The Bridling of Pegasus Part 11

Electric love illuminates the world.

DANTE'S POETIC CONCEPTION OF WOMAN

The imaginative estimate or ideal conception of Woman by the Poets has always been deemed exceptionally interesting, especially by women themselves, for, as a rule, it is agreeable; and, even if the presentation be sometimes a little overcharged with glowing colour, all of us, men and women alike, are not otherwise than pleased with descriptions that portray us, not exactly as we are, but as we should like to be. Withal, a portrait, to obtain recognition, must have in it some resemblance to the original; and, speaking in the most prosaic manner, one need not hesitate to affirm that any representation of women, at least of womanly women, that was not attractive would be a travesty of the fact.

Alike in the _Vita Nuova_ and the _Divina Commedia_, Beatrice Portinari figures so largely, and Dante's love for her from childhood in her tenth till her death in her twenty-sixth year is so striking that most persons think of the great Florentine Poet in a.s.sociation with no other women, their characters, their occupations, temptations, weaknesses, virtues, and everyday duties. Yet no man could be a Poet such as Dante who confined his ken to so limited a field of observation and feeling, and to whom the whole range of feminine emotion and action was not familiar; and, in the exposition of that theme, I would invite attention to that wider range and scope of interest, though from it Beatrice will not be forgotten. Let us turn, first of all, to the fifteenth canto of the _Paradiso_, where Cacciaguida, the Poet's ancestor, describes, while Beatrice looks on with a.s.senting smile, the simplicity of Florentine manners in former times, alike in men and women, but in women especially--times dear to Dante, since they immediately preceded those in which he himself lived.

Fiorenza,

says Cacciaguida, calling the city by its original name,

Fiorenza, dentro della cerchia antica, Si stava in pace, sobria e pudica.

Non avea catenella, non corona, Non donne contigiate, non cintura, Che fosse a veder pi che la persona.

Florence, within her ancient boundaries Was chaste, and sober, and in peace abode.

No golden bracelets and no head-tires then, Transparent garments, rich embroideries, That caught the eye more than the wearer's self.

He goes on to say that the Florentine ladies of that day left their mirror without any artificial colouring on their cheeks. Mothers themselves tended the cradle, and maidens and matrons drew off the thread from the distaff, while listening to old tales of Troy, Fiesole, and Rome. It is Dante's own description of the manners and customs of the days when he was a child.

Some, perhaps, will ask, "Surely there is nothing very poetic in the foregoing description of woman?" If so, one must reply, indeed there is, and only the acceptance of the idea of Poetry prevailing amongst us of late years, which is essentially false, because so narrow and so exclusive of the simplest poetry at one end of the scale, and of the highest poetry at the other, could make any one doubt that a really poetic and imaginative conception of woman must include the dedication, though not the entire dedication, of herself to domestic duty and tenderness.

Is there nothing poetic in Wordsworth's picture of a girl turning her wheel beside an English fire?

Is there nothing poetic in Byron's description?--

A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose hopes are innocent.

Or in Coventry Patmore's?--

So wise in all she ought to know, So ignorant in all beside.

Is there, I venture to ask, nothing poetic, nothing romantic in the description of a young girl who blends with cultivated sensibility to Literature and Art homely tasks thus described?--

... She brims the pail, Straining the udders with her dainty palms, Sweet as the milk they drain. She skims the cream, And, with her sleeves rolled up and round white arms, Makes the churn sing like boulder-baffled stream.

A wimple on her head, and kirtled short, She hangs the snow-white linen in the wind, A heavenly earthliness.

In the whole range of poetic literature there is no more celebrated pa.s.sage than the essentially domestic picture, in the Sixth Book of the _Iliad_, of Hector, Andromache, and their baby boy, where the Trojan hero, before sallying forth to battle afresh, stretches out his arms to clasp the little Astyanax. It might be pedantic to recite the pa.s.sage in the original. But here is an excellent translation of it by Mr. Walter Leaf:

So spake glorious Hector, and stretched out his arms to his boy. But the child shrank back to the bosom of his fair-girdled nurse, dismayed at his dear father's aspect, and in dread at the horse-hair crest that he beheld nodding fiercely from the helmet's top. Then his dear father laughed aloud, and his lady-mother; and forthwith glorious Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it, all gleaming, upon the ground; then kissed he his dear son, and dandled him in his arms.

Surely everybody feels the poetic, the romantic character of the incident, founded on the loves of the household and the hearth. Turn to Chaucer, to Milton, to Shakespeare, to any great Poet, and you will find that, like Dante, they included simple duties in their poetic conception of woman.

Only in an age sicklied o'er with lackadaisical or sensuous sentimentality could it be otherwise.

But a poet's ideals of what women should be, and often are, is shown not only by what he extols, but by what he condemns, and, in this respect, Dante, poet-like, is sparing and reserved. Most--indeed, nearly all--of the persons whom he indicates by name as being eternally punished in the Circles of the Inferno are men; partly, perhaps, because Dante, who, it must be owned, would have been loved by Doctor Johnson as a good hater, had political and other scores of the kind to settle with those he describes as having a perpetual lease in the lower regions, but in part, also, because he could not bring himself to write harshly of any woman he had known. But to a few notorious female rebels against what he deemed womanly character and conduct, and who had lived many hundred years before his day, he is pitilessly severe. It would be difficult to quote lines from any Poet more so than those in which he describes Semiramis as among those whom

Nulla speranza gli conforta mai.

