Part 10

The completeness of our severance or deficiency may be, after all, the determining circumstance of our achievement. What I would have is cut so clean off from what I have as to leave no sense of wholeness in my continuing as I am. Something of mine is mislaid or lost. It is more mine than anything that I have, but where to find it? Who has it? I reach for it under this bundle and under that. After my life's trial, I find that I have pursued, but not possessed it. What I have gained of it in the pursuit, others must realize. I bequeath, and cannot take it with me. Did Dante regard the parchments of his "Divina Commedia" with a sigh, foreseeing the long future of commentators and booksellers, he himself absolving them beforehand by the quitclaim of death? You and I may also grieve to part from certain unsold volumes, from certain manuscripts of doubtful fate and eventuality. Oh! out of this pang of death has come the scheme and achievement of immortality. "_Non omnis moriar_." "I am the resurrection and the life." "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body."

This tremendous leap and feat of the human soul across the bridge of dark negativity would never have been made without the sharp spur and bitter pang of death. "My life food for worms? No; never. I will build and bestow it in arts and charities, spin it in roads and replicate it in systems; but to be lopped from the great body of humanity, and decay like a black, amputated limb? My manhood refuses. The infinite hope within me generates another life, realizable in every moment of my natural existence, whose moments are not in time, whose perfect joys are not measured by variable duration. Thus every day can be to me full of immortality, and the matter of my corporeal decease full of indifference, as sure to be unconscious."

I think this attainment the first, fundamental to all the others. We console the child with a simple word about heaven. He is satisfied, and feels its truth. How to attain this deathlessness is the next problem whose solution he will ask of us. We point him to the plane on which he will roll; for our life is a series of revolutions,--no straight-forward sledding, but an acceleration by ideal weight and propulsion, through which our line becomes a circle, and our circle itself a living wheel of action, creating out of its mobile necessity a past and a future.

The halfness of the individual is literally shown in the division of sex. The Platonic fancy runs into an anterior process, by which what was originally one has been made two. We will say that the two halves were never historically, though always ideally, one. Here Art comes to the assistance of Nature. The mere contrast of sex does not lift society out of what is animal and slavish. The integrity of sex relation is not to be found in a succession or simultaneity of mates, easily taken and as easily discarded. This great value of a perfected life is to be had only through an abiding and complete investment,--the relations of sex lifted up to the communion of the divine, unified by the good faith of a lifetime, enriched by a true sharing of all experience. This august partnership is Marriage, one of the most difficult and delicate achievements of society. Too sadly does its mockery afflict us in these and other days. Either party, striving to dwarf the other, dwarfs itself. This mystic selfhood, inexpressible in literal phrases, is at once the supreme of Nature and the sublime of institutions. The ideal human being is man and woman united on the ideal plane. The church long presented and represented this plane. The state is hereafter to second and carry out its suggestions. The ideal assembly, which we figure by the communion of the saints, is a coming together of men and women in the highest aims and views to which Humanity can be a party.

Passing from immediate to projected consciousness, I can imagine expression itself to spring from want. The sense of the incompleteness of life in itself and in each of its acts calls for this effort to show, at least, what life should be,--to vindicate the shortcoming of action out of the fulness of speech. This that eats and sleeps is so little of the man! These processes are so little what he understands by life! Listen; let him tell you what life means to him.

And so sound is differentiated into speech, and hammered into grammar, and built up into literature--all of whose creations are acoustic palaces of imagination. For the eye in reading is only the secondary sense: the written images the spoken word.

How the rhythm of the blood comes to be embodied in verse is more difficult to trace. But the justification of Poetry is obvious. When you have told the thing in prose, you have made it false by making it literal. Poesy lies a little to complete the truth which Honesty lacks skill to embody. Her artifices are subtle and wonderful. You glance sideways at the image, and you see it. You look it full in the face, and it disappears.

The plastic arts, too. This beautiful face commands me to paint from it a picture twice as beautiful. Its charm of Nature I cannot attain. My painting must not try for the edge of its flesh and blood forms, the evanescence of its color, the light and shadow of its play of feature. But something which the beautiful face could not know of itself the artist knows of it. That deep interpretation of its ideal significance marks the true master, who is never a Chinese copyist. Some of the portraits that look down upon you from the walls of Rome and of Florence calmly explain to you a whole eternity. Their eyes seem to have seized it all, and to hold it beyond decay. This is what Art gives in the picture,--not simply what appears and disappears, but that which, being interpreted, abides with us.

Who shall say by what responsive depths the heights of architecture measure themselves? The uplifted arches mirror the introspective soul. So profoundly did I think, and plot, and contrive! So loftily must my stone climax balance my cogitations! To such an amount of prayer allow so many aisles and altars. The pillars of cloisters image the brotherhood who walked in the narrow passages; straight, slender, paired in steadfastness and beauty, there they stand, fair records of amity. Columns of retrospect, let us hope that the souls they image did not look back with longing upon the scenes which they were called upon to forsake.

Critical belief asks roomy enclosures and windows unmasked by artificial impediments. It comes also to desire limits within which the voice of the speaker can reach all present. Men must look each other in the face, and construct prayer or sermon with the human alphabet. We are glad to see the noble structures of older times maintained and renewed; but we regret to see them imitated in our later day. (St. Peter's is, in all save dimension, a church of Protestant architecture--so is St. Paul's, of London.) The present has its own trials and agonies, its martyrdoms and deliverances. With it, the old litanies must sink to sleep; the more Christian of to-day efface the most Christian of yesterday. The very attitude of saintship is changed. The practical piety of our time looks neither up nor down, but straight before it, at the men and women to be relieved, at the work to be done. Religion to-day is not "height nor depth nor any other creature," but God with us.

