Essays Aesthetical Part 5

Dante, too, was a believer; and such warm, wide sympathies had he, and an imagination so daring, that he undertook to unfold the divine judgment on the mult.i.tudinous dead, ranging with inspired vision through h.e.l.l, and purgatory, and heaven. In his large, hot heart, he lodged the racy, crude beliefs of his age, and with poetic pen wrought them into immortal shapes. The then religious imaginations of Christendom, positive, and gross, and very vivid; the politics of Italy, then tumultuous and embittered; the theology and philosophy of his time, fantastic, unfashioned--all this was his material. But all this, and were it ten times as much, is but the skeleton, the frame.

The true material of a poem is the poet's own nature and thoughts, his sentiment and his; judgment, his opinions, aspirations, imaginations, his veriest self, the whole of him, especially the best of him.

Than imaginary journeys through the realms beyond the grave, which were so much the vogue with the religious writers of the day,--and literature then was chiefly, almost exclusively, religious,--no more broad or tempting canvas could be offered to a poet, beset, as all poets are apt to be, with the need of utterance, and possessed, moreover, of a graphic genius that craved strong, glowing themes for its play. The present teeming world to be transfigured into the world to come, and the solicitation and temptation to do this brought to a manly, powerful nature, pa.s.sionate, creative, descriptive, to a stirring realist, into whose breast, as a chief actor on the Italian scene, ran, all warm from the wheels of their spinning, the threads of Italian politics at the culmination of the papal imperial conflict; and that breast throbbing with the fiery pa.s.sions of republican Italy, while behind the throb beat the measure of a poetic soul impelled to tune the wide, variegated cacophony. Proud, pa.s.sionate, and baffled, the man Dante deeply swayed the poet. Much of his verse is directly woven out of his indignations and burning personal griefs. At times, contemporaneous history tyrannized over him.

Dante's high and various gifts, his supreme poetic gift, the n.o.ble character and warm individuality of the man, with the pathos of his personal story, the full, lively transcript he hands down of the theology and philosophy of his age, his native literary force as molder of the Italian language, his being the bold, adventurous initiator, the august father of modern poetry--all this has combined to keep him and his verse fresh in the minds of men through six centuries. But even all this would not have made him one of the three or four world-poets, would not have won for him the wreath of universal European translation. What gave his rare qualities their most advantageous field, not merely for the display of their peculiar superiorities, but for keeping their fruit sound and sweet, was that he is the historian of h.e.l.l, purgatory, and heaven--of the world to come such as it was pictured in his day, and as it has been pictured more or less ever since--the word-painter of that visionary, awful hereafter, the thought of which has ever been a spell.

Those imaginations as to future being--to the Middle Ages so vivid as to become soul-realities--Dante, with his transcendent pictorial mastership, clothed in words fresh and weighty from the mine of popular speech, stamping them with his glittering imperial superscription. Imaginations! there are imaginations of the future, the reverse of poetical. Hunger will give you tormenting imaginations of breakfasts and dinners; avarice enlivens some minds with pictures of gains that are to be. But imaginations of the life beyond the grave, these we cannot entertain without spirituality. The having them with any urgency and persistence implies strong spiritual prepossessions: men must be self-possessed with their higher self, with their spirit. The very attempt to figure your disembodied state is an attempt poetical. To succeed with any distinctness denotes some power of creative projection: without wings, this domain cannot be entered. In Dante's time these attempts were common. Through his preeminent qualifications, crowned with the poetic faculty, the faculty of sympathy with ideal excellence, his attempt was a great, a unique success.

To accompany Dante through his vast triple trans-terrestrial world, would seem to demand in the reader a sustained effort of imagination.

But Dante is so graphic, and, we might add, corporeal in his pictures, puts such a pulse into his figures, that the artistic illusion wherewith we set out is exchanged for, or rather overborne by, an illusion of the reality of what is represented. Yet from the opening of the first canto he is ever in the super-earthly world, and every line of the fourteen thousand has the benefit of a super-earthly, that is, a poetic atmosphere, which lightens it, transfigures it, floats it. One reads with the poetic prestige of the knowledge that every scene is trans-terrestrial; and, at the same time, every scene is presented with a physical realism, a visual and audible vividness, which captivates and holds the perceptive faculty; so that the reader finds himself grasped, as it were, in a vice, whose double handle is mortised on one side in the senses, and on the other in the spiritual imagination.

