Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers Volume I Part 13

"Paia 'l giorno pianger the si mure."

Alas! why could not the great Tuscan have been superior enough to his personal griefs to write a whole book full of such beauties, and so have left us a work truly to be called Divine?]

[Footnote 17:

"Te lucis ante terminum;"--a hymn sung at evening service.]

[Footnote 18: Lucy, _Lucia_ (supposed to be derived from _lux, lucis_), is the G.o.ddess (I was almost going to say) who in Roman Catholic countries may be said to preside over _light_, and who is really invoked in maladies of the eyes. She was Dante's favourite saint, possibly for that reason among others, for he had once hurt his eyes with study, and they had been cured. In her spiritual character she represents the light of grace.]

[Footnote 19: The first step typifies consciousness of sin; the second, horror of it; the third, zeal to amend.]

[Footnote 20: The keys of St. Peter. The gold is said by the commentators to mean power to absolve; the silver, the learning and judgment requisite to use it.]

[Footnote 21: "Te Deum laudamus," the well-known hymn of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine.]

[Footnote 22:

"Non v'accorgete voi, che noi siam vermi, Nati a formar l'angelica farfalla, Che vola a giustizia senza schermi?"

"Know you not, we are worms Born to compose the angelic b.u.t.terfly, That flies to heaven when freed from what deforms?"

[Footnote 23:

"Piu ridon le carte Che penelleggia Franco Bolognese: L'onore e tutto or suo, e mio in parte."

[Footnote 24: The "new Guido" is his friend Guido Cavalcante (now dead); the "first" is Guido Guinicelli, for whose writings Dante had an esteem; and the poet, who is to "chase them from the nest," _caccera di nido_ (as the not very friendly metaphor states it), is with good reason supposed to be himself! He was right; but was the statement becoming? It was certainly not necessary. Dante, notwithstanding his friendship with Guido, appears to have had a grudge against both the Cavalcanti, probably for some scorn they had shewn to his superst.i.tion; far they could be proud themselves; and the son has the reputation of scepticism, as well as the father. See the _Decameron, Giorn_. vi. _Nov. 9_.]

[Footnote 25: This is the pa.s.sage from which it is conjectured that Dante knew what it was to "tremble in every vein," from the awful necessity of begging. Mr. Cary, with some other commentators, thinks that the "trembling" implies fear of being refused. But does it not rather mean the agony of the humiliation? In Salvani's case it certainly does; for it was in consideration of the pang to his pride, that the good deed rescued him from worse punishment.]

[Footnote 26: The reader will have noticed the extraordinary mixture of Paganism and the Bible in this pa.s.sage, especially the introduction of such fables as Niobe and Arachne. It would be difficult not to suppose it intended to work out some half sceptical purpose, if we did not call to mind the grave authority given to fables in the poet's treatise on Monarchy, and the whole strange spirit, at once logical and gratuitous, of the learning of his age, when the acuter the mind, the subtler became the reconcilement with absurdity.]

[Footnote 27: _Beati pauperes spiritu_. "Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven"--one of the beautiful pa.s.sages of the beautiful sermon on the Mount. How could the great poet read and admire such pa.s.sages, and yet fill his books so full of all which they renounced? "Oh," say his idolators, "he did it out of his very love for them, and his impatience to see them triumph." So said the Inquisition.

The evil was continued for the sake of the good which it prevented! The result in the long-run may be so, but not for the reasons they supposed, or from blindness to the indulgence of their bad pa.s.sions.]

[Footnote 28:

"_Savia_ non fui, avvegna che _Sapa_ Fosse chiamata."

The pun is poorer even than it sounds in English: for though the Italian name may possibly remind its readers of _sapienza_ (sapience), there is the difference of a _v_ in the adjective _savia_, which is also accented on the first syllable. It is almost as bad as if she had said in English, "Sophist I found myself, though Sophia is my name." It is pleasant, however, to see the great saturnine poet among the punsters.--It appears, from the commentators, that Sapia was in exile at the time of the battle, but they do not say for what; probably from some zeal of faction]

[Footnote 29: We are here let into Dante's confessions. He owns to a little envy, but far more pride:

"Gli occhi, diss' io, mi fieno ancor qui tolti, Ma picciol tempo; che poch' e l'offesa Fatta per esser con invidia volti.

Troppa e piu la paura ond' e sospesa L'anima mia del tormento di sotto Che gia lo 'ncarco di la giu mi pesa."

The first confession is singularly ingenuous and modest; the second, affecting. It is curious to guess what sort of persons Dante could have allowed himself to envy--probably those who were more acceptable to women.]

[Footnote 29: Aglauros, daughter of Cecrops, king of Athens, was turned to stone by Mercury, for disturbing with her envy his pa.s.sion for her sister Herse.

The pa.s.sage about Cain is one of the sublimest in Dante. Truly wonderful and characteristic is the way in which he has made physical noise and violence express the anguish of the wanderer's mind. We are not to suppose, I conceive, that we see Cain. We know he has pa.s.sed us, by his thunderous and headlong words. Dante may well make him invisible, for his words are things--veritable thunderbolts.

