Emerson and Other Essays Part 7

The things I feel, the things I follow and the things I seek--are not in me,--I hardly know the place To find them. It is others make them mine.

It happens when I see thee--and it brings Sweet pain--a yes,--a no,--sorrow and grace Surely it must have been those eyes of thine.

There are others which give a most touching picture of extreme piety in extreme old age. And there are still others which are both love poems and religious poems at the same time.

LV

Thou knowest that I know that thou dost know How, to enjoy thee, I did come more near.

Thou knowest, I know thou knowest--I am here.

Would we had given our greetings long ago.

If true the hope thou hast to me revealed, If true the plighting of a sacred troth, Let the wall fall that stands between us both, For griefs are doubled when they are concealed.

If, loved one,--if I only loved in thee What thou thyself dost love,--'tis to this end The spirit with his beloved is allied.

The things thy face inspires and teaches me Mortality doth little comprehend.

Before we understand we must have died.

LI

Give me the time when loose the reins I flung Upon the neck of galloping desire.

Give me the angel face that now among The angels,--tempers Heaven with its fire.

Give the quick step that now is grown so old, The ready tears--the blaze at thy behest, If thou dost seek indeed, O Love! to hold Again thy reign of terror in my breast.

If it be true that thou dost only live Upon the sweet and bitter pains of man Surely a weak old man small food can give Whose years strike deeper than thine arrows can.

Upon life's farthest limit I have stood-- What folly to make fire of burnt wood.

The occasion of the following was probably some more than wonted favor shown to him by Vittoria.

XXVI.

Great joy no less than grief doth murder men.

The thief, even at the gallows, may be killed If, while through every vein with fear he's chilled, Sudden reprieve do set him free again.

Thus hath this bounty from you in my pain Through all my griefs and sufferings fiercely thrilled, Coming from a breast with sovereign mercy filled, And more than weeping, cleft my heart in twain.

Good news, like bad, may bring the taker death.

The heart is rent as with the sharpest knife, Be it pressure or expansion cause the rift.

Let thy great beauty which G.o.d cherisheth Limit my joy if it desire my life-- The unworthy dies beneath so great a gift.

XXVIII

The heart is not the life of love like mine.

The love I love thee with has none of it.

For hearts to sin and mortal thought incline And for love's habitation are unfit.

G.o.d, when our souls were parted from Him, made Of me an eye--of thee, splendor and light.

Even in the parts of thee which are to fade Thou hast the glory; I have only sight.

Fire from its heat you may not a.n.a.lyze, Nor worship from eternal beauty take, Which deifies the lover as he bows.

Thou hast that Paradise all within thine eyes Where first I loved thee. 'T is for that love's sake My soul's on fire with thine, beneath thy brows.

The German musicians of the seventeenth century used to write voluntaries for the organ, using the shorthand of the older notation; they jotted down the formulas of the successive harmonies expressed in terms of the chords merely. The transitions and the musical explanation were left to the individual performer. And Michael Angelo has left behind him, as it were, the poetical equivalents of such shorthand musical formulas. The harmonies are wonderful. The successions show a great grasp of comprehension, but you cannot play them without filling them out.

"Is that music, after all," one may ask, "which leaves so much to the performer, and is that poetry, after all, which leaves so much to the reader?" It seems you must be a Kapellmeister or a student, or dilettante of some sort, before you can transpose and ill.u.s.trate these hieroglyphics. There is some truth in this criticism, and the modesty of purpose in the poems is the only answer to it. They claim no comment.

Comment claims them. Call them not poetry if you will. They are a window which looks in upon the most extraordinary nature of modern times,--a nature whose susceptibility to impressions of form through the eye allies it to cla.s.sical times; a nature which on the emotional side belongs to our own day.

Is it a wonder that this man was venerated with an almost superst.i.tious regard in Italy, and in the sixteenth century? His creations were touched with a superhuman beauty which his contemporaries felt, yet charged with a profoundly human meaning which they could not fathom. No one epoch has held the key to him. There lives not a man and there never has lived a man who could say, "I fully understand Michael Angelo's works." It will be said that the same is true of all the very greatest artists, and so it is in a measure. But as to the others, that truth comes as an afterthought and an admission. As to Michael Angelo, it is primary and overwhelming impression. "We are not sure that we comprehend him," say the centuries as they pa.s.s, "but of this we are sure: _Simil ne maggior uom non nacque mai_."

THE FOURTH CANTO OF THE INFERNO

There are many great works of fiction where the interest lies in the situation and development of the characters or in the wrought-up climax of the action, and where it is necessary to read the whole work before one can feel the force of the catastrophe. But Dante's poem is a series of disconnected scenes, held together only by the slender thread of the itinerary. The scenes vary in length from a line or two to a page or two; and the power of them comes, one may say, not at all from their connection with each other, but entirely from the language in which they are given.

A work of this kind is hard to translate because verbal felicities, to use a mild term, are untranslatable. What English words can render the mystery of that unknown voice that calls out of the deep,--

"Onorate 'l altissimo poeta, Torna sua ombra che era dipart.i.ta"?