Dante had it in him,--this h.e.l.l, purgatory, and heaven--so full and warm and large was his nature. Within his own breast he had felt, with the keen intensity of the poetic temperament, the loves and hates, the griefs and delights of life. Through his wealth of heart he had a fellow-feeling for all the joys and sorrows of his brother-men, and, added to this, an artist's will and want to reproduce them, and _to_ reproduce them a clear, outwelling, intellectual vivacity. He need scarcely have told us that his poem, though treating of spirits, relates to the pa.s.sions and doings of men in the flesh. He chose a theme that at once seized the attention of his readers, and gave to himself a boundless scope. His field was all past history, around the alt.i.tudes of which are cl.u.s.tered biographical traits and sketches of famous sinners and famous saints, of heroes and lofty criminals; and, along with this, contemporaneous Florentine and Italian history, with its tumults and vicissitudes, its biographies and personalities, its wraths and triumphs.

Dante exhibits great fertility in situations and conjunctions; but, besides that many of them were ready to his hand, this kind of inventiveness denotes of itself no fine creative faculty. It is the necessary equipment of the voluminous novelist. In this facility and abundance Goldsmith could not have coped with James and Bulwer; and yet the "Vicar of Wakefield" (not to go so high as "Tristram Shandy"

and "Don Quixote") is worth all their hundred volumes of tales put together. What insight, what weight, and faithfulness, and refinement, and breadth, and truth, and elevation of character and conception, does the framework of incident support and display? That is the aesthetic question. The novels of every day bristle with this material inventiveness, this small, abounding, tangled underwood of event and sensation, which yields no timber and wherein birds will not build.

The invention exhibited in the punishments and tortures and conditions of the "Inferno" and "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso," is not admirable for their mere exuberance and diversity,--for that might have come from a comparatively prosaic mind, especially when fed, as all minds then were, with the pa.s.sionate mediaeval beliefs,--but for the heart there is in them, throbbing deeply in some, and for the human sympathy, and thence, in part, the photographic fidelity, and for the paramount gift poetically to portray. A consequence of the choice of subject, and, as regards the epic quality of Dante's poem, an important consequence, is that there is in it no unity of interest. The sympathies of the reader are not engrossed by one great group of characters, acting and reacting on one another through the whole sweep of the invention.

Instead of this, we have a long series of unconnected pictures, each one awakening a new interest. Hereby the mind is distracted, the attention being transferred at every hundred lines to a fresh figure or group. We pa.s.s through a gallery of pictures and portraits, cla.s.sed, to be sure, by subjects, but distinct one from the other, and separated by the projection of as many different frames. We are on a weird, adventurous journey, and make but brief stops, however attractive the strangers or acquaintance we meet. We go from person to person, from scene to scene; so that at the end of the journey, although the perception has been richly crowded, one impression has effaced the other. Not carrying the weight, not pulsating in its every limb with the power of a broad, deep, involved story, architecturally reared on one foundation, whose parts are all subordinated to a great unity, the "Divina Commedia," as an organic, artistic whole, is inferior to the "Iliad" and "Paradise Lost," and to the Grecian and Shakespearean tragedies.

The exclusive super-earthliness of his scenes and personages, and, with this, his delight in picture-drawing, keep Dante close to his page--fastened to it, we might say, by a twofold fascination. Among the many faculties that equip him for his extraordinary task, most active is that of form. Goethe says of him, "The great intellectual and moral qualities of Dante being universally acknowledged, we shall be furthered in a right estimate of his works, if we keep in view that just in his life-time--Giotto being his contemporary--was the re-birth of plastic art in all its natural strength. By this sensuous, form-loving spirit of the age, working so widely and deeply, Dante, too, was largely swayed. With the eye of his imagination he seized objects so distinctly that he could reproduce them in sharp outline.

Thence we see before us the most abstruse and unusual, drawn, as it were, after nature." In recognition of the same characteristic, Coleridge says, "In picturesqueness Dante is beyond all other poets, ancient or modern, and more in the stern style of Pindar than of any other. Michael Angelo is said to have made a design for every page of the 'Divina Commedia.'"

Dante, eminent in poetic gifts, has many sides, but this is his strongest side: he is preeminently a poet of form. In his mind and in his work there is a southern, an Italian, sensuousness. He is a poet of thought, but more a poet of molds; he is a poet of sentiment, but more a poet of pictures. Rising readily to generalization, still his intellect is more specific than generic. His subject--chosen by the concurrence of his aesthetic, moral, and intellectual needs--admits of, nay, demands portraits, isolated sketches, unconnected delineations. The personages of his poem are independent one of the other, and are thence the more easily drawn. Nor does Dante abound in transferable pa.s.sages, sentences of universal application, from being saturated with the perfumed essence of humanity. We say it with diffidence, but to us it seems that there is a further poetic glance, more idealized fidelity, in Milton; more significance and wisdom and profound hint in Goethe. In Milton the mental reverberation is wider: he rivets us through distant grand a.s.sociation, by great suggestion.

