Protestantism and the enforcement of a slavish life." Mr. Masson snatches at the hint: "This is interesting," he says; "Milton, it seems, has for some time been practising drill! The City Artillery Ground was near.... Did Milton among others make a habit of going there of mornings? Of this more hereafter." When Mr. Masson returns to the subject he speaks of Milton's "all but positive statement ... that in the spring of 1642, or a few months before the breaking out of the Civil War, he was in the habit of spending a part of each day in _military exercise somewhere not far from his house in Aldersgate Street_." What he puts by way of query on page 402 has become downright certainty seventy-nine pages further on. The passage from Milton's tract makes no "statement" of the kind it pleases Mr. Masson to assume. It is merely a Miltonian way of saying that he took regular exercise, because he believed that moral no less than physical courage demanded a sound body. And what proof does Mr. Masson bring to confirm his theory? Nothing more nor less than two or three passages in "Paradise Lost," of which I shall quote only so much as is essential to his argument:-- "And now Advanced in view they stand, a horrid front Of dreadful length and dazzling arms, in guise Of warriors old with _ordered_ spear and shield, Awaiting what command their mighty chief Had to impose."[359] Mr. Masson assures us that "there are touches in this description (as, for example, the _ordering_ of arms at the moment of halt, and without word of command) too exact and technical to have occurred to a mere civilian. Again, at the same review.... "'He now prepared To speak; whereat their doubled ranks they bend From wing to wing, and half enclose him round With all his peers; _attention_ held them mute.'[360] "To the present day this is the very process, or one of the processes, when a commander wishes to address his men. They wheel inward and stand at 'attention.'" But his main argument is the phrase "_ported_ spears," in Book Fourth, on which he has an interesting and valuable comment. He argues the matter through a dozen pages or more, seeking to prove that Milton _must_ have had some practical experience of military drill. I confess a very grave doubt whether "attention" and "ordered" in the passages cited have any other than their ordinary meaning, and Milton could never have looked on at the pike-exercise without learning what "ported" meant. But, be this as it may, I will venture to assert that there was not a boy in New England, forty years ago, who did not know more of the manual than is implied in Milton's use of these terms. Mr. Masson's object in proving Milton to have been a proficient in these martial exercises is to increase our wonder at his not entering the army. "If there was any man in England of whom one might surely have expected that he would be in arms among the Parliamentarians," he says, "that man was Milton." Milton may have had many an impulse to turn soldier, as all men must in such times, but I do not believe that he ever seriously intended it. Nor is it any matter of reproach that he did not. It is plain, from his works, that he believed himself very early set apart and consecrated for tasks of a very different kind, for services demanding as much self-sacrifice and of more enduring result. I have no manner of doubt that he, like Dante, believed himself divinely inspired with what he had to utter, and, if so, why not also divinely guided in what he should do or leave undone? Milton wielded in the cause he loved a weapon far more effective than a sword. It is a necessary result of Mr. Masson's method, that a great deal of space is devoted to what might have befallen his hero and what he might have seen. This leaves a broad margin indeed for the insertion of purely hypothetical incidents. Nay, so desperately addicted is he to what he deems the vivid style of writing, that he even goes out of his way to imagine what might have happened to anybody living at the same time with Milton. Having told us fairly enough how Shakespeare, on his last visit to London, perhaps saw Milton "a fair child of six playing at his father's door," he must needs conjure up an imaginary supper at the Mermaid. "Ah! what an evening ... was that; and how Ben and Shakespeare _be-tongued_ each other, while the others listened and wondered; and how, when the company dispersed, the sleeping street heard their departing footsteps, and the stars shone down on the old roofs." Certainly, if we may believe the old song, the stars "had nothing else to do," though their chance of shining in the middle of a London November may perhaps be reckoned very doubtful. An author should consider how largely the art of writing consists in knowing what to leave in the inkstand. Mr. Masson's volumes contain a great deal of very valuable matter, whatever one may think of its bearing upon the life of Milton. The chapters devoted to Scottish affairs are particularly interesting to a student of the Great Rebellion, its causes and concomitants. His analyses of the two armies, of the Parliament, and the Westminster Assembly, are sensible additions to our knowledge. A too painful thoroughness, indeed, is the criticism we should make on his work as a biography. Even as a history, the reader might complain that it confuses by the multiplicity of its details, while it wearies by want of continuity. Mr. Masson lacks the skill of an accomplished story-teller. A fact is to him a fact, never mind how unessential, and he misses the breadth of truth in his devotion to accuracy. The very order of his title-page, "The Life of Milton, narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time," shows, it should seem, a misconception of the true nature of his subject. Milton's chief importance, it might be fairly said his only importance, is a literary one. His place is fixed as the most classical of our poets. Neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics, did Milton leave any distinguishable trace on the thought of his time or in the history of opinion. In both these lines of his activity circumstances forced upon him the position of a controversialist whose aims and results are by the necessity of the case desultory and ephemeral. Hooker before him and Hobbes after him had a far firmer grasp of fundamental principles than he. His studies in these matters were perfunctory and occasional, and his opinions were heated to the temper of the times and shaped to the instant exigencies of the forum, sometimes to his own convenience at the moment, instead of being the slow result of a deliberate judgment enlightened by intellectual and above all historical sympathy with his subject. His interest was rather in the occasion than the matter of the controversy. No aphorisms of political science are to be gleaned from his writings as from those of Burke. His intense personality could never so far dissociate itself from the question at issue as to see it in its larger scope and more universal relations. He was essentially a _doctrinaire_, ready to sacrifice everything to what at the moment seemed the abstract truth, and with no regard to historical antecedents and consequences, provided those of scholastic logic were carefully observed. He has no respect for usage or tradition except when they count in his favor, and sees no virtue in that power of the past over the minds and conduct of men which alone insures the continuity of national growth and is the great safeguard of order and progress. The life of a nation was of less importance to him than that it should be conformed to certain principles of belief and conduct. Burke could distill political wisdom out of history because he had a profound consciousness of the soul that underlies and outlives events, and of the national character that gives them meaning and coherence. Accordingly his words are still living and operative, while Milton's pamphlets are strictly occasional and no longer interesting except as they illustrate him. In the Latin ones especially there is an odd mixture of the pedagogue and the public orator. His training, so far as it was thorough, so far, indeed, as it may be called optional, was purely poetical and artistic. A true Attic bee, he made boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly classic honey. Milton, indeed, could hardly have been a match for some of his antagonists in theological and ecclesiastical learning. But he brought into the contest a white heat of personal conviction that counted for much. His self-consciousness, always active, identified him with the cause he undertook. "I conceived myself to be now not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was persuaded and whereof I had declared myself openly to be the partaker."[361] Accordingly it does not so much seem that he is the advocate of Puritanism, Freedom of Conscience, or the People of England, as that all these are _he_, and that he is speaking for himself. He was not nice in the choice of his missiles, and too often borrows a dirty lump from the dunghill of Luther; but now and then the gnarled sticks of controversy turn to golden arrows of Phoebus in his trembling hands, singing as they fly and carrying their messages of doom in music. Then, truly, in his prose as in his verse, his is the large utterance of the early gods, and there is that in him which tramples all learning under his victorious feet. From the first he looked upon himself as a man dedicated and set apart. He had that sublime persuasion of a divine mission which sometimes lifts his speech from personal to cosmopolitan significance; his genius unmistakably asserts itself from time to time, calling down fire from heaven to kindle the sacrifice of irksome private duty, and turning the hearthstone of an obscure man into an altar for the worship of mankind. Plainly enough here was a man who had received something other than Episcopal ordination. Mysterious and awful powers had laid their unimaginable hands on that fair head and devoted it to a nobler service. Yet it must be confessed that, with the single exception of the "Areopagitica," Milton's tracts are wearisome reading, and going through them is like a long sea-voyage whose monotony is more than compensated for the moment by a stripe of phosphorescence heaping before you in a drift of star-sown snow, coiling away behind in winking disks of silver, as if the conscious element were giving out all the moonlight it had garnered in its loyal depths since first it gazed upon its pallid regent. Which, being interpreted, means that his prose is of value because it is Milton's, because it sometimes exhibits in an inferior degree the qualities of his verse, and not for its power of thought, of reasoning, or of statement. It is valuable, where it is best, for its inspiring quality, like the fervencies of a Hebrew prophet. The English translation of the Bible had to a very great degree Judaized, not the English mind, but the Puritan temper. Those fierce enthusiasts could more easily find elbow-room for their consciences in an ideal Israel than in a practical England. It was convenient to see Amalek or Philistia in the men who met them in the field, and one unintelligible horn or other of the Beast in their theological opponents. The spiritual provincialism of the Jewish race found something congenial in the English mind. Their national egotism quintessentialized in the prophets was especially sympathetic with the personal egotism of Milton. It was only as an inspired and irresponsible person that he could live on decent terms with his own self-confident individuality. There is an intolerant egotism which identifies itself with omnipotence,[362] and whose sublimity is its apology; there is an intolerable egotism which subordinates the sun to the watch in its own fob. Milton's was of the former kind, and accordingly the finest passages in his prose and not the least fine in his verse are autobiographic, and this is the more striking that they are often unconsciously so. Those fallen angels in utter ruin and combustion hurled, are also cavaliers fighting against the Good Old Cause; Philistia is the Restoration, and what Samson did, that Milton would have done if he could. The "Areopagitica" might seem an exception, but that also is a plea rather than an argument, and his interest in the question is not one of abstract principle, but of personal relation to himself. He was far more rhetorician than thinker. The sonorous amplitude of his style was better fitted to persuade the feelings than to convince the reason. The only passages from his prose that may be said to have survived are emotional, not argumentative, or they have lived in virtue of their figurative beauty, not their weight of thought. Milton's power lay in dilation. Touched by him, the simplest image, the most obvious thought, "Dilated stood Like Teneriffe or Atlas.... .... nor wanted in his grasp What _seemed_ both spear and shield." But the thin stiletto of Macchiavelli is a more effective weapon than these fantastic arms of his. He had not the secret of compression that properly belongs to the political thinker, on whom, as Hazlitt said of himself, "nothing but abstract ideas makes any impression." Almost every aphoristic phrase that he has made current is borrowed from some one of the classics, like his famous "License they