The cry breaks upon the night, full of awful greeting, proclamation, prophecy, and leaves the reader standing next to Virgil, afraid now to lift up his eyes to the poet. Awe breathes in the cadence of the words themselves. And so with many of the most splendid lines in Dante, the meaning inheres in the very Italian words. They alone shine with the idea. They alone satisfy the spiritual vision.

Of all the greatest poets, Dante is most foreign to the genius of the English race. From the point of view of English-speaking people, he is lacking in humor. It might seem at first blush as if the argument of his poem were a sufficient warrant for seriousness; but his seriousness is of a nature strange to northern nations. There is in it a gaunt and sallow earnestness which appears to us inhuman.

In the treatment of the supernatural the Teutonic nations have generally preserved a touch of humor. This is so intrinsically true to the Teutonic way of feeling that the humor seems to go with and to heighten the terror of the supernatural. When Hamlet, in the scene on the midnight terrace, addresses the ghost as "old mole," "old truepenny,"

etc., we may be sure that he is in a frenzy of excitement and apprehension. Perhaps the explanation of this mixture of humor and terror, is that when the mind feels itself shaken to its foundations by the immediate presence of the supernatural,--palsied, as it were, with fear,--there comes to its rescue, and as an antidote to the fear itself, a reserve of humor, almost of levity. Staggered by the unknown, the mind opposes it with the homely and the familiar. The northern nations were too much afraid of ghosts to take them seriously. The sight of one made a man afraid he should lose his wits if he gave way to his fright. Thus it has come about that in the sincerest terror of the north there is a touch of grotesque humor; and this touch we miss in Dante. The hundred cantos of his poem are unrelieved by a single scene of comedy. The strain of exalted tragedy is maintained throughout. His jests and wit are not of the laughing kind. Sometimes they are grim and terrible, sometimes playful, but always serious and full of meaning. This lack of humor becomes very palpable in a translation, where it is not disguised by the transcendent beauty of Dante's style.

There is another difficulty peculiar to the translating of Dante into English. English is essentially a diffuse and prodigal language. The great English writers have written with a free hand, prolific, excursive, diffuse. Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Browning, all the typical writers of English, have been many-worded. They have been men who said everything that came into their heads, and trusted to their genius to make their writings readable. The eighteenth century in England, with all its striving after cla.s.sical precision, has left behind it no great laconic English cla.s.sic who stands in the first rank. Our own Emerson is concise enough, but he is disconnected and prophetic. Dante is not only concise, but logical, deductive, p.r.o.ne to ratiocination. He set down nothing that he had not thought of a thousand times, and conned over, arranged, and digested. We have in English no prototype for such condensation. There is no native work in the language written in anything which approaches the style of Dante.

My heavy sleep a sullen thunder broke, So that I shook myself, springing upright, Like one awakened by a sudden stroke, And gazed with fixed eyes and new-rested sight Slowly about me,--awful privilege,-- To know the place that held me, if I might.

In truth I found myself upon the edge That girds the valley of the dreadful pit, Circling the infinite wailing with its ledge.

Dark, deep, and cloudy, to the depths of it Eye could not probe, and though I bent mine low, It helped my vain conjecture not a whit.

"Let us go down to the blind world below,"

Began the poet, with a face like death, "I shall go first, thou second." "Say not so,"

Cried I when I again could find my breath, For I had seen the whiteness of his face, "How shall I come if thee it frighteneth?"

And he replied: "The anguish of the place And those that dwell there thus hath painted me With pity, not with fear. But come apace; The spur of the journey p.r.i.c.ks us." Thus did he Enter himself, and take me in with him, Into the first great circle's mystery That winds the deep abyss about the brim.

Here there came borne upon the winds to us, Not cries, but sighs that filled the concave dim, And kept the eternal breezes tremulous.

The cause is grief, but grief unlinked to pain, That makes the unnumbered peoples suffer thus.

I saw great crowds of children, women, men, Wheeling below. "Thou dost not seek to know What spirits are these thou seest?" Thus again My master spoke. "But ere we further go, Thou must be sure that these feel not the weight Of sin. They well deserved,--and yet not so.-- They had not baptism, which is the gate Of Faith,--thou holdest. If they lived before The days of Christ, though sinless, in that state G.o.d they might never worthily adore.

And I myself am such an one as these.

For this shortcoming--on no other score-- We are lost, and most of all our torment is That lost to hope we live in strong desire."

Grief seized my heart to hear these words of his, Because most splendid souls and hearts of fire I recognized, hung in that Limbo there.

"Tell me, my master dear, tell me, my sire,"

Cried I at last, with eager hope to share That all-convincing faith,--"but went there not One,--once,--from hence,--made happy though it were Through his own merit or another's lot?"

"I was new come into this place," said he, Who seemed to guess the purport of my thought, "When Him whose brows were bound with Victory I saw come conquering through this prison dark.

He set the shade of our first parent free, With Abel, and the builder of the ark, And him that gave the laws immutable, And Abraham, obedient patriarch, David the king, and ancient Israel, His father and his children at his side, And the wife Rachel that he loved so well, And gave them Paradise,--and before these men None tasted of salvation that have died."

We did not pause while he was talking then, But held our constant course along the track, Where spirits thickly thronged the wooded glen.