Read Ebook: Dante. An essay. To which is added a translation of De Monarchia. by Church R W Richard William Dante Alighieri Church F J Frederick John Translator

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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.

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.

Mira Quanto ? '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.

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. 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.

or the noise of the cracking ice:

even separate letters--to express an image, to spell a name, or as used in some popular proverb. 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 ;--the cook's assistant watching over the boiling broth ;--the hurried or impatient horse-groom using his curry-comb ;--or the common sights of the street or the chamber--the wet wood sputtering on the hearth:

the paper changing colour when about to catch fire:

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:

the snail drawing in its horns ;--the hog shut out of its sty, and trying to gore with its tusks ;--the dogs' misery in summer ;--the frogs jumping on to the bank before the water-snake ;--or showing their heads above water:

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.

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:

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:

the rooks, beginning to move about at daybreak:

the morning sounds of the swallow:

the joy and delight of the nightingale's song ; the lark, silent at last, filled with its own sweetness:

the flight of the starlings and storks ; the mournful cry and long line of the cranes ; the young birds trying to escape from the nest ; 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:

or the flock of pigeons, feeding:

Hawking supplies its images: the falcon coming for its food:

or just unhooded, pluming itself for its flight:

or returning without success, sullen and loath:

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 multae glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus Trans pontum fugat, et terris immittit apricis--

Dante uses the same images, but without copying:

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:

or else, bursting out suddenly over the heavens:

or the effect of shooting-stars:

or, again, that characteristic sight of the Italian summer night--the fire-flies:

Noon, too, does not want its characteristic touches--the lightning-like glancing of the lizard's rapid motion:

the motes in the sunbeam at noontide ; its clear, diffused, insupportable brightness, filling all things:

and veiling the sun in his own light:

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:

the chill of early morning ; the dawn stealing on, and the stars, one by one, fading "infino alla pi? bella" ; 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 ; then succeeded by the orange tints--and Mars setting red, through the mist over the sea:

the distant sea-beach quivering in the early light:

the contrast of east and west at the moment of sunrise, and the sun appearing, clothed in mist:

or breaking through it, and shooting his beams over the sky:

luce Come letizia in pupilla viva;

and in the smile:

Vincendo me col lume d'un sorriso;

joy lending its expression to light:

the manner in which sheep come out from the fold:

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