mean when they cry liberty," from Tacitus. This is no reproach to him so far as his true function, that of poet, is concerned. It is his peculiar glory that literature was with him so much an art, an end and not a means. Of his political work he has himself told us, "I should not choose this manner of writing, wherein, knowing myself inferior to myself (led by the genial power of nature to another task), I have the use, as I may account, but of my left hand." Mr. Masson has given an excellent analysis of these writings, selecting with great judgment the salient passages, which have an air of blank-verse thinly disguised as prose, like some of the corrupted passages of Shakespeare. We are particularly thankful to him for his extracts from the pamphlets written against Milton, especially for such as contain criticisms on his style. It is not a little interesting to see the most stately of poets reproached for his use of vulgarisms and low words. We seem to get a glimpse of the schooling of his "choiceful sense" to that nicety which could not be content till it had made his native tongue "search all her coffers round." One cannot help thinking also that his practice in prose, especially in the long involutions of Latin periods, helped him to give that variety of pause and that majestic harmony to his blank-verse which have made it so unapproachably his own. Landor, who, like Milton, seems to have thought in Latin, has caught somewhat more than others of the dignity of his gait, but without his length of stride. Wordsworth, at his finest, has perhaps approached it, but with how long an interval! Bryant has not seldom attained to its serene equanimity, but never emulates its pomp. Keats has caught something of its large utterance, but altogether fails of its nervous severity of phrase. Cowper's muse (that moved with such graceful ease in slippers) becomes stiff when (in his translation of Homer) she buckles on her feet the cothurnus of Milton. Thomson grows tumid wherever he assays the grandiosity of his model. It is instructive to get any glimpse of the slow processes by which Milton arrived at that classicism which sets him apart from, if not above, all our other poets. In gathering up the impressions made upon us by Mr. Masson's work as a whole, we are inclined rather to regret his copiousness for his own sake than for ours. The several parts, though disproportionate, are valuable, his research has been conscientious, and he has given us better means of understanding Milton's time than we possessed before. But how is it about Milton himself? Here was a chance, it seems to me, for a fine bit of portrait-painting. There is hardly a more stately figure in literary history than Milton's, no life in some of its aspects more tragical, except Dante's. In both these great poets, more than in any others, the character of the men makes part of the singular impressiveness of what they wrote and of its vitality with after times. In them the man somehow overtops the author. The works of both are full of autobiographical confidences. Like Dante, Milton was forced to become a party by himself. He stands out in marked and solitary individuality, apart from the great movement of the Civil War, apart from the supine acquiescence of the Restoration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man. Very much alive he certainly was in his day. Has Mr. Masson made him alive to us again? I fear not. At the same time, while we cannot praise either the style or the method of Mr. Masson's work, we cannot refuse to be grateful for it. It is not so much a book for the ordinary reader of biography as for the student, and will be more likely to find its place on the library-shelf than the centre-table. It does not in any sense belong to light literature, but demands all the muscle of the trained and vigorous reader. "Truly, in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is Milton's life it is naught." Mr. Masson's intimacy with the facts and dates of Milton's career renders him peculiarly fit in some respects to undertake an edition of the poetical works. His edition, accordingly, has distinguished merits. The introductions to the several poems are excellent and leave scarcely anything to be desired. The general Introduction, on the other hand, contains a great deal that might well have been omitted, and not a little that is positively erroneous. Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's English seem often to be those of a Scotsman to whom English is in some sort a foreign tongue. It is almost wholly inconclusive, because confined to the Miltonic verse, while the basis of any altogether satisfactory study should surely be the Miltonic prose; nay, should include all the poetry and prose of his own age and of that immediately preceding it. The uses to which Mr. Masson has put the concordance to Milton's poems tempt one sometimes to class him with those whom the poet himself taxed with being "the mousehunts and ferrets of an index." For example, what profits a discussion of Milton's [Greek: hapax legomena], a matter in which accident is far more influential than choice?[363] What sensible addition is made to our stock of knowledge by learning that "the word _woman_ does not occur in any form in Milton's poetry before 'Paradise Lost,'" and that it is "exactly so with the word _female_"? Is it any way remarkable that such words as _Adam, God, Heaven, Hell, Paradise, Sin, Satan_, and _Serpent_ should occur "very frequently" in "Paradise Lost"? Would it not rather have been surprising that they should not? Such trifles at best come under the head of what old Warner would have called cumber-minds. It is time to protest against this minute style of editing and commenting great poets. Gulliver's microscopic eye saw on the fair skins of the Brobdignagian maids of honor "a mole here and there as broad as a trencher," and we shrink from a cup of the purest Hippocrene after the critic's solar microscope has betrayed to us the grammatical, syntactical, and, above all, hypothetical monsters that sprawl in every drop of it. When a poet has been so much edited as Milton, the temptation of whosoever undertakes a new edition to see what is not to be seen becomes great in proportion as he finds how little there is that has not been seen before. Mr. Masson is quite right in choosing to modernize the spelling of Milton, for surely the reading of our classics should be made as little difficult as possible, and he is right also in making an exception of such abnormal forms as the poet may fairly be supposed to have chosen for melodic reasons. His exhaustive discussion of the spelling of the original editions seems, however, to be the less called-for as he himself appears to admit that the compositor, not the author, was supreme in these matters, and that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases to the thousand Milton had no system, but spelt by immediate inspiration. Yet Mr. Masson fills nearly four pages with an analysis of the vowel sounds, in which, as if to demonstrate the futility of such attempts so long as men's ears differ, he tells us that the short _a_ sound is the same in _man_ and _Darby_, the short _o_ sound in _God_ and _does_, and what he calls the long _o_ sound in _broad_ and _wrath_. Speaking of the apostrophe, Mr. Masson tells us that "it is sometimes inserted, not as a possessive mark at all, but merely as a plural mark: _hero's_ for _heroes_, _myrtle's_ for _myrtles_, _Gorgons_ and _Hydra's_, etc." Now, in books printed about the time of Milton's the apostrophe was put in almost at random, and in all the cases cited is a misprint, except in the first, where it serves to indicate that the pronunciation was not heróës as it had formerly been.[364] In the "possessive singular of nouns already ending in _s_" Mr. Masson tells us, "Milton's general practice is not to double the _s_; thus, _Nereus wrinkled look, Glaucus spell_. The necessities of metre would naturally constrain to such forms. In a possessive followed by the word _sake_ or the word _side_, dislike to [of] the double sibilant makes us sometimes drop the inflection. In addition to '_for righteousness' sake_' such phrases as '_for thy name sake_' and '_for mercy sake_,' are allowed to pass; _bedside_ is normal and _riverside_ nearly so." The necessities of metre need not be taken into account with a poet like Milton, who never was fairly in his element till he got off the soundings of prose and felt the long swell of his verse under him like a steed that knows his rider. But does the dislike of the double sibilant account for the dropping of the _s_ in these cases? Is it not far rather the presence of the _s_ already in the sound satisfying an ear accustomed to the English slovenliness in the pronunciation of double consonants? It was this which led to such forms as _conscience sake_ and _on justice side_, and which beguiled Ben Jonson and Dryden into thinking, the one that _noise_ and the other that _corps_ was a plural,[365] What does Mr. Masson say to _hillside, Bankside, seaside, Cheapside, spindleside, spearside, gospelside_ (of a church), _nightside, countryside, wayside, brookside_, and I know not how many more? Is the first half of these words a possessive? Or is it not rather a noun impressed into the service as an adjective? How do such words differ from _hilltop, townend, candlelight, rushlight, cityman_, and the like, where no double _s_ can be made the scapegoat? Certainly Milton would not have avoided them for their sibilancy, he who wrote "And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses," "So in his seed all nations shall be blest," "And seat of Salmanasser whose success," verses that hiss like Medusa's head in wrath, and who was, I think, fonder of the sound than any other of our poets. Indeed, in compounds of the kind we always make a distinction wholly independent of the doubled _s_. Nobody would boggle at _mountainside_; no one would dream of saying _on the fatherside_ or _motherside_. Mr. Masson speaks of "the Miltonic forms _vanquisht, markt, lookt_, etc." Surely he does not mean to imply that these are peculiar to Milton? Chapman used them before Milton was born, and pressed them farther, as in _nak't_ and _saf't_ for _naked_ and _saved_. He often prefers the contracted form in his prose also, showing that the full form of the past participle in _ed_ was passing out of fashion, though available in verse.[366] Indeed, I venture to affirm that there is not a single variety of spelling or accent to be found in Milton which is without example in his predecessors or contemporaries. Even _highth_, which is thought peculiarly Miltonic, is common (in Hakluyt, for example), and still often heard in New England. Mr. Masson gives an odd reason for Milton's preference of it "as indicating more correctly the formation of the word by the addition of the suffix _th_ to the adjective _high_." Is an adjective, then, at the base of _growth_, _earth_, _birth_, _truth_, and other words of this kind? Horne Tooke made a better guess than this. If Mr. Masson be right in supposing that a peculiar meaning is implied in the spelling _bearth_ (Paradise Lost, IX. 624), which he interprets as "collective produce," though in the only other instance where it occurs it is neither more nor less than _birth_, it should seem that Milton had hit upon Horne Tooke's etymology. But it is really solemn trifling to lay any stress on the spelling of the original editions, after having admitted, as Mr. Masson has honestly done, that in all likelihood Milton had nothing to do with it. And yet he cannot refrain. On the word _voutsafe_ he hangs nearly a page of dissertation on the nicety of Milton's ear. Mr. Masson thinks that Milton "must have had a reason for it,"[367] and finds that reason in "his dislike to [of] the sound _ch_, or to [of] that sound combined with _s_.... His fine ear taught him not only to seek for musical effects and cadences at large, but also to be fastidious as to syllables, and to avoid harsh or difficult conjunctions of consonants, except when there might be a musical reason for harshness or difficulty. In the management of the letter _s_, the frequency of which in English is one of the faults of the speech, he will be found, I believe, most careful and skilful. More rarely, I think, than in Shakespeare will one word ending in _s_ be found followed immediately in Milton by another word beginning with the same letter; or, if he does occasionally pen such a phrase as _Moab's sons_, it will be difficult to find in him, I believe, such a harsher example as _earth's substance_, of which many writers would think nothing. [With the index to back him Mr. Masson could safely say this.] The same delicacy of ear is even more apparent in his management of the _sh_ sound. He has it often, of course; but it may be noted that he rejects it in his verse when he can. He writes _Basan_ for _Bashan_, _Sittim_ for _Shittim_, _Silo_ for _Shiloh_, _Asdod_ for _Ashdod_. Still more, however, does he seem to have been wary of the compound sound _ch_ as in _church_. Of his sensitiveness to this sound in excess there is a curious proof in his prose pamphlet entitled 'An Apology against a Pamphlet, called A Modest Completion, etc.,' where, having occasion to quote these lines from one of the Satires[368] of his opponent, Bishop Hall, "'Teach each hollow grove to sound his love, Wearying echo with one changeless word,' "he adds, ironically, 'And so he well might, and all his auditory besides, with his _teach each!