Cain comes in rapid successions of thunder-claps. The voice of Aglauros is thunder-claps crashing into one another--broken thunder. This is exceedingly fine also, and wonderful as a variation upon that awful music; but Cain is the astonishment and the overwhelmingness. If it were not, however, for the second thunder, we should not have had the two silences; for I doubt whether they are not better even than one. At all events, the final silence is tremendous.]

[Footnote 30: St. Luke ii. 48.]

[Footnote 31: The stoning of Stephen.]

[Footnote 32: These ill.u.s.trative spectacles are not among the best inventions of Dante. Their introduction is forced, and the instances not always pointed. A murderess, too, of her son, changed into such a bird as the nightingale, was not a happy a.s.sociation of ideas in Homer, where Dante found it; and I am surprised he made use of it, intimate as he must have been with the less inconsistent story of her namesake, Philomela, in the _Metamorphoses_.]

[Footnote 33: So, at least, I conceive, by what appears afterwards; and I may here add, once for all, that I have supplied the similar requisite intimations at each successive step in Purgatory, the poet seemingly having forgotten to do so. It is necessary to what he implied in the outset. The whole poem, it is to be remembered, is thought to have wanted his final revision.]

[Footnote 34: What an instance to put among those of haste to do good!

But the fame and accomplishments of Caesar, and his being at the head of our Ghibelline's beloved emperors, fairly overwhelmed Dante's boasted impartiality.]

[Footnote 35: A masterly allegory of Worldly Pleasure. But the close of it in the original has an intensity of the revolting, which outrages the last recesses of feeling, and disgusts us with the denouncer.]

[Footnote 36: The fierce Hugh Capet, soliloquising about the Virgin in the tones of a lady in child-bed, is rather too ludicrous an a.s.sociation of ideas. It was for calling this prince the son of a butcher, that Francis the First prohibited the admission of Dante's poem into his dominions. Mr. Cary thinks the king might have been mistaken in his interpretation of the pa.s.sage, and that "butcher" may be simply a metaphorical term for the blood-thirstiness of Capet's father. But when we find the man called, not _the_ butcher, or _that_ butcher, or butcher in reference to his species, but in plain local parlance "a butcher of Paris" (_un beccaio di Parigi_), and when this designation is followed up by the allusion to the extinction of the previous dynasty, the ordinary construction of the words appears indisputable. Dante seems to have had no ground for what his aristocratical pride doubtless considered a hard blow, and what King Francis, indeed, condescended to feel as such. He met with the notion somewhere, and chose to believe it, in order to vex the French and their princes. The spirit of the taunt contradicts his own theories elsewhere; for he has repeatedly said, that the only true n.o.bility is in the mind. But his writings (poetical truth excepted) are a heap of contradictions.]

[Footnote 37: Mr. Cary thought he had seen an old romance in which there is a combat of this kind between Jesus and his betrayer. I have an impression to the same effect.]

[Footnote 38:

"O Signor mio, quando sar io lieto A veder la vendetta the nascosa Fa dolce l'ira tua nel tuo segreto!"

The spirit of the blasphemous witticism attributed to another Italian, viz. that the reason why G.o.d prohibited revenge to mankind was its being "too delicate a morsel for any but himself," is here gravely antic.i.p.ated as a positive compliment to G.o.d by the fierce poet of the thirteenth century, who has been held up as a great Christian divine! G.o.d hugs revenge to his bosom with delight! The Supreme Being confounded with a poor grinning Florentine!]

[Footnote 39: A ludicrous anti-climax this to modern ears! The allusion is to the Pygmalion who was Dido's brother, and who murdered her husband, the priest Sichaeus, for his riches. The term "parricide" is here applied in its secondary sense of--the murderer of any one to whom we owe reverence.]

[Footnote 40: Heliodorus was a plunderer of the Temple, thus supernaturally punished. The subject has been n.o.bly treated by Raphael.]

[Footnote 41: A grand and beautiful fiction.]

[Footnote 42: Readers need hardly be told that there is no foundation for this fancy, except in the invention of the churchmen. Dante, in another pa.s.sage, not necessary to give, confounds the poet Statius who was from Naples, with a rhetorician of the same name from Thoulouse.]

[Footnote 43:

"Paren l'occhiaje anella senza gemme."

This beautiful and affecting image is followed in the original by one of the most fantastical conceits of the time. The poet says, that the physiognomist who "reads the word OMO (_h.o.m.o_, man), written in the face of the human being, might easily have seen the letter _m_ in theirs."

"Chi nel viso de gli uomini legge _o m o_, Bene avria quivi conosciuto l'_emme_."

The meaning is, that the perpendicular lines of the nose and temples form the letter M, and the eyes the two O's. The enthusiast for Roman domination must have been delighted to find that Nature wrote in Latin!]

[Footnote 44:

"Se le svergognate fosser certe Di quel che l' ciel veloce loro ammanna, Gia per urlare avrian le bocche aperte."

This will remind the reader of the style of that gentle Christian, John Knox, who, instead of offering his own "cheek to the smiters," delighted to smite the cheeks of women. Fury was his mode of preaching meekness, and threats of everlasting howling his reproof of a tune on Sundays.

But, it will be said, he looked to consequences. Yes; and produced the worst himself, both spiritual and temporal. Let the whisky-shops answer him. However, he helped to save Scotland from Purgatory: so we must take good and bad together, and hope the best in the end.