Is Polite Society Polite? Part 12

a.s.sist him: so to me will comfort spring.

I who now bid thee on this errand forth Am Beatrice.

Who and what was Beatrice, whose message gave Dante strength to explore the fearful depths of evil and its punishment? This we may learn elsewhere.

Dante, pa.s.sionate poet in his youth, has left to posterity a work unique of its sort,--the romance of a childish love which grew with the growth of the lover. In his adolescence, its intensity at times overpowers his bodily senses. The years that built up his towering manhood built up along with it this ideal womanhood, which, whether realized or realizable, or neither, was the highest and holiest essence which his imagination could infuse into a human form. The sweet shyness of that first peep at the Beautiful, of that first thrill of the master chord of being, is rendered immortal for us by the candor of this great master.

We can see the shamefaced boy, taken captive by the dazzling vision of Beatrice, veiling the features of his unreasonable pa.s.sion, and retiring to his own closet, there to hide his joy at having found on earth a thing so beautiful.

Dante's love for Beatrice dates from the completion of his own ninth year, and the beginning of hers. He first sees her at a May party, at the house of her father, Folco Polinari. Her apparel, he says, "was of a most n.o.ble tincture, a subdued and becoming crimson; and she wore a girdle and ornaments becoming her childish years." At the sight of her, his heart began to beat with painful violence. A master thought had taken possession of him, and that master's name was well known to him, as how should it not have been in that day when, if ever in this world, Love was crowned lord of all? Urged by this tyrant, from time to time, to go in search of Beatrice, he beheld in her, he says, a demeanor so praiseworthy and so n.o.ble as to remind him of a line of Homer, regarding Helen of Troy:--

"From heaven she had her birth, and not from mortal clay."

These glimpses of her must have been transient ones, for the poet tells us that his second meeting, face to face, with Beatrice occurred nine years after their first encounter. Her childish charm had now ripened into maidenly loveliness. He beholds her arrayed in purest white, walking between two n.o.ble ladies older than herself. "As she pa.s.sed along the street, she turned her eyes toward the spot where I, thrilled through and through with awe, was standing; and in her ineffable courtesy, which now hath its guerdon in everlasting life, she saluted me in such gracious wise that I seemed in that moment to behold the utmost bounds of bliss."

He now begins to dream of her in his sleeping moments, and to rhyme of her in his waking hours. In his first vision, Love appears with Beatrice in his arms. In one hand he holds Dante's flaming heart, upon which he constrains her to feed; after which, weeping, he gathers up his fair burthen and ascends with her to Heaven. This dream seemed to Dante fit to be communicated to the many famous poets of the time. He embodies it in a sonnet, which opens thus:--

To every captive soul and gentle heart Into whose sight shall come this song of mine, That they to me its matter may divine, Be greeting in Love's name, our master's, sent.

And now begins for him a season of love-lorn pining and heart-sickness.

The intensity of the attraction paralyzes in him the power of approaching its object. His friends notice his altered looks, and ask the cause of this great change in him. He confesses that it is the master pa.s.sion, but so misleads them as to the person beloved, as to bring upon another a scandal by his feigning. For this he is punished by the displeasure of Beatrice, who, pa.s.sing him in the street, refuses him that salutation the very hope of which, he says, kindled such a flame of charity within him as to make him forget and forgive every offence and injury.

Love now visits him in his sleep, in the guise of a youth arrayed in garments of exceeding whiteness, and desires him to indite certain words in rhyme, which, though not openly addressed to Beatrice, shall yet a.s.sure her of what she partly knows,--that the poet's heart has been hers from boyhood. The ballad which he composes in obedience to his love's command is not a very literal rendering of his story.

He now begins to have many conflicting thoughts about Love, two of which const.i.tute a very respectable antinomy. One of these tells him that the empire of Love is good, because it turns the inclinations of its va.s.sal from all that is base. The opposite thought is: "The empire of Love is not good, since the more absolute the allegiance of his va.s.sal, the more severe and woful are the straits through which he must perforce pa.s.s."

These conflicting thoughts sought expression in a sonnet, of which I will quote a part:--

Of Love, Love only, speaks my every thought; And all so various they be that one Bids me bow down to his dominion, Another counsels me his power is naught.

One, flushed with hopes, is all with sweetness fraught; Another makes full oft my tears to run.