_'" Generalizations are always risky, but when extemporized from a single hint they are maliciously so. Surely it needed no great sensitiveness of ear to be set on edge by Hall's echo of _teach each_. Did Milton reject the _h_ from _Bashan_ and the rest because he disliked the sound of _sh_, or because he had found it already rejected by the Vulgate and by some of the earlier translators of the Bible into English? Oddly enough, Milton uses words beginning with _sh_ seven hundred and fifty four times in his poetry, not to speak of others in which the sound occurs, as, for instance, those ending in _tion_. Hall, had he lived long enough, might have retorted on Milton his own "Manli_est_, resolut_est_, br_east_, As the magnetick hard_est_ iron draws," or his "What moves thy inquisition? Know'st thou not that my rising is thy fall, And my promotion thy destruction?" With the playful controversial wit of the day he would have hinted that too much _est-est_ is as fatal to a blank-verse as to a bishop, and that danger was often incurred by those who too eagerly _shun_ned it. Nay, he might even have found an echo almost tallying with his own in "To begirt the almighty throne Beseeching or besieging," a pun worthy of Milton's worst prose. Or he might have twitted him with "a _seq_uent king who _seeks_." As for the _sh_ sound, a poet could hardly have found it ungracious to his ear who wrote, "Gna_sh_ing for angui_sh_ and despite and _sh_ame," or again, "Then bursting forth Afre_sh_ with con_sc_ious terrors vex me round That rest or intermi_ssion_ none I find. Before mine eyes in oppos_ition_ sits Grim Death, my son." And if Milton disliked the _ch_ sound, he gave his ears unnecessary pain by verses such as these,-- "Straight cou_ch_es close; then, rising, _ch_anges oft His cou_ch_ant wat_ch_, as one who _ch_ose his ground"; still more by such a juxtaposition as "matchless chief."[369] The truth is, that Milton was a harmonist rather than a melodist. There are, no doubt, some exquisite melodies (like the "Sabrina Fair ") among his earlier poems, as could hardly fail to be the case in an age which produced or trained the authors of our best English glees, as ravishing in their instinctive felicity as the songs of our dramatists, but he also showed from the first that larger style which was to be his peculiar distinction. The strain heard in the "Nativity Ode," in the "Solemn Music," and in "Lycidas," is of a higher mood, as regards metrical construction, than anything that had thrilled the English ear before, giving no uncertain augury of him who was to show what sonorous metal lay silent till he touched the keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various language, that have never since felt the strain of such prevailing breath. It was in the larger movements of metre that Milton was great and original. I have spoken elsewhere of Spenser's fondness for dilatation as respects thoughts and images. In Milton it extends to the language also, and often to the single words of which a period is composed. He loved phrases of towering port, in which every member dilated stands like Teneriffe or Atlas. In those poems and passages that stamp him great, the verses do not dance interweaving to soft Lydian airs, but march rather with resounding tread and clang of martial music. It is true that he is cunning in alliterations, so scattering them that they tell in his orchestra without being obvious, but it is in the more scientific region of open-voweled assonances which seem to proffer rhyme and yet withhold it (rhyme-wraiths one might call them), that he is an artist and a master. He even sometimes introduces rhyme with misleading intervals between and unobviously in his blank-verse:-- "There rest, if any rest can harbour _there_; And, reassembling our afflicted powers, Consult how we may henceforth most offend Our enemy, our own loss how re_pair_, How overcome this dire calamity, What reinforcement we may gain from hope, If not, what resolution from des_pair_."[370] There is one almost perfect quatrain,-- "Before thy fellows, ambitious to win From me some plume, that thy success may show Destruction to the rest. This pause between (Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know"; and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an assonance,-- "If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft In worst extremes and on the perilous edge Of battle when it raged, in all assaults." There can be little doubt that the rhymes in the first passage cited were intentional, and perhaps they were so in the others; but Milton's ear has tolerated not a few perfectly rhyming couplets, and others in which the assonance almost becomes rhyme, certainly a fault in blankverse:-- "From the Asian Kings (and Parthian among these), From India and the Golden Chersonese"; "That soon refreshed him wearied, and repaired What hunger, if aught hunger, had impaired"; "And will alike be punished, whether thou Reign or reign not, though to that gentle brow"; "Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy, Save what is in destroying, other joy"; "Shall all be Paradise, far happier place Than this of Eden, and far happier days"; "This my long sufferance and my day of grace They who neglect and scorn shall never taste"; "So far remote with diminution seen, First in his East the glorious lamp was seen."[371] These examples (and others might be adduced) serve to show that Milton's ear was too busy about the larger interests of his measures to be always careful of the lesser. He was a strategist rather than a drill-sergeant in verse, capable, beyond any other English poet, of putting great masses through the most complicated evolutions without clash or confusion, but he was not curious that every foot should be at the same angle. In reading "Paradise Lost" one has a feeling of vastness. You float under an illimitable sky, brimmed with sunshine or hung with constellations; the abysses of space are about you; you hear the cadenced surges of an unseen ocean; thunders mutter round the horizon; and if the scene change, it is with an elemental movement like the shifting of mighty winds. His imagination seldom condenses, like Shakespeare's, in the kindling flash of a single epithet, but loves better to diffuse itself. Witness his descriptions, wherein he seems to circle like an eagle bathing in the blue streams of air, controlling with his eye broad sweeps of champaign or of sea, and rarely fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser expression. He was fonder of the vague, perhaps I should rather say the indefinite, where more is meant than meets the ear, than any other of our poets. He loved epithets (like _old_ and _far_) that suggest great reaches, whether of space or time. This bias shows itself already in his earlier poems, as where he hears "The _far off_ curfew sound Over some _widewatered_ shore," or where he fancies the shores[372] and sounding seas washing Lycidas far away; but it reaches its climax in the "Paradise Lost." He produces his effects by dilating our imaginations with an impalpable hint rather than by concentrating them upon too precise particulars. Thus in a famous comparison of his, the fleet has no definite port, but plies stemming nightly toward the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He generalizes always instead of specifying,--the true secret of the ideal treatment in which he is without peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he is never turgid. Tasso begins finely with "Chiama gli abitator dell' ombre eterne II rauco suon della tartarea tromba; Treman le spaziose atre caverne, E l'aer cieco a quel rumor rimbomba," but soon spoils all by condescending to definite comparisons with thunder and intestinal convulsions of the earth; in other words, he is unwary enough to give us a standard of measurement, and the moment you furnish Imagination with a yardstick she abdicates in favor of her statistical poor-relation Commonplace. Milton, with this passage in his memory, is too wise to hamper himself with any statement for which he can be brought to book, but wraps himself in a mist of looming indefiniteness; "He called so loud that all the hollow deep Of hell resounded," thus amplifying more nobly by abstention from his usual method of prolonged evolution. No caverns, however spacious, will serve his turn, because they have limits. He could practise this self-denial when his artistic sense found it needful, whether for variety of verse or for the greater intensity of effect to be gained by abruptness. His more elaborate passages have the multitudinous roll of thunder, dying away to gather a sullen force again from its own reverberations, but he knew that the attention is recalled and arrested by those claps that stop short without echo and leave us listening. There are no such vistas and avenues of verse as his. In reading the "Paradise Lost" one has a feeling of spaciousness such as no other poet gives. Milton's respect for himself and for his own mind and its movements rises wellnigh to veneration. He prepares the way for his thought and spreads on the ground before the sacred feet of his verse tapestries inwoven with figures of mythology and romance. There is no such unfailing dignity as his. Observe at what a reverent distance he begins when he is about to speak of himself, as at the beginning of the Third Book and the Seventh. His sustained strength is especially felt in his beginnings. He seems always to start full-sail; the wind and tide always serve; there is never any fluttering of the canvas In this he offers a striking contrast with Wordsworth, who has to go through with a great deal of _yo-heave-ohing_ before he gets under way. And though, in the didactic parts of "Paradise Lost," the wind dies away sometimes, there is a long swell that will not let us forget it, and ever and anon some eminent verse lifts its long ridge above its tamer peers heaped with stormy memories. And the poem never becomes incoherent; we feel all through it, as in the symphonies of Beethoven, a great controlling reason in whose safe-conduct we trust implicitly. Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's English are, it seems to me, for the most part unsatisfactory He occupies some ten pages, for example, with a history of the genitival form _its_, which adds nothing to our previous knowledge on the subject and which has no relation to Milton except for its bearing on the authorship of some verses attributed to him against the most overwhelming internal evidence to the contrary. Mr. Masson is altogether too resolute to find traces of what he calls oddly enough "recollectiveness of Latin constructions" in Milton, and scents them sometimes in what would seem to the uninstructed reader very idiomatic English. More than once, at least, he has fancied them by misunderstanding the passage in which they seem to occur. Thus, in "Paradise Lost," XI. 520, 521, "Therefore so abject is their punishment, Disfiguring not God's likeness but their own," has no analogy with _eorum deformantium_, for the context shows that it is the _punishment_ which disfigures. Indeed, Mr. Masson so often finds constructions difficult, ellipses strange, and words needing annotation that are common to all poetry, nay, sometimes to all English, that his notes seem not seldom to have been written by a foreigner. On this passage in "Comus,"-- "I do not think my sister so to seek Or so unprincipled in virtue's book And the sweet peace that virtue bosoms ever As that the single want of light and noise * * * * * "(Not being in danger, as I trust she is not) Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts," Mr. Masson tells us, that "in very strict construction, _not being_ would cling to _want_ as its substantive; but the phrase passes for the Latin ablative absolute." So on the words _forestalling night_, "i. e. anticipating. Forestall is literally to anticipate the market by purchasing goods before they are brought to the stall." In the verse "Thou hast immanacled while Heaven sees good," he explains that "_while_ here has the sense of _so long as_." But Mr. Masson's notes on the language are his weakest. He is careful to tell us, for example, "that there are instances of the use of _shine_ as a substantive in Spenser, Ben Jonson, and other poets." It is but another way of spelling _sheen_, and if Mr. Masson never heard a shoeblack in the street say, "Shall I give you a shine, sir?" his experience has been singular.