Thus, describing the darkened head of Satan, Milton says,--

"As when the sun new risen Looks through the horizontal misty air, Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon, In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations,"

Setting aside the epithets "horizontal" and "disastrous," which are poetically imaginative, the likening of Satan to the sun seen through a mist, or in eclipse, is a direct, parallel comparison that aids us to see Satan; and it is in such, immediate, not mediate,--not involving likeness between physical and mental qualities, but merely between physical, not between subtle, relations,--that Dante chiefly deals, showing imaginative fertility, helpful, needful to the poet, but different from, and altogether inferior to, poetic imagination.

The mind attains to the height of poetic imagination when the intellect, urged by the purer sensibilities in alliance with aspiration for the perfect, exerts its imaginative power to the utmost, and, as the result of this exertion, discovers a thought or image which, from its originality, fitness, and beauty, gives to the reader a new delight. Of this, the lordliest mental exhibition, there is a sovereign example in the words wherewith Milton concludes the pa.s.sage--

"and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs."

This fills the mind with the terror he wishes his Satan to inspire; this gives its greatness to the pa.s.sage.

Dante, by the distinctness of his outline, addresses himself more to the reader's senses and perception; Milton rouses his higher imaginative capacity. In the whole "Inferno," is there a sentence so aglow as this line and a half of "Paradise Lost"?

"And the torrid clime Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire."

Or is there in Dante any sound so loud and terrible as that shout of Milton's demon-host--

"That tore h.e.l.l's concave, and beyond Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night"?

Here the unity of his theme stands Milton in stead for grandeur and breadth.

Dante is copious in similes. Such copiousness by no means proves poetic genius; and a superior poet may have less command of similes than one inferior to him. Wordsworth has much less of this command than Moore. But when a poet does use similes, he will be likely often to put of his best into them, for they are captivating instruments and facilities for poetic expansion. When a poet is in warm sympathy with the divine doings, there will be at times a flashing fitness in his similitudes, which are then the sudden offspring of finest intuition.

In citing some of the most prominent in the "Divina Commedia," we at once give brief samples of Dante and of the craft of his three latest translators, using the version of Dr. Parsons for extracts from the "Inferno," that of Mr. Dayman for those from the "Purgatorio," and that of Mr. Longfellow for those from the "Paradiso."

"As well-filled sails, which in the tempest swell, Drop, with folds flapping, if the mast be rent; So to the earth that cruel monster fell, And straightway down to h.e.l.l's Fourth Pit he went."

_Inferno_: Canto VII.

"Swept now amain those turbid waters o'er A tumult of a dread portentous kind, Which rocked with sudden spasms each trembling sh.o.r.e, Like the mad rushing of a rapid wind; As when, made furious by opposing heats, Wild through the wood the unbridled tempest scours, Dusty and proud, the cringing forest beats, And scatters far the broken limbs and flowers; Then fly the herds,--the swains to shelter scud.

Freeing mine eyes, 'Thy sight,' he said, 'direct O'er the long-standing sc.u.m of yonder flood, Where, most condense, its acrid streams collect.'"

_Inferno_: Canto IX.

"When, lo! there met us, close beside our track, A troop of spirits. Each amid the band Eyed us, as men at eve a pa.s.ser-by 'Neath a new moon; as closely us they scanned, As an old tailor doth a needle's eye."

_Inferno_: Canto XV.

"And just as frogs that stand, with noses out On a pool's margin, but beneath it hide Their feet and all their bodies but the snout, So stood the sinners there on every side."

_Inferno_: Canto XXII.

"A cooper's vessel, that by chance hath been Either of middle-piece or cant-piece reft, Gapes not so wide as one that from his chin I noticed lengthwise through his carca.s.s cleft."

_Inferno_: Canto XXVIII.

"We tarried yet the ocean's brink upon, Like unto people musing of their way, Whose body lingers when the heart hath gone; And lo! as near the dawning of the day, Down in the west, upon the watery floor, The vapor-fogs do Mars in red array, Even such appeared to me a light that o'er The sea so quickly came, no wing could match Its moving. Be that vision mine once more."

_Purgatorio_: Canto II.

"And thou, remembering well, with eye that sees The light, wilt know thee like the sickly one That on her bed of down can find no ease, But turns and turns again her ache to shun,"

_Purgatorio_: Canto VI.

"'T was now the hour the longing heart that bends In voyagers, and meltingly doth sway, Who bade farewell at morn to gentle friends; And wounds the pilgrim newly bound his way With poignant love, to hear some distant bell That seems to mourn the dying of the day; When I began to slight the sounds that fell Upon my ear, one risen soul to view, Whose beckoning hand our audience would compel."

_Purgatorio_: Canto VIII.

"There I the shades see hurrying up to kiss Each with his mate from every part, nor stay, Contenting them with momentary bliss.

So one with other, all their swart array Along, do ants encounter snout with snout, So haply probe their fortune and their way."

_Purgatorio_: Canto XXVI.