There is a mystic birth and Providence in the succession of the Arts; yet are they designed to dwell together, each needing the aid of all. People often speak of sculpture as of an art purely and distinctively Grecian. But the Greeks possessed all the Arts, and more, too,--the substratum of democracy and the sublime of philosophy. No natural jealousy prevails in this happy household. The Arts are not wives, of whom one must die before another has proper place. They are sisters, whose close communion heightens the charm of all by the excellence of each. The Christian unanimity is as favorable to Art as to human society.

We may say that the Greeks attained a great perfection in sculpture, and have continued in this art to offer the models of the world.

When the great period of Italian art attained its full splendor, it seemed as if the frozen crystals of Greek sculpture had melted before the fire of Christian inspiration. But this transformation, like the transfiguration of Hindoo deities, did not destroy the anterior in its issue.

The soul of sculpture ripened into painting, but Sculpture, the beautiful mother, still lived and smiled upon her glowing daughter. See Michael Angelo studying the torso! See the silent galleries of the Vatican, where Form holds you in one room, Color presently detaining you in another! And what are our Raphaels, Angelos, making to-day? Be sure they are in the world, for the divine spirit of Art never leaves itself without a witness. But what is their noble task? They are moulding character, embodying the divine in human culture and in human institutions. The Greek sculptures indicate and continue a fitting reverence for the dignity and beauty of the human form; but the reverence for the human soul which fills the world to-day is a holier and happier basis of Art. From it must come records in comparison with which obelisk and pyramid, triumphal arch and ghostly cathedral, shall seem the toys and school appliances of the childhood of the race.

To return to our original problem,--how shall we attain the proper human stature, how add the wanting half to the half which is given?

I answer: By labor and by faith, in which there is nothing accidental or arbitrary. The very world in which we live is but a form, whose spirit, breathing through Nature and Experience, slowly creates its own interpretation, adding a new testament to an old testament, lifting the veil between Truth and Mercy, clasping the mailed hand of Righteousness in the velvet glove of Peace.

The spirit of Religion is the immanence of the divine in the human, the image of the eternal in the transitory, of things infinite in things limited. I have heard endless discussions and vexed statements of how the world came out of chaos. From the Mosaic version to the last rationalistic theory, I have been willing to give ear to these. It is a subject upon which human ingenuity may exercise itself in its allowable leisure. One thing concerns all of us much more; _viz._, how to get heaven out of earth, good out of evil, instruction out of opportunity.

This is our true life work. When we have done all in this that life allows us, we have not done more than half, the other half lying beyond the pale struggle and the silent rest. Oh! when we shall reach that bound, whatever may be wanting, let not courage and hope forsake us.

Dante and Beatrice

DANTE and Beatrice--names linked together by holy affection and high art. Ary Scheffer has shown them to us as in a beatific vision,--the stern spirit which did not fear to confront the horrors of Hell held in a silken leash of meekness by the gracious one through whose intervention he passed unscathed through fire and torment, bequeathing to posterity a record unique in the annals alike of literature and of humanity.

My first studies of the great poet are in the time long past, antedating even that middle term of life which was for him the starting-point of a new inspiration. Yet it seems to me that no part of my life, since that reading, has been without some echo of the "Divine Comedy" in my mind. In the walk through Hell, I strangely believe. Its warnings still admonish me. I see the boat of Charon, with its mournful freight. I pass before the judgment seat of Midas. I see the souls tormented in hopeless flame. I feel the weight of the leaden cloaks. I shrink from the jar of the flying rocks, hurled as weapons. For me, dark Ugolino still feeds upon his enemy. Francesca still mates with her sad lover.

From this hopeless abyss, I emerge to the kindlier pain of Purgatory, whose end is almost Heaven. And of that blessed realm, my soul still holds remembrance--of its solemn joy, of its unfolding revelation. The vision of that mighty cross in which all the stars of the highest heaven range themselves is before me, on each fair cluster the word "Cristo" outshining all besides.

Among my dearest recollections is that of an Easter sermon devised by me for an ignorant black congregation in a far-off West Indian isle, in which I told of this vision of the cross, and tried to make it present to them. But this grateful remembrance which I have carried through so many years does not regard the poet alone. In the world's great goods, as in its great evils, a woman has her part. And this poem, which has been such a boon to humanity, has for its central inspiration the memory of a woman.

In the prologue, already we hear of her. It is she who sends her poet his poet-guide. When he shrinks from the painful progress which lies before him, and deems the companionship even of Virgil an insufficient pledge of safety, the words of his lady, repeated to him by his guide, restore his sinking courage, and give him strength for his immortal journey.

Here are those words of Beatrice, spoken to Virgil, and by him brought to Dante:--

O courteous shade of Mantua! thou whose fame Yet lives and shall live long as Nature lasts! A friend, not of my fortune, but myself, On the wide desert in his road has met Hindrance so great that he through fear has turned. Assist 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, passionate 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 passion, 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 noble 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 noble 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 noble ladies older than herself. "As she passed 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 passion, 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, passing 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 assure 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 constitute a very respectable antinomy. One of these tells him that the empire of Love is good, because it turns the inclinations of its vassal from all that is base. The opposite thought is: "The empire of Love is not good, since the more absolute the allegiance of his vassal, the more severe and woful are the straits through which he must perforce pass."

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 noble 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 embarrassment, now asks the cause of it; to which question Dante replies: "I have set my foot in that part of life to pass 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 passing 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 noble 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 passing 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 noble 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 noble mould, A year to-day it is since thou didst seek the skies."