[373] His notes in general are very good (though too long). Those on the astronomy of Milton are particularly valuable. I think he is sometimes a little too scornful of parallel passages,[374] for if there is one thing more striking than another in this poet, it is that his great and original imagination was almost wholly nourished by books, perhaps I should rather say set in motion by them. It is wonderful how, from the most withered and juiceless hint gathered in his reading, his grand images rise like an exhalation; how from the most battered old lamp caught in that huge drag-net with which he swept the waters of learning, he could conjure a tall genius to build his palaces. Whatever he touches swells and towers. That wonderful passage in Comus of the airy tongues, perhaps the most imaginative in suggestion he ever wrote, was conjured out of a dry sentence in Purchas's abstract of Marco Polo. Such examples help us to understand the poet. When I find that Sir Thomas Browne had said before Milton, that Adam "was _the wisest of all men since_," I am glad to find this link between the most profound and the most stately imagination of that age. Such parallels sometimes give a hint also of the historical development of our poetry, of its apostolical succession, so to speak. Every one has noticed Milton's fondness of sonorous proper names, which have not only an acquired imaginative value by association, and so serve to awaken our poetic sensibilities, but have likewise a merely musical significance. This he probably caught from Marlowe, traces of whom are frequent in him. There is certainly something of what afterwards came to be called Miltonic in more than one passage of "Tamburlaine," a play in which gigantic force seems struggling from the block, as in Michel Angelo's Dawn. Mr. Masson's remarks on the versification of Milton are, in the main, judicious, but when he ventures on particulars, one cannot always agree with him. He seems to understand that our prosody is accentual merely, and yet, when he comes to what he calls _variations_, he talks of the "substitution of the Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or the Spondee, for the regular Iambus, or of the Anapaest, the Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for the same." This is always misleading. The shift of the accent in what Mr. Masson calls "dissyllabic variations" is common to all pentameter verse, and, in the other case, most of the words cited as trisyllables either were not so in Milton's day,[375] or were so or not at choice of the poet, according to their place in the verse. There is not an elision of Milton's without precedent in the dramatists from whom he learned to write blank-verse. Milton was a greater metrist than any of them, except Marlowe and Shakespeare, and he employed the elision (or the slur) oftener than they to give a faint undulation or retardation to his verse, only because his epic form demanded it more for variety's sake. How Milton would have _read_ them, is another question. He certainly often marked them by an apostrophe in his manuscripts. He doubtless composed according to quantity, so far as that is possible in English, and as Cowper somewhat extravagantly says, "gives almost as many proofs of it in his 'Paradise Lost' as there are lines in the poem."[376] But when Mr. Masson tells us that "Self-fed and self-consumed: if this fail," and "Dwells in all Heaven charity so rare," are "only nine syllables," and that in "Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream," "either the third foot must be read as an _anapaest_ or the word _hugest_ must be pronounced as one syllable, _hug'st_," I think Milton would have invoked the soul of Sir John Cheek. Of course Milton read it "Created hugest that swim th' ocean-stream," just as he wrote (if we may trust Mr. Masson's facsimile) "Thus sang the uncouth swain to th' oaks and rills," a verse in which both hiatus and elision occur precisely as in the Italian poets.[377] "Gest that swim" would be rather a knotty _anapaest_, an insupportable foot indeed! And why is even _hug'st_ worse than Shakespeare's "_Young'st_ follower of thy drum"? In the same way he says of "For we have also our evening and our morn," that "the metre of this line is irregular," and of the rapidly fine "Came flying and in mid air aloud thus cried," that it is "a line of unusual metre." Why more unusual than "As being the contrary to his high will"? What would Mr. Masson say to these three verses from Dekkar?-- "And _knowing_ so much, I muse thou art so poor"; "I fan away the dust _flying_ in mine eyes"; "_Flowing_ o'er with court news only of you and them." All such participles (where no consonant divided the vowels) were normally of one syllable, permissibly of two.[378] If Mr. Masson had studied the poets who preceded Milton as he has studied _him_, he would never have said that the verse "Not this rock only; his omnipresence fills," was "peculiar as having a distinct syllable of overmeasure." He retains Milton's spelling of _hunderd_ without perceiving the metrical reason for it, that _d, t, p, b,_ &c., followed by _l_ or _r_, might be either of two or of three syllables. In Marlowe we find it both ways in two consecutive verses:-- "A hundred [hundered] and fifty thousand horse, Two hundred thousand foot, brave men at arms."[379] Mr. Masson is especially puzzled by verses ending in one or more unaccented syllables, and even argues in his Introduction that some of them might be reckoned Alexandrines. He cites some lines of Spenser as confirming his theory, forgetting that rhyme wholly changes the conditions of the case by throwing the accent (appreciably even now, but more emphatically in Spenser's day) on the last syllable. "A spirit and judgment equal or superior," he calls "a remarkably anomalous line, consisting of twelve or even thirteen syllables." Surely Milton's ear would never have tolerated a dissyllabic "spirit" in such a position. The word was then more commonly of one syllable, though it might be two, and was accordingly spelt _spreet_ (still surviving in _sprite_), _sprit_, and even _spirt_, as Milton himself spells it in one of Mr. Masson's facsimiles.[380] Shakespeare, in the verse "Hath put a spirit of youth in everything," uses the word admirably well in a position where it _cannot_ have a metrical value of more than one syllable, while it gives a dancing movement to the verse in keeping with the sense. Our old metrists were careful of elasticity, a quality which modern verse has lost in proportion as our language has stiffened into uniformity under the benumbing fingers of pedants. This discussion of the value of syllables is not so trifling as it seems. A great deal of nonsense has been written about imperfect measures in Shakespeare, and of the admirable dramatic effect produced by filling up the gaps of missing syllables with pauses or prolongations of the voice in reading. In rapid, abrupt, and passionate dialogue this is possible, but in passages of continuously level speech it is barbarously absurd. I do not believe that any of our old dramatists has knowingly left us a single imperfect verse. Seeing in what a haphazard way and in how mutilated a form their plays have mostly reached us, we should attribute such _faults_ (as a geologist would call them) to anything rather than to the deliberate design of the poets. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the two best metrists among them, have given us a standard by which to measure what licenses they took in versification,--the one in his translations, the other in his poems. The unmanageable verses in Milton are very few, and all of them occur in works printed after his blindness had lessened the chances of supervision and increased those of error. There are only two, indeed, which seem to me wholly indigestible as they stand. These are, "Burnt after them to the bottomless pit," and "With them from bliss to the bottomless deep." This certainly looks like a case where a word had dropped out or had been stricken out by some proof-reader who limited the number of syllables in a pentameter verse by that of his finger-ends. Mr. Masson notices only the first of these lines, and says that to make it regular by accenting the word _bottomless_ on the second syllable would be "too horrible." Certainly not, if Milton so accented it, any more than _blasphémous_ and twenty more which sound oddly to us now. However that may be, Milton could not have intended to close not only a period, but a paragraph also, with an unmusical verse, and in the only other passage where the word occurs it is accented as now on the first syllable: "With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell." As _bottom_ is a word which, like _bosom_ and _besom_, may be monosyllabic or dissyllabic according to circumstances, I am persuaded that the last passage quoted (and all three refer to the same event) gives us the word wanting in the two others, and that Milton wrote, or meant to write,-- "Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit," which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of ripple that Milton liked best.[381] Much of what Mr. Masson says in his Introduction of the way in which the verses of Milton should be read is judicious enough, though some of the examples he gives, of the "comicality" which would ensue from compressing every verse into an exact measure of ten syllables, are based on a surprising ignorance of the laws which guided our poets just before and during Milton's time in the structure of their verses. Thus he seems to think that a strict scansion would require us in the verses "So he with difficulty and labor hard," and "Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold," to pronounce _diffikty_ and _purp'_. Though Mr. Masson talks of "slurs and elisions," his ear would seem somewhat insensible to their exact nature or office. His _diffikty_ supposes a hiatus where none is intended, and his making _purple_ of one syllable wrecks the whole verse, the real slur in the latter case being on _azure or_.[382] When he asks whether Milton required "these pronunciations in his verse," no positive answer can be given, but I very much doubt whether he would have thought that some of the lines Mr. Masson cites "remain perfectly good Blank Verse even with the most leisurely natural enunciation of the spare syllable," and I am sure he would have stared if told that "the number of accents" in a pentameter verse was "variable." It may be doubted whether elisions and compressions which would be thought in bad taste or even vulgar now were more abhorrent to the ears of Milton's generation than to a cultivated Italian would be the hearing Dante read as prose. After all, what Mr. Masson says may be reduced to the infallible axiom that poetry should be read as poetry. Mr. Masson seems to be right in his main principles, but the examples he quotes make one doubt whether he knows what a verse is. For example, he thinks it would be a "horror," if in the verse "That invincible Samson far renowned" we should lay the stress on the first syllable of _invincible_. It is hard to see why this should be worse than _cónventicle_ or _rémonstrance_ or _súccessor_ or _incómpatible_, (the three latter used by the correct Daniel) or why Mr. Masson should clap an accent on _surfàce_ merely because it comes at the end of a verse, and deny it to _ínvincible_. If one read the verse just cited with those that go with it, he will find that the accent _must_ come on the first syllable of _invincible_ or else the whole passage becomes chaos.[383] Should we refuse to say _obleeged_ with Pope because the fashion has changed? From its apparently greater freedom in skilful hands, blank-verse gives more scope to sciolistic theorizing and dogmatism than the rhyming pentameter couplet, but it is safe to say that no verse is good in the one that would not be good in the other when handled by a master like Dryden. Milton, like other great poets, wrote some bad verses, and it is wiser to confess that they are so than to conjure up some unimaginable reason why the reader should accept them as the better for their badness. Such a bad verse is "Rocks, caves, lakes, _fens_, bogs, _dens_ and shapes of death," which might be cited to illustrate Pope's "And ten low words oft creep in one dull line." Milton cannot certainly be taxed with any partiality for low words. He rather loved them tall, as the Prussian King loved men to be six feet high in their stockings, and fit to go into the grenadiers. He loved them as much for their music as for their meaning,--perhaps more. His style, therefore, when it has to deal with commoner things, is apt to grow a little cumbrous and unwieldy. A Persian poet says that when the owl would boast he boasts of catching mice at the edge of a hole. Shakespeare would have understood this. Milton would have made him talk like an eagle. His influence is not to be left out of account as partially contributing to that decline toward poetic diction which was already beginning ere he died. If it would not be fair to say that he is the most artistic, he may be called in the highest sense the most scientific of our poets. If to Spenser younger poets have gone to be sung-to, they have sat at the feet of Milton to be taught. Our language has no finer poem than "Samson Agonistes," if any so fine in the quality of austere dignity or in the skill with which the poet's personal experience is generalized into a classic tragedy. Gentle as Milton's earlier portraits would seem to show him, he had in him by nature, or bred into him by fate, something of the haughty and defiant self-assertion of Dante and Michel Angelo. In no other English author is the man so large a part of his works. Milton's haughty conception of himself enters into all he says and does. Always the necessity of this one man became that of the whole human race for the moment. There were no walls so sacred but must go to the ground when _he_ wanted elbow-room; and he wanted a great