Where, then, to turn, what think, I cannot tell.

Fain would I speak, yet know not what to say.

While these uncertainties still possess him, Dante is persuaded by a friend to attend a bridal festivity, where it is hoped that the sight of much beauty may give him great pleasure.

"Why have you brought me among these ladies?" he asks. "In order that they may be properly attended," is the answer.

Small attendance can Dante give upon these n.o.ble beauties. A fatal tremor seizes him; he looks up and, beholding Beatrice, can see nothing else. Nay, even of her his vision is marred by the intensity of his feeling. The ladies first wonder at his agitation, and then make merry over it, Beatrice apparently joining in their merriment. His friend, chagrined at his embarra.s.sment, now asks the cause of it; to which question Dante replies: "I have set my foot in that part of life to pa.s.s beyond which, with purpose to return, is impossible."

With these words the poet departs, and in his chamber of tears persuades himself that Beatrice would not have joined in the laughter of her friends if she had really known his state of mind. Then follows, naturally, a sonnet:--

With other ladies thou dost flaunt at me, Nor thinkest, lady, whence doth come the change, What fills mine aspect with a trouble strange When I the wonder of thy beauty see.

If thou didst know, thou must, for charity, Forswear the wonted rigor of thine eye.

With this poetic utterance comes the plain prose question: "Seeing thou dost present an aspect so ridiculous whenever thou art near this lady, wherefore dost thou seek to come into her presence?"

It takes two sonnets to answer this question. He is not the only person who asks it. Meeting with some merry dames, he is thus questioned by her of them who seems "most gay and pleasant of discourse:" "Unto what end lovest thou this lady, seeing that her near presence overwhelms thee?"

In reply, he professes himself happy in having words wherewith to speak the praises of his lady, and going thence, determines in his heart to devote his powers of expression to that high theme. He leaves the cramping sonnet now, and expands his thought in the _canzone_, of which I need only repeat the first line:--

Ladies who have the intellect of Love.

Why the course of this true love never did run smooth, we know not.

Beatrice, at the proper age, was given in marriage to Messer Simone dei Bardi. It is thought that she was wedded to him before the occasion on which Dante's love-lorn appearance moved her to a mirth which may have been feigned. Still, the thought of her continues to be his greatest possession, and he and his master, Love, hold many arguments together concerning the bliss and bane of this high fancy. He has great comfort in the general esteem in which his lady is held, and is proud and glad when those who see her pa.s.sing in the street hasten to get a better view of her. He sees the controlling power of her loveliness in its influence on those around her, who are not thrown into the shade, but brightened, by her radiance.

Such virtue rare her beauty hath, in sooth No envy stirs in other ladies' breast; But in its light they walk beside her, dressed In gentleness, and love, and n.o.ble truth.

Her looks whate'er they light on seem to bless; Nor her alone make lovely to the view, But all her peers through her have honor, too.

Dante was still engaged in interpreting the merits of Beatrice to the world when that most gentle being met the final conflict, and received the crown of immortality. His first feeling is that Florence is made desolate by her loss. He can think of no words but those with which the prophet Jeremiah bewailed the spoiling of Jerusalem: "How doth the city sit desolate!" The princes of the earth, he thinks, should learn the loss of this more than princess. He speaks of her in sonnet and _canzone_.

The pa.s.sing of a band of pilgrims in the street suggests to him the thought that they do not know of his sweet saint, nor of her death, and that if they did, they would perforce stop to weep with him:--

Tell me, ye pilgrims, who so thoughtful go, Musing, mayhap, on what is far away, Come ye from climes so far, as your array And look of foreign nurture seem to shew, That from your eyes no tears of pity flow, As ye along our mourning city stray, Serene of countenance and free, as they Who of her deep disaster nothing know?

Oh! she hath lost her Beatrice, her saint, And what of her her co-mates can reveal Must drown with tears even strangers' hearts, perforce.

On the first anniversary of his lady's death, as he sits absorbed in thoughts of her, he sketches the figure of an angel upon his tablets.

Turning presently from his work, he sees near him some gentlemen of his acquaintance, who are watching the movements of his pencil. He answers the interruption thus:

Into my lonely thoughts that n.o.ble dame Whom Love bewails, had entered in the hour When you, my friends, attracted by his power, To see the task that did employ me came.

