Part 27

Read as a poem of earth, the “Divine” Comedy has for us a value quite other than Dante—in his political and prophetic passion—designed. What we see in it is the complete _Mappamondo_ of the mediæval, a complete vision of the world, with its ethics, its philosophy and its science, as it reflected itself in the shining if storm-tossed soul of the poet, whose epic was alike the climax and the conclusion of the Middle Ages. No wonder the Italian quotes it with the finality of a Gospel text. For this epic is less of a people than of humanity. Though the Florentine background is of the pettiest—including even Dante’s apologia for breaking a font in the church of St. John—it is really world-history with which the poem is concerned; not world-history as the modern conceives it, for Dante’s _Mappamondo_ held neither America nor China, neither Russia nor Japan, but that selected conceptual world—that autocosm—in which the cultured of his day lived and had their being: a world in which classic and chivalric legend had their equal part—as they have in the poetry of Milton—so that the very “Paradiso” could open with an invocation to Apollo! And this world-history is unified by being strung together on a moral plan, precisely as in the Hebrew Bible, Judas and Brutus finding themselves equally in Lucifer’s avenging fangs. The flames of righteous indignation redeem the crude brimstone, and if we bleed for the sinners, the sins under chastisement are mainly those we would wish purged from the universe in the white flame of righteousness. Indeed, this great sensuous, sinful Tuscan, who went unscathed through the dolorous city, is a soul on fire. He is taken up to Heaven, like Elijah, but in the fiery chariot of his own ardour. His passion is the stars, visible symbol of beauty and infinity. Each of his three great sections ends with the very words. “The stars” shine again in that noble letter refusing the Republic’s terms of pardon. “What!” cries the exile, “shall I not everywhere enjoy the sight of the sun and the stars?” “The love that moves the sun and the other stars” is, indeed, the great doctrine of the poem—its literal last word. How this love, “this goodness celestial, whose signature is writ large on the universe,” is to be reconciled with the spirit that moves the flame and the other dooms, he does not explain. Though ever and anon his own tears of pity flow, the doctrine of eternal hopeless torture does not appal him; not even though, at the Day of Judgment, worse is in store, for the sufferers shall by then have subtilised their practised nerves for