deal. Did Mary Powell, the cavalier's daughter, find the abode of a roundhead schoolmaster _incompatible_ and leave it, forthwith the cry of the universe was for an easier dissolution of the marriage covenant. If _he_ is blind, it is with excess of light, it is a divine partiality, an over-shadowing with angels' wings. Phineus and Teiresias are admitted among the prophets because they, too, had lost their sight, and the blindness of Homer is of more account than his Iliad. After writing in rhyme till he was past fifty, he finds it unsuitable for his epic, and it at once becomes "the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre." If the structure of _his_ mind be undramatic, why, then, the English drama is naught, learned Jonson, sweetest Shakespeare, and the rest notwithstanding, and he will compose a tragedy on a Greek model with the blinded Samson for its hero, and he will compose it partly in rhyme. Plainly he belongs to the intenser kind of men whose yesterdays are in no way responsible for their to-morrows. And this makes him perennially interesting even to those who hate his politics, despise his Socinianism, and find his greatest poem a bore. A new edition of his poems is always welcome, for, as he is really great, he presents a fresh side to each new student, and Mr. Masson, in his three handsome volumes, has given us, with much that is superfluous and even erroneous, much more that is a solid and permanent acquisition to our knowledge. It results from the almost scornful withdrawal of Milton into the fortress of his absolute personality that no great poet is so uniformly self-conscious as he. We should say of Shakespeare that he had the power of transforming himself into everything; of Milton, that he had that of transforming everything into himself. Dante is individual rather than self-conscious, and he, the cast-iron man, grows pliable as a field of grain at the breath of Beatrice, and flows away in waves of sunshine. But Milton never let himself go for a moment. As other poets are possessed by their theme, so is he _self_-possessed, his great theme being John Milton, and his great duty that of interpreter between him and the world. I say it with all respect, for he was well worthy translation, and it is out of Hebrew that the version is made. Pope says he makes God the Father reason "like a school divine." The criticism is witty, but inaccurate. He makes Deity a mouthpiece for his present theology, and had the poem been written a few years later, the Almighty would have become more heterodox. Since Dante, no one had stood on these visiting terms with heaven. Now it is precisely this audacity of self-reliance, I suspect, which goes far toward making the sublime, and which, falling by a hair's-breadth short thereof, makes the ridiculous. Puritanism showed both the strength and weakness of its prophetic nurture; enough of the latter to be scoffed out of England by the very men it had conquered in the field, enough of the former to intrench itself in three or four immortal memories. It has left an abiding mark in politics and religion, but its great monuments are the prose of Bunyan and the verse of Milton. It is a high inspiration to be the neighbor of great events; to have been a partaker in them and to have seen noble purposes by their own self-confidence become the very means of ignoble ends, if it do not wholly depress, may kindle a passion of regret deepening the song which dares not tell the reason of its sorrow. The grand loneliness of Milton in his latter years, while it makes him the most impressive figure in our literary history, is reflected also in his maturer poems by a sublime independence of human sympathy like that with which mountains fascinate and rebuff us. But it is idle to talk of the loneliness of one the habitual companions of whose mind were the Past and Future. I always seem to see him leaning in his blindness a hand on the shoulder of each, sure that the one will guard the song which the other had inspired. Footnotes: [358] The Life of John Milton: narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. By David Masterson, M.D., LL.D. Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh. Vols. I., II. 1638-1643. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. 1871. 8vo. pp. xii, 608. The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited, with Introduction, Notes and an Essay on Milton's English by David Masson, M.A., LL.D. Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh. 3 vols. 8vo. Macmillan & Co. 1874. [359] Book I. 562-567. [360] Ibid., 615-618. [361] Apology for Smectymnuus. [362] "For him I was not sent, nor yet to free That people, victor once, now vile and base, Deservedly made vassal."--P.R. IV. 131-133. [363] If things are to be scanned so micrologically, what weighty inferences might not be drawn from Mr. Masson's invariably printing [Greek: _apax legomena_!] [364] "That you may tell heroës, when you come To banquet with your wife." _Chapman's Odyssey_, VIII. 336, 337. In the facsimile of the sonnet to Fairfax I find "Thy firm unshak'n vertue ever brings," which shows how much faith we need give to the apostrophe. [365] Mr. Masson might have cited a good example of this from Drummond, whom (as a Scotsman) he is fond of quoting for an authority in English,-- "Sleep, Silence' child, sweet father of soft rest." The survival of _Horse_ for _horses_ is another example. So by a reverse process _pult_ and _shay_ have been vulgarly deduced from the supposed plurals _pulse_ and _chaise_. [366] Chapman's spelling is presumably his own. At least he looked after his printed texts. I have two copies of his "Byron's Conspiracy," both dated 1608, but one evidently printed later than the other, for it shows corrections. The more solemn ending in _ed_ was probably kept alive by the reading of the Bible in churches. Though now dropped by the clergy, it is essential to the right hearing of the more metrical passages in the Old Testament, which are finer and more scientiflc than anything in the language, unless it be some parts of "Samson Agonistes." I remember an old gentleman who always used the contracted form of the participle in conversation, but always gave it back its embezzled syllable in reading. Sir Thomas Browne seems to have preferred the more solemn form. At any rate he has the spelling _empuzzeled_ in prose. [367] He thinks the same of the variation _strook_ and _struck_, though they were probably pronounced alike. In Marlowe's "Faustus" two consecutive sentences (in prose) begin with the words "Cursed be he that struck." In a note on the passage Mr. Dyce tells us that the old editions (there were three) have _stroke_ and _strooke_ in the first instance, and all agree on _strucke_ in the second. No inference can be drawn from such casualties. [368] The lines are _not_ "from one of the Satires," and Milton made them worse by misquoting and bringing _love_ jinglingly near to _grove_. Hall's verse (in his Satires) is always vigorous and often harmonious. He long before Milton spoke of rhyme almost in the very terms of the preface to Paradise Lost. [369] Mr. Masson goes so far as to conceive it possible that Milton may have committed the vulgarism of leaving a _t_ out of _slep'st_, "for ease of sound." Yet the poet could bear _boast'st_ and--one stares and gasps at it--_doat'dst_. There is, by the way, a familiar passage in which the _ch_ sound predominates, not without a touch of _sh_, in a single couplet:-- "Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould Breathe su_ch_ divine enchanting ravi_sh_ment?" So "Blotches and blains must all his flesh emboss," and perhaps "I see his tents Pitched about Sechem" might be added. [370] I think Coleridge's nice ear would have blamed the nearness of _enemy_ and _calamity_ in this passage. Mr. Masson leaves out the comma after _If not_, the pause of which is needful, I think, to the sense, and certainly to keep _not_ a little farther apart from _what_, ("teach each"!) [371] "First in his East," is not soothing to the ear. [372] There seems to be something wrong in this word _shores_. Did Milton write _shoals_? [373] But his etymological notes are worse. For example, "_recreant_, renouncing the faith, from the old French _recroire_, which again is from the mediaeval Latin _recredere_, to 'believe back,' or apostatize." This is pure fancy. The word had no such meaning in either language. He derives _serenate_ from _sera_, and says that _parle_ means treaty, negotiation, though it is the same word as _parley_, had the same meanings, and was commonly pronounced like it, as in Marlowe's "What, shall we _parlé_ with this Christïan?" It certainly never meant _treaty_, though it may have meant _negotiation_. When it did it implied the meeting face to face of the principals. On the verses "And some flowers and some bays For thy hearse to strew the ways," he has a note to tell us that _hearse_ is not to be taken "in our sense of a carriage for the dead, but in the older sense of a tomb or framework over a tomb," though the obvious meaning is "to strew the ways for thy hearse." How could one do that for a tomb or the framework over it? [374] A passage from Dante (Inferno, XI. 96-105), with its reference to Aristotle, would have given him the meaning of "Nature taught art," which seems to puzzle him. A study of Dante and of his earlier commentators would also have been of great service in the astronomical notes. [375] Almost every combination of two vowels might in those days be a diphthong or not, at will. Milton's practice of elision was confirmed and sometimes (perhaps) modified by his study of the Italians, with whose usage in this respect he closely conforms. [376] Letter to Rev. W. Bagot, 4th January, 1791. [377] So Dante:-- "Ma sapienza e amore e virtute." So Donne:-- "Simony and sodomy in churchmen's lives." [378] Mr. Masson is evidently not very familiar at first hand with the versification to which Milton's youthful ear had been trained, but seems to have learned something from Abbott's "Shakespearian Grammar" in the interval between writing his notes and his Introduction. Walker's "Shakespeare's Versification" would have been a great help to him in default of original knowledge. [379] Milton has a verse in Comus where the _e_ is elided from the word _sister_ by its preceding a vowel:-- "Heaven keep my sister! again, again, and near!" This would have been impossible before a consonant. [380] So _spirito_ and _spirto_ in Italian, _esperis_ and _espirs_ in Old French. [381] Milton, however, would not have balked at _th' bottomless_ any more than Drayton at _th' rejected_ or Donne at _th' sea_. Mr. Masson does not seem to understand this elision, for he corrects _i' th' midst_ to _i' the midst_, and takes pains to mention it in a note. He might better have restored the _n_ in _i'_, where it is no contraction, but merely indicates the pronunciation, as _o'_ for _of_ and _on_. [382] Exactly analogous to that in treasurer when it is shortened to two syllables. [383] Milton himself has _ínvísible_, for we cannot suppose him guilty of a verse like "Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep," while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions that he loved. KEATS. There are few poets whose works contain slighter hints of their personal history than those of Keats; yet there are, perhaps, even fewer whose real lives, or rather the conditions upon which they lived, are more clearly traceable in what they have written. To write the life of a man was formerly understood to mean the cataloguing and placing of circumstances, of those things which stood about the life and were more or less related to it, but were not the life itself. But Biography from day to day holds dates cheaper and facts dearer. A man's life, so far as its outward events are concerned, may be made for him, as his clothes are by the tailor, of this cut or that, of finer or coarser material; but the gait and gesture show through, and give to trappings, in themselves characterless, an individuality that belongs to the man himself. It is those essential facts which underlie the life and make the individual man that are of importance, and it is the cropping out of these upon the surface that gives us indications by which to judge of the true nature hidden below. Every man has his block given him, and the figure he cuts will depend very much upon the shape of that,--upon the knots and twists which existed in it from the beginning. We were designed in the cradle, perhaps earlier, and it is in finding out this design, and shaping ourselves to it, that our years are spent wisely. It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough. Keats hardly lived long enough to develop a well-outlined character, for that results commonly from the resistance made by temperament to the many influences by which the world, as it may happen then to be, endeavors to mould every one in its own image. What his temperament was we can see clearly, and also that it subordinated itself more and more to the discipline of art. * * * * * John Keats, the second of four children, like Chaucer and Spenser, was a Londoner, but, unlike them, he was certainly not of gentle blood. Lord Houghton, who seems to have had a kindly wish to create him gentleman by brevet, says that he was "born in the upper ranks of the middle