She has not even hope to fall back on as a mitigation of her endless torments. Of her offences against his ideal of woman he says:

A vizio di lussuria fu si rotta, Che libito fe lecito in sua legge, Per torre il biasmo in che era condotta.

She was so steeped in wickedness that she promulgated laws permitting others to act as she herself did, in order to annul the stigma that would otherwise have been attached to her. He is a little hard and unjust to Dido, whom Virgil treats with such exquisite tenderness, in naming her along with "l.u.s.tful Cleopatra" in the same pa.s.sage. To Helen he is more indulgent, in words at least, content with saying that she was the guilty cause of dire events, "_per cui tanto reo tempo si volse_"; but she does not escape endless expiation. Some of my readers will remember how much more d.a.m.ning of her conduct is Virgil in the Sixth Book of the _neid_, where Priam represents her as giving the signal to the Greeks to enter Troy, and having concealed his sword, that he may fall a helpless victim to the vengeance of Paris, whom the fair wanton wished to propitiate in the hour of her lord's triumph.

But what is Dante's att.i.tude towards Francesca da Rimini, in the most beautiful pa.s.sage, it seems to me, in the whole range of narrative Poetry?

Many, I am sure, know it by heart, and have thereby fortified themselves against the modern less-refined treatment of it even by men aspiring to be regarded as poets. Often as one has repeated it to oneself, one has never felt that Dante had for Francesca any harsher feeling than sympathetic compa.s.sion. He casts around her the halo of the purest sentiment; he brings music of matchless verbal sweetness to the description of the hour, the place, the circ.u.mstances of her disinterested and unselfish surrender. The very lines in which he leads up to her pathetic story, lines in which his feeling concerning frail and hapless love seems to be purposely expressed in general and wide-embracing language, are in themselves significant to those who observe their meaning. He says that when he heard Virgil name the numerous knights and fair dames who were suffering from having subordinated prudence to impulse, he only felt troubled for them and bewildered.

Piet mi vinse, e fu quasi smarrito.

The first thing he notices in Francesca and her lover is their buoyancy in the air, as though they were the finest and most tenuous of spirits; and when he says to Virgil that he would fain have speech with them, the reply is that he has only to appeal to them by the love that still moves them, and they will draw nigh to him. Then follows that lovely simile of doves floating to call, and Francesca's recognition of Dante with the words:

O animal grazioso e benigno!

who is sure to have pity on her hapless doom. When Francesca pauses in her narrative, and Dante bows his head for sorrow, Virgil shows what is his own feeling by the brief question addressed to Dante, "What think you?"

Dante replies in a voice broken by emotion:

... O la.s.so, Quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio Men costoro al doloroso pa.s.so!

and, turning to Francesca, he says that her fate fills his eyes with tears and his heart with anguish. Encouraged by the poet's sympathy, she tells him what happened, "_al tempo de' dolci sospiri_," in the season of sweet sighs, in itself a preliminary and melodious appeal for indulgence, and that he must be patient with her if she tells her tale, sobbing as she speaks. Torn between sweet remembrance and regret, she cannot refrain from recalling

... il disiato riso Esser baciato da cotanto amante,

or intimating with supreme delicacy what ensued in the final line of her narrative:

Quel giorno pi non vi leggemmo avante.

The story she had been reading with Paolo Malatesta of Lancelot and Guinevere fell from their hands, and that day they read no further on. And Dante? All he says is that he felt like to die for grief, and fell to the ground even as a dead body falls. From the first line to the last he utters no word of blame or reproach. He would not have been a poet had he done so.

Let us now turn from the fifth book of the _Inferno_ to the third of the _Paradiso_, that we may add to our knowledge of Dante's poetic conception of Woman. He there beholds Piccarda Donati, whom he had known in her lifetime on earth, but at first does not recognise, because, as she herself says with heavenly humility, she is now much fairer to look on than she was then. Withal, she adds, she occupies only an inferior place in Heaven, because she was forced, and sorely against her own will, to violate her vow of virginity. She begins her story by saying simply:

Io fui nel mondo vergine sorella,

that she was a nun dedicated to G.o.d, and goes on to tell how she was violently torn from her cloister by her brother, Forese Donati, and his accomplices, to further family ambition, and compelled to submit to the marriage rite. Dante, feeling, as it seems to me, that this did not detract from her merit, asks her if she is contented with the relatively inferior position in Paradise she says she is a.s.signed among celestial denizens. I trust many readers know her reply, for it is one of the n.o.blest and most beautiful pa.s.sages in the whole of the _Divina Commedia_.

Like all fine pa.s.sages in Poetry, adequate rendering of it in another tongue is not attainable. But the best translation of it with which I am acquainted is that of C. B. Cayley--no Cary, mark you--in _terza rima_, and of which I remember I availed myself when, many years ago, I was beginning to learn Italian, and read Dante for the first time among the then leafy-covered ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. Here is Piccarda's reply:

Our will, O brother mine, is kept at rest By power of heavenly love, which makes us will, For nought else thirsting, only things possessed.

If we should crave to be exalted still More highly, then our will would not agree With His, who gives to us the place we fill.

For 'tis of our own will the very ground, That in the will of G.o.d we govern ours.

Then comes that supremely beautiful line, not to be surpa.s.sed by any line even in Dante:

In la sua voluntade nostra pace.

Our peace is in submission to His will.