Many a sigh of dole escapes his heart, he says,

But they which came with sharpest pang were those Which said: "O intellect of n.o.ble mould, A year to-day it is since thou didst seek the skies."

We may find, perhaps, a more wonderful proof of his constancy in his stout-hearted resistance to the charms of a beautiful lady who regards him with that intense pity which is akin to love. To her he says:

Never was Pity's semblance, or Love's hue So wondrously in face of lady shown, That tenderly gave ear to Sorrow's moan Or looked on woful eyes, as shows in you.

To this new attraction he is on the point of surrendering, when the vision of Beatrice rises before him, as he first saw her,--robed in crimson, and bright with the angelic beauty of childhood. All other thoughts are put to flight by this, and with renewed faith he devotes himself to the memory of Beatrice, hoping to say of her some day "that which hath never yet been said of any lady."

All who have been lovers--and who has not?--must feel, I think, that the "Vita Nuova" is the romance of a true love. The Beatrice of the "Divina Commedia" is this love, and much more. Dante has had a deep and availing experience of life. Statesman and scholar, he has laid his fiery soul upon the world's great anvil, where Fate, with heavy hammering and fiery blowing, has wrought out of him a stern, sad man, so hunted and exiled that the ways of Imagination alone are open to him. In its domain, he calls around him the majestic shadows of those with whom his life has made him familiar. For him, the way to Heaven lies through h.e.l.l and Purgatory. Into these regions, the blessed Beatrice cannot come. She sends, however, the poet shade, who seems to her most fit to be his guide. The cla.s.sic refinement makes evident to him the vulgarity of sin and the logic of its consequences. He surveys the eternal, hopeless punishment, and pa.s.ses through the cleansing fires of Purgatory, at whose outer verge, a fair vision comes to bless him. Beatrice, in a mystical car, her beauty at first concealed by a veil of flowers which drop from the hands of attendant angels, speaks to him in tones which move his penitential grief.

The high love of his youth thus appears to him as accusing Conscience, which stands to question him with the offended majesty of a loving mother. Through her rebukes, precious in their bitterness, he attains to that view of his own errors without which it would have been impossible for him to forsake them. It is a real orthodox "repentance and conviction of sin" with which the religious renewal of his life begins.

Tormented by this cruel retrospect, the poet is mercifully bathed in the waters of forgetfulness, and then, being made a new creature, regains the society of Beatrice.

Seated at the root of the great Tree of Humanity, she bids him take note of the prophetic vision which symbolizes the history of the church. Of the sanct.i.ty of the tree, she thus admonishes him:

This whoso robs, This whoso plucks, with blasphemy of deed Sins against G.o.d, who for His use alone Creating, hallowed it.

Dante drinks now of a stream whose sweetness can never satiate, and from that holy wave returns,

Regenerate, Pure, and made apt for mounting to the stars.

It appears to me quite simple and natural that the image of the poet's earthly love, long lost from physical sense, should prompt the awakening of his higher nature, which, obscured, as he confesses, by the disorders of his mortal life, a.s.serts itself with availing authority when Beatrice, the beloved, becomes present to his mind. All progress, all heavenly learning, is thenceforth a.s.sociated with her. High as he may climb, she always leads him. Where he pa.s.ses as a stranger, she is at home. Where he poorly guesses, she wholly knows. Nor does he part from her until he has attained the highest point of spiritual vision, where he sees her throned and crowned in immortal glory, and above her, the lovely one of Heaven,--the Virgin Mother of Christ. What he sees after this, he says, cannot be told with mortal tongue.

Here vigor failed the towering fantasy, But yet the will rolled onward, like a wheel, In even motion, by the love impelled That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars.

Two opposite points in great authors give us pleasure; _viz._, the originality of their talent or genius, and the catholicity of their sentiments and interest,--in other words, their likeness and their unlikeness to the average of humanity. We are delighted to find Plato at once so modern and so ancient, his prevision and prophecy needing so little adaptation to make them germane to the wants of our own or of any other time, his grasp of apprehension and comparison so peculiar to himself, so unrivalled by any thinker of any time. In like manner, the mediaeval pictures drawn by Dante delight us, and the bold daring of his imagination. At the same time, the perfectly sound and rational common sense of many of his utterances seems familiar from its accordance with the soundest criticism of our own time:--