class." This shows a commendable tenderness for the nerves of English society, and reminds one of Northcote's story of the violin-player who, wishing to compliment his pupil, George III., divided all fiddlers into three classes,--those who could not play at all, those who played very badly, and those who played very well,--assuring his Majesty that he had made such commendable progress as to have already reached the second rank. We shall not be too greatly shocked by knowing that the father of Keats (as Lord Houghton had told us in an earlier biography) "was employed in the establishment of Mr. Jennings, the proprietor of large livery-stables on the Pavement in Moorfields, nearly opposite the entrance into Finsbury Circus." So that, after all, it was not so bad; for, first, Mr. Jennings was a _proprietor_; second, he was the proprietor of an _establishment_; third, he was the proprietor of a _large_ establishment; and fourth, this large establishment was _nearly_ opposite Finsbury Circus,--a name which vaguely dilates the imagination with all sorts of potential grandeurs. It is true Leigh Hunt asserts that Keats "was a little too sensitive on the score of his origin,"[384] but we can find no trace of such a feeling either in his poetry or in such of his letters as have been printed. We suspect the fact to have been that he resented with becoming pride the vulgar Blackwood and Quarterly standard, which measured genius by genealogies. It is enough that his poetical pedigree is of the best, tracing through Spenser to Chaucer, and that Pegasus does not stand at livery even in the largest establishments in Moorfields. As well as we can make out, then, the father of Keats was a groom in the service of Mr. Jennings, and married the daughter of his master. Thus, on the mother's side, at least, we find a grandfather, on the father's there is no hint of such an ancestor, and we must charitably take him for granted. It is of more importance that the elder Keats was a man of sense and energy, and that his wife was a "lively and intelligent woman, who hastened the birth of the poet by her passionate love of amusement," bringing him into the world, a seven-months' child, on the 29th October, 1795, instead of the 29th of December, as would have been conventionally proper. Lord Houghton describes her as "tall, with a large oval face, and a somewhat saturnine demeanour." This last circumstance does not agree very well with what he had just before told us of her liveliness, but he consoles us by adding that "she succeeded, _however_, in inspiring her children with the profoundest affection." This was particularly true of John, who once, when between four and five years old, mounted guard at her chamber door with an old sword, when she was ill and the doctor had ordered her not to be disturbed.[385] In 1804, Keats being in his ninth year, his father was killed by a fall from his horse. His mother seems to have been ambitious for her children, and there was some talk of sending John to Harrow. Fortunately this plan was thought too expensive, and he was sent instead to the school of Mr. Clarke at Enfield with his brothers. A maternal uncle, who had distinguished himself by his courage under Duncan at Camperdown, was the hero of his nephews, and they went to school resolved to maintain the family reputation for courage. John was always fighting, and was chiefly noted among his school-fellows as a strange compound of pluck and sensibility. He attacked an usher who had boxed his brother's ears; and when his mother died, in 1810, was moodily inconsolable, hiding himself for several days in a nook under the master's desk, and refusing all comfort from teacher or friend. He was popular at school, as boys of spirit always are, and impressed his companions with a sense of his power. They thought he would one day be a famous soldier. This may have been owing to the stories he told them of the heroic uncle, whose deeds, we may be sure, were properly famoused by the boy Homer, and whom they probably took for an admiral at the least, as it would have been well for Keats's literary prosperity if he had been. At any rate, they thought John would be a great man, which is the main thing, for the public opinion of the playground is truer and more discerning than that of the world, and if you tell us what the boy was, we will tell you what the man longs to be, however he may be repressed by necessity or fear of the police reports. Lord Houghton has failed to discover anything else especially worthy of record in the school-life of Keats. He translated the twelve books of the Aeneid, read Robinson Crusoe and the Incas of Peru, and looked into Shakespeare. He left school in 1810, with little Latin and no Greek, but he had studied Spence's Polymetis, Tooke's Pantheon, and Lempriere's Dictionary, and knew gods, nymphs, and heroes, which were quite as good company perhaps for him as artists and aspirates. It is pleasant to fancy the horror of those respectable writers if their pages could suddenly have become alive tinder their pens with all that the young poet saw in them.[386] On leaving school he was apprenticed for five years to a surgeon at Edmonton. His master was a Mr. Hammond, "of some eminence" in his profession, as Lord Houghton takes care to assure us. The place was of more importance than the master, for its neighborhood to Enfield enabled him to keep up his intimacy with the family of his former teacher, Mr. Clarke, and to borrow books of them. In 1812, when he was in his seventeenth year, Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke lent him the "Faerie Queene." Nothing that is told of Orpheus or Amphion is more wonderful than this miracle of Spenser's, transforming a surgeon's apprentice into a great poet. Keats learned at once the secret of his birth, and henceforward his indentures ran to Apollo instead of Mr. Hammond. Thus could the Muse defend her son. It is the old story,--the lost heir discovered by his aptitude for what is gentle and knightly. Haydon tells us "that he used sometimes to say to his brother he feared he should never be a poet, and if he was not he would destroy himself." This was perhaps a half-conscious reminiscence of Chatterton, with whose genius and fate he had an intense sympathy, it may be from an inward foreboding of the shortness of his own career.[387] Before long we find him studying Chaucer, then Shakespeare, and afterward Milton. But Chapman's translations had a more abiding influence on his style both for good and evil. That he read wisely, his comments on the "Paradise Lost" are enough to prove. He now also commenced poet himself, but does not appear to have neglected the study of his profession. He was a youth of energy and purpose, and though he no doubt penned many a stanza when he should have been anatomizing, and walked the hospitals accompanied by the early gods, nevertheless passed a very creditable examination in 1817. In the spring of this year, also, he prepared to take his first degree as poet, and accordingly published a small volume containing a selection of his earlier essays in verse. It attracted little attention, and the rest of this year seems to have been occupied with a journey on foot in Scotland, and the composition of "Endymion," which was published in 1818. Milton's "Tetrachordon" was not better abused; but Milton's assailants were unorganized, and were obliged each to print and pay for his own dingy little quarto, trusting to the natural laws of demand and supply to furnish him with readers. Keats was arraigned by the constituted authorities of literary justice. They might be, nay, they were Jeffrieses and Scroggses, but the sentence was published, and the penalty inflicted before all England. The difference between his fortune and Milton's was that between being pelted by a mob of personal enemies and being set in the pillory. In the first case, the annoyance brushes off mostly with the mud; in the last, there is no solace but the consciousness of suffering in a great cause. This solace, to a certain extent, Keats had; for his ambition was noble, and he hoped not to make a great reputation, but to be a great poet. Haydon says that Wordsworth and Keats were the only men he had ever seen who looked conscious of a lofty purpose. It is curious that men should resent more fiercely what they suspect to be good verses, than what they know to be bad morals. Is it because they feel themselves incapable of the one and not of the other? Probably a certain amount of honest loyalty to old idols in danger of dethronement is to be taken into account, and quite as much of the cruelty of criticism is due to want of thought as to deliberate injustice. However it be, the best poetry has been the most savagely attacked, and men who scrupulously practised the Ten Commandments as if there were never a _not_ in any of them, felt every sentiment of their better nature outraged by the "Lyrical Ballads." It is idle to attempt to show that Keats did not suffer keenly from the vulgarities of Blackwood and the Quarterly. He suffered in proportion as his ideal was high, and he was conscious of falling below it. In England, especially, it is not pleasant to be ridiculous, even if you are a lord; but to be ridiculous and an apothecary at the same time is almost as bad as it was formerly to be excommunicated. _A priori_, there was something absurd in poetry written by the son of an assistant in the livery-stables of Mr. Jennings, even though they were an establishment, and a large establishment, and nearly opposite Finsbury Circus. Mr. Gifford, the ex-cobbler, thought so in the Quarterly, and Mr. Terry, the actor,[388] thought so even more distinctly in Blackwood, bidding the young apothecary "back to his gallipots!" It is not pleasant to be talked down upon by your inferiors who happen to have the advantage of position, nor to be drenched with ditchwater, though you know it to be thrown by a scullion in a garret. Keats, as his was a temperament in which sensibility was excessive, could not but be galled by this treatment. He was galled the more that he was also a man of strong sense, and capable of understanding clearly how hard it is to make men acknowledge solid value in a person whom they have once heartily laughed at. Reputation is in itself only a farthing-candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit. Keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve it. To his friend Taylor he writes, "There is but one way for me. The road lies through study, application, and thought." Thrilling with the electric touch of sacred leaves, he saw in vision, like Dante, that small procession of the elder poets to which only elect centuries can add another laurelled head. Might he, too, deserve from posterity the love and reverence which he paid to those antique glories? It was no unworthy ambition, but everything was against him,--birth, health, even friends, since it was partly on their account that he was sneered at. His very name stood in his way, for Fame loves best such, syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue, like Spenserian, Shakespearian. In spite of Juliet, there is a great deal in names, and when the fairies come with their gifts to the cradle of the selected child, let one, wiser than the rest, choose a name for him from which well-sounding derivatives can be made, and, best of all, with a termination in _on_. Men judge the current coin of opinion by the ring, and are readier to take without question whatever is Platonic, Baconian, Newtonian, Johnsonian, Washingtonian, Jeffersonian, Napoleonic, and all the rest. You cannot make a good adjective out of Keats,--the more pity,--and to say a thing is _Keatsy_ is to contemn it. Fortune likes fine names. Haydon tells us that Keats was very much depressed by the fortunes of his book. This was natural enough, but he took it all in a manly way, and determined to revenge himself by writing better poetry. He knew that activity, and not despondency, is the true counterpoise to misfortune. Haydon is sure of the change in his spirits, because he would come to the painting-room and sit silent for hours. But we rather think that the conversation, where Mr. Haydon was, resembled that in a young author's first play, where the other interlocutors are only brought in as convenient points for the hero to hitch the interminable web of his monologue upon. Besides, Keats had been continuing his education this year, by a course of Elgin marbles and pictures by the great Italians, and might very naturally have found little to say about Mr. Haydon's extensive works, that he would have cared to hear. Lord Houghton, on the other hand, in his eagerness to prove that Keats was not killed by the article in the Quarterly, is carried too far toward the opposite extreme, and more than hints that he was not even hurt by it. This would have been true of Wordsworth, who, by a constant companionship with mountains, had acquired something of their manners, but was simply impossible to a man of Keats's temperament. On the whole, perhaps, we need not respect Keats the less for having been gifted with sensibility, and may even say what we believe to be true, that his health was injured by the failure of his book. A man cannot have a sensuous nature and be pachydermatous at the same time, and if he be imaginative as well as sensuous, he suffers just in proportion to the amount of his imagination. It is perfectly true that what we call the world, in these affairs, is nothing more than a mere Brocken spectre, the projected shadow of ourselves; but as long as we do not know it, it is a very passable giant. We are not without experience of natures so purely intellectual that their bodies had no more concern in their mental doings and sufferings than a house has with the good or ill fortune of its occupant. But poets are not built on this plan, and especially poets like Keats, in whom the moral seems to have so perfectly interfused the physical man, that you might almost say he could feel sorrow with his hands, so truly did his body, like that of Donne's Mistress Boulstred, think and remember and forebode. The healthiest poet of whom our civilization has been capable says that when he beholds "desert a beggar born, And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority," alluding, plainly enough, to the Giffords of his day, "And simple truth miscalled simplicity," as it was long afterward in Wordsworth's case, "And captive Good attending Captain Ill," that then even he, the poet to whom, of all others, life seems to have been dearest, as it was also the fullest of enjoyment, "tired of all these," had nothing for it but to cry for "restful Death." Keats, to all appearance, accepted his ill fortune courageously. He certainly did not overestimate "Endymion," and perhaps a sense of humor which was not wanting in him may have served as a buffer against the too importunate shock of disappointment. "He made Ritchie promise," says Haydon, "he would carry his 'Endymion' to the great desert of Sahara and fling it in the midst." On the 9th October, 1818, he writes to his publisher, Mr. Hessey, "I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part. As for the rest, I begin to get acquainted with my own strength and weakness. Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could inflict; and also, when I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. J.S. is perfectly right in regard to 'the slipshod Endymion.' That it is so is no fault of mine. No! though it may sound a little paradoxical, it is as good as I had power to make it by myself. Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice and trembled over every page, it would not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble. I will write independently. I have written independently _without judgment_. I may write independently and _with judgment_, hereafter. The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself. In 'Endymion' I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest." This was undoubtedly true, and it was naturally the side which a large-minded person would display to a friend. This is what he thought, but whether it was what he _felt_, I think doubtful. I look upon it rather as one of the phenomena of that multanimous nature of the poet, which makes him for the moment that of which he has an intellectual perception. Elsewhere he says something which seems to hint at the true state of the case. "I must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a man: _they make our prime objects a refuge as well as a passion_." One cannot help contrasting Keats with Wordsworth,--the one altogether poet; the other essentially a Wordsworth, with the poetic faculty added,--the one shifting from form to form, and from style to style, and pouring his hot throbbing life into every mould; the other remaining always the individual, producing works, and not so much living in his poems as memorially recording his life in them. When Wordsworth alludes to the foolish criticisms on his writings, he speaks serenely and generously of Wordsworth the poet, as if he were an unbiassed third person, who takes up the argument merely in the interest of literature. He towers into a bald egotism which is quite above and beyond selfishness. Poesy was his employment; it was Keats's very existence, and he felt the rough treatment of his verses as if it had been the wounding of a limb. To Wordsworth, composing was a healthy exercise, his slow pulse and imperturbable self trust gave him assurance of a life so long that he could wait, and when we read his poems we should never suspect the existence in him of any sense but that of observation, as if Wordsworth the poet were a half-mad land-surveyor, accompanied by Mr. Wordsworth the distributor of stamps, as a kind of keeper. But every one of Keats's poems was a sacrifice of vitality, a virtue went away from him into every one of them; even yet, as we turn the leaves, they seem to warm and thrill our fingers with the flush of his fine senses, and the flutter of his electrical nerves, and we do not wonder he felt that what he did was to be done swiftly. In the mean time his younger brother languished and died, his elder seems to have been in some way unfortunate and had gone to America, and Keats himself showed symptoms of the hereditary disease which caused his death at last. It is in October, 1818, that we find the first allusion to a passion which was, erelong, to consume him It is plain enough beforehand, that those were not moral or mental graces that should attract a man like Keats. His intellect was satisfied and absorbed by his art, his books, and his friends He could have companionship and appreciation from men; what he craved of woman was only repose. That luxurious nature, which would have tossed uneasily on a crumpled rose leaf, must have something softer to rest upon than intellect, something less ethereal than culture. It was his body that needed to have its equilibrium restored, the waste of his nervous energy that must be repaired by deep draughts of the overflowing life and drowsy tropical force of an abundant and healthily poised womanhood. Writing to his sister-in-law, he says of this nameless person: "She is not a Cleopatra, but is, at least, a Charmian; she has a rich Eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. When she comes into a room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may address her. From habit, she thinks that _nothing particular_. I always find myself at ease with such a woman; the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble. I forget myself entirely, because I live in her. You will by this time think I am in love with her, so, before I go any farther, I will tell you that I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart's might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very _yes_ and _no_ of whose life is to me a banquet.... I like her and her like, because one has no _sensation_; what we both are is taken for granted.... She walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn toward her with magnetic power.... I believe, though, she has faults, the same as a Cleopatra or a Charmian might have had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way; for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things,--the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me." It is pleasant always to see Love hiding his head with such pains, while his whole body is so clearly visible, as in this extract. This lady, it seems, is not a Cleopatra, only a Charmian; but presently we find that she is imperial. He does not love her, but he would just like to be ruined by her, nothing more. This glimpse of her, with her leopardess beauty, crossing the room and drawing men after her magnetically, is all we have. She seems to have been still living in 1848, and as Lord Houghton tells us, kept the memory of the poet sacred. "She is an East-Indian," Keats says, "and ought to be her grandfather's heir." Her name we do not know. It appears from Dilke's "Papers of a Critic" that they were betrothed: "It is quite a settled thing between John Keats and Miss ----. God help them. It is a bad thing for them. The mother says she cannot prevent it, and that her only hope is that it will go off. He don't like any one to look at her or to speak to her." Alas, the tropical warmth became a consuming fire! "His passion cruel grown took on a hue Fierce and sanguineous." Between this time and the spring of 1820 he seems to have worked assiduously. Of course, worldly success was of more importance than ever. He began "Hyperion," but had given it up in September, 1819, because, as he said, "there were too many Miltonic inversions in it." He wrote "Lamia" after an attentive study of Dryden's versification. This period also produced the "Eve of St. Agnes," "Isabella," and the odes to the "Nightingale" and to the "Grecian Urn." He studied Italian, read Ariosto, and wrote part of a humorous poem, "The Cap and Bells." He tried his hand at tragedy, and Lord Houghton has published among his "Remains," "Otho the Great," and all that was ever written of "King Stephen." We think he did unwisely, for a biographer is hardly called upon to show how ill his _biographee_ could do anything. In the winter of 1820 he was chilled in riding on the top of a stage-coach, and came home in a state of feverish excitement. He was persuaded to go to bed, and in getting between the cold sheets, coughed slightly. "That is blood in my mouth," he said; "bring me the candle; let me see this blood." It was of a brilliant red, and his medical knowledge enabled him to interpret the augury. Those narcotic odors that seem to breathe seaward, and steep in repose the senses of the voyager who is drifting toward the shore of the mysterious Other World, appeared to envelop him, and, looking up with sudden calmness, he said, "I know the color of that blood; it is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived in that color. That drop is my death-warrant; I must die." There was a slight rally during the summer of that year, but toward autumn he grew worse again, and it was decided that he should go to Italy. He was accompanied thither by his friend, Mr. Severn, an artist. After embarking, he wrote to his friend, Mr. Brown. We give a part of this letter, which is so deeply tragic that the sentences we take almost seem to break away from the rest with a cry of anguish, like the branches of Dante's lamentable wood. "I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much. There is one I must mention and have done with it. Even if my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it. The very thing which I want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it. Who can help it? Were I in health it would make me ill, and how can I bear it in my state? I dare say you will be able to guess on what subject I am harping,--you know what was my greatest pain during the first part of my illness at your house I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains, which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but Death is the great divorcer forever. When the pang of this thought has passed through my mind, I may say the bitterness of death is passed. I often wish for you, that you might flatter me with the best. I think, without my mentioning it, for my sake, you would be a, friend to Miss ---- when I am dead. You think she has many faults, but for my sake think she has not one. If there is anything you can do for her by word or deed I know you will do it. I am in a state at present in which woman, merely as woman, can have no more power over me than stocks and stones, and yet the difference of my sensations with respect to Miss ---- and my sister is amazing,--the one seems to absorb the other to a degree incredible. I seldom think of my brother and sister in America; the thought of leaving Miss ---- is beyond everything horrible,--the sense of darkness coming over me,--I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing, some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my ears. Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be; we cannot be created for this sort of suffering." To the same friend he writes again from Naples, 1st November, 1820:-- "The persuasion that I shall see her no more will kill me. My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear to die,--I cannot bear to leave her. O God! God! God! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling-cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her,--I see her, I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her a moment. This was the case when I was in England, I cannot recollect, without shuddering, the time that I was a prisoner at Hunt's, and used to keep my eyes fixed on Hampstead all day. Then there was a good hope of seeing her again,--now!--O that I could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her, to receive a letter from her,--to see her handwriting would break my heart. Even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do? Where can I look for consolation or ease? If I had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me. Indeed, through the whole of my illness, both at your house and at Kentish Town, this fever has never ceased wearing me out." The two friends went almost immediately from Naples to Rome, where Keats was treated with great kindness by the distinguished physician, Dr. (afterward Sir James) Clark.