"Between two viands, equally removed And tempting, a free man would die of hunger Ere either he could bring unto his teeth.

So would a lamb between the ravenings Of two fierce wolves stand fearing both alike; And so would stand a dog between two does.

Hence, if I held my peace, myself I blame not, Impelled in equal measure by my doubts, Since it must be so, nor do I commend."

_Paradiso_: Canto IV.

"And as a lute and harp, accordant strung With many strings, a dulcet tinkling make To him by whom the notes are not distinguished, So from the lights that there to me appeared Upgathered through the cross a melody, Which rapt me, not distinguishing the hymn."

_Paradiso_: Canto XIV.

"As through the pure and tranquil evening air There shoots from time to time a sudden fire, Moving the eyes that steadfast were before, And seems to be a star that changeth place, Except that in the part where it is kindled Nothing is missed, and this endureth little; So from the horn that to the right extends Unto that cross's foot there ran a star Out of the constellation shining there."

_Paradiso_: Canto XV.

"Even as remaineth splendid and serene The hemisphere of air, when Boreas Is blowing from that cheek where he is mildest, Because is purified and resolved the rack That erst disturbed it, till the welkin laughs With all the beauties of its pageantry; Thus did I likewise, after that my lady Had me provided with a clear response, And like a star in Heaven the truth was seen."

_Paradiso_: Canto XXVIII.

The first question to ask in regard to a simile found in verse is, Is it poetical? Is there, as effect of its introduction, any heightening of the reader's mood, any cleansing of his vision, any clarification of the medium through which he is looking? Is there a sudden play of light that warms, and, through this warmth, illuminates the object before him? Few of those just quoted, put to such test, could be called more than conventionally poetical--if this be not a solecism. To ill.u.s.trate one sensuous object by another does not animate the mind enough to fulfill any one of the above conditions.

Such similitudes issuing from intellectual liveliness, there is through them no steeping of intellectual perception in emotion. They may help to make the object ocularly more apparent, but they do not make the feeling a party to the movement. When this is done,--as in the examples from Canto XV. of the "Inferno," and Canto VIII. of the "Purgatorio,"--what an instantaneous vivification of the picture!

But in the best of them the poetic gleam is not so unlooked-for bright as in the best of Shakespeare's. As one instance out of many: towards the end of the great soliloquy of Henry V., after enumerating the emblems and accompaniments of royalty, the king continues,--

"No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony, Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave; Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind, Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread; Never sees horrid night, the child of h.e.l.l; But, like a lackey, from the rise to set, Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night Sleeps in Elysium; next day, after dawn, Doth rise _and help Hyperion to his horse_"

What a sudden filling of the earth with light through that image, so fresh and unexpected, of the rising sun, with its suggestion of beauty and healthfulness! Then the far-reaching, transfiguring imagination, that, in a twinkle, trans.m.u.tes into the squire of Hyperion a stolid rustic, making him suddenly radiant with the glory of morning. It is by this union of unexpectedness with fitness, of solidity with brilliancy, of remoteness with instantaneous presence, in his figures, denoting overflow of resources, a divine plenitude, so that we feel after Shakespeare has said his best things, that he could go on saying more and better,--it is especially by this l.u.s.trous, ever-teeming fullness of life, this creative readiness, that Shakespeare throws a farther and whiter and a broader light than Dante. Nor does Dante's page glisten, as Shakespeare's so often does, with metaphor, or compressed similes, that at times with a word open the spiritual sphere; not super-imposed as cold ornament, but inter-tissued with the web of thought, upflashings from a deep sea of mind, to quiver on the surface, as on the calm level of the Atlantic you may see a circuit of shining ripple, caused by schools of fish that have come up from the wealth in the depths below to help the sun to glisten,--a sign of life, power, and abundance.

Like his great compeer, Milton, Dante fails of universality from want of humor. Neither had any fun in him. This was the only fault (liberally to interpret Can's conduct) that Dante's host, Can Grande of Verona, had to find with him. The subjects of both poets (unconsciously chosen perhaps from this very defect of humor) were predominantly religious, and their theology, which was that of their times, was crude and cruel. The deep, sympathetic earnestness, which is the basis of the best humor, they had, but, to use an ill.u.s.tration of Richter, they could not turn sublimity upside down,--a great feat, only possible through sense of the comic, which, in its highest manifestation of humor, pillows pain in the lap of absurdity, throws such rays upon affliction as to make a grin to glimmer through gloom, and, with the fool in "Lear," forces you, like a child, to smile through warmest tears of sympathy. Humor imparts breadth and buoyancy to tolerance, enabling it to dandle lovingly the faults and follies of men; through humor the spiritual is calm and clear enough to sport with and toss the sensual; it is a compa.s.sionate, tearful delight; in its finest mood, an angelic laughter.