[389] But there was no hope from the first. His disease was beyond remedy, as his heart was beyond comfort. The very fact that life might be happy deepened his despair. He might not have sunk so soon, but the waves in which he was struggling looked only the blacker that they were shone upon by the signal-torch that promised safety and love and rest. It is good to know that one of Keats's last pleasures was in hearing Severn read aloud from a volume of Jeremy Taylor. On first coming to Rome, he had bought a copy of Alfieri, but, finding on the second page these lines, "Misera me! sollievo a me non resta Altro che il pianto, ed il pianto é delitto," he laid down the book and opened it no more. On the 14th February, 1821, Severn speaks of a change that had taken place in him toward greater quietness and peace. He talked much, and fell at last into a sweet sleep, in which he seemed to have happy dreams. Perhaps he heard the soft footfall of the angel of Death, pacing to and fro under his window, to be his Valentine. That night he asked to have this epitaph inscribed upon his gravestone,-- "HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER." On the 23d he died, without pain and as if falling asleep. His last words were, "I am dying; I shall die easy; don't be frightened, be firm and thank God it has come!" He was buried in the Protestant burial-ground at Rome, in that part of it which is now disused and secluded from the rest. A short time before his death he told Severn that he thought his intensest pleasure in life had been to watch the growth of flowers; and once, after lying peacefully awhile, he said, "I feel the flowers growing over me." His grave is marked by a little headstone on which are carved somewhat rudely his name and age, and the epitaph dictated by himself. No tree or shrub has been planted near it, but the daisies, faithful to their buried lover, crowd his small mound with a galaxy of their innocent stars, more prosperous than those under which he lived.[390] In person, Keats was below the middle height, with a head small in proportion to the breadth of his shoulders. His hair was brown and fine, falling in natural ringlets about a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed. Every feature was delicately cut; the chin was bold; and about the mouth something of a pugnacious expression. His eyes were mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled.[391] Haydon says that his eyes had an inward Delphian look that was perfectly divine. The faults of Keats's poetry are obvious enough, but it should be remembered that he died at twenty-five, and that he offends by superabundance and not poverty. That he was overlanguaged at first there can be no doubt, and in this was implied the possibility of falling back to the perfect mean of diction. It is only by the rich that the costly plainness, which at once satisfies the taste and the imagination, is attainable. Whether Keats was original or not, I do not think it useful to discuss until it has been settled what originality is. Lord Houghton tells us that this merit (whatever it is) has been denied to Keats, because his poems take the color of the authors he happened to be reading at the time he wrote them. But men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several generations. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past. It is true that Keats has the accent of the men from whom he learned to speak, but this is to make originality a mere question of externals, and in this sense the author of a dictionary might bring an action of trover against every author who used his words. It is the man behind the words that gives them value, and if Shakespeare help himself to a verse or a phrase, it is with ears that have learned of him to listen that we feel the harmony of the one, and it is the mass of his intellect that makes the other weighty with meaning. Enough that we recognize in Keats that indefinable newness and unexpectedness which we call genius. The sunset is original every evening, though for thousands of years it has built out of the same light and vapor its visionary cities with domes and pinnacles, and its delectable mountains which night shall utterly abase and destroy. Three men, almost contemporaneous with each other,--Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron,--were the great means of bringing back English poetry from the sandy deserts of rhetoric, and recovering for her her triple inheritance of simplicity, sensuousness, and passion. Of these, Wordsworth was the only conscious reformer, and his hostility to the existing formalism injured his earlier poems by tingeing them with something of iconoclastic extravagance. He was the deepest thinker, Keats the most essentially a poet, and Byron the most keenly intellectual of the three. Keats had the broadest mind, or at least his mind was open on more sides, and he was able to understand Wordsworth and judge Byron, equally conscious, through his artistic sense, of the greatnesses of the one and the many littlenesses of the other, while Wordsworth was isolated in a feeling of his prophetic character, and Byron had only an uneasy and jealous instinct of contemporary merit. The poems of Wordsworth, as he was the most individual, accordingly reflect the moods of his own nature; those of Keats, from sensitiveness of organization, the moods of his own taste and feeling; and those of Byron, who was impressible chiefly through the understanding, the intellectual and moral wants of the time in which he lived. Wordsworth has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats, their forms; and Byron, interesting to men of imagination less for his writings than for what his writings indicate, reappears no more in poetry, but presents an ideal to youth made restless with vague desires not yet regulated by experience nor supplied with motives by the duties of life. Keats certainly had more of the penetrative and sympathetic imagination which belongs to the poet, of that imagination which identifies itself with the momentary object of its contemplation, than any man of these later days. It is not merely that he has studied the Elizabethans and caught their turn of thought, but that he really sees things with their sovereign eye, and feels them with their electrified senses. His imagination was his bliss and bane. Was he cheerful, he "hops about the gravel with the sparrows"; was he morbid, he "would reject a Petrarcal coronation,--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers." So impressible was he as to say that he "had no nature," meaning character. But he knew what the faculty was worth, and says finely, "The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream: he awoke and found it truth." He had an unerring instinct for the poetic uses of things, and for him they had no other use. We are apt to talk of the classic _renaissance_ as of a phenomenon long past, nor ever to be renewed, and to think the Greeks and Romans alone had the mighty magic to work such a miracle. To me one of the most interesting aspects of Keats is that in him we have an example of the _renaissance_ going on almost under our own eyes, and that the intellectual ferment was in him kindled by a purely English leaven. He had properly no scholarship, any more than Shakespeare had, but like him he assimilated at a touch whatever could serve his purpose. His delicate senses absorbed culture at every pore. Of the self-denial to which he trained himself (unexampled in one so young) the second draft of Hyperion as compared with the first is a conclusive proof. And far indeed is his "Lamia" from the lavish indiscrimination of "Endymion." In his Odes he showed a sense of form and proportion which we seek vainly in almost any other English poet, and some of his sonnets (taking all qualities into consideration) are the most perfect in our language. No doubt there is something tropical and of strange overgrowth in his sudden maturity, but it _was_ maturity nevertheless. Happy the young poet who has the saving fault of exuberance, if he have also the shaping faculty that sooner or later will amend it! As every young person goes through all the world-old experiences, fancying them something peculiar and personal to himself, so it is with every new generation, whose youth always finds its representatives in its poets. Keats rediscovered the delight and wonder that lay enchanted in the dictionary. Wordsworth revolted at the poetic diction which he found in vogue, but his own language rarely rises above it, except when it is upborne by the thought. Keats had an instinct for fine words, which are in themselves pictures and ideas, and had more of the power of poetic expression than any modern English poet. And by poetic expression I do not mean merely a vividness in particulars, but the right feeling which heightens or subdues a passage or a whole poem to the proper tone, and gives entireness to the effect. There is a great deal more than is commonly supposed in this choice of words. Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or reapplies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best. This power of language is veiled in the old legends which make the invisible powers the servants of some word. As soon as we have discovered the word for our joy or sorrow we are no longer its serfs, but its lords. We reward the discoverer of an anaesthetic for the body and make him member of all the societies, but him who finds a nepenthe for the soul we elect into the small academy of the immortals. The poems of Keats mark an epoch in English poetry; for, however often we may find traces of it in others, in them found its most unconscious expression that reaction against the barrel-organ style which had been reigning by a kind of sleepy divine right for half a century. The lowest point was indicated when there was such an utter confounding of the common and the uncommon sense that Dr. Johnson wrote verse and Burke prose. The most profound gospel of criticism was, that nothing was good poetry that could not be translated into good prose, as if one should say that the test of sufficient moonlight was that tallow-candles could be made of it. We find Keats at first going to the other extreme, and endeavoring to extract green cucumbers from the rays of tallow; but we see also incontestable proof of the greatness and purity of his poetic gift in the constant return toward equilibrium and repose in his later poems. And it is a repose always lofty and clear-aired, like that of the eagle balanced in incommunicable sunshine. In him a vigorous understanding developed itself in equal measure with the divine faculty; thought emancipated itself from expression without becoming its tyrant; and music and meaning floated together, accordant as swan and shadow, on the smooth element of his verse. Without losing its sensuousness, his poetry refined itself and grew more inward, and the sensational was elevated into the typical by the control of that finer sense which underlies the senses and is the spirit of them. Footnotes: [384] Hunt's Autobiography (Am. ed.), Vol. II. p. 36. [385] Haydon tells the story differently, but I think Lord Houghton's version the best. [386] There is always some one willing to make himself a sort of accessary after the fact in any success; always an old woman or two, ready to remember omens of all quantities and qualities in the childhood of persons who have become distinguished. Accordingly, a certain "Mrs. Grafty, of Craven Street, Finsbury," assures Mr. George Keats, when he tells her that John is determined to be a poet, "that this was very odd, because when he could just speak, instead of answering questions put to him, he would always make a rhyme to the last word people said, and then laugh." The early histories of heroes, like those of nations, are always more or less mythical, and I give the story for what it is worth. Doubtless there is a gleam of intelligence in it, for the old lady pronounces it odd that any one should _determine_ to be a poet, and seems to have wished to hint that the matter was determined earlier and by a higher disposing power. There are few children who do not soon discover the charm of rhyme, and perhaps fewer who can resist making fun of the Mrs. Graftys, of Craven Street, Finsbury, when they have the chance. See Haydon's Autobiography, Vol I. p.361. [387] "I never saw the poet Keats but once, but he then read some lines from (I think) the 'Bristowe Tragedy' with an enthusiasm of admiration such as could be felt only by a poet, and which true poetry only could have excited."--J. H. C., in Notes & Queries, 4th s. x. 157. [388] Haydon (Autobiography, Vol. I. p.379) says that he "strongly suspects" Terry to have written the articles in Blackwood. [389] The lodging of Keats was on the Piazza di Spagna, in the first house on the right hand in going up the Scalinata. Mr. Severn's Studio is said to have been in the Cancello over the garden gate of the Villa Negroni, pleasantly familiar to all Americans as the Roman home of their countryman Crawford. [390] Written in 1856. O irony of Time! Ten years after the poet's death the woman he had so loved wrote to his friend Mr. Dilke, that "the kindest act would be to let him rest forever in the obscurity to which circumstances had condemned him"! (Papers of a Critic, I. 11.) O Time the atoner! In 1874 I found the grave planted with shrubs and flowers, the pious homage of the daughter of our most eminent American sculptor. [391] Leigh Hunt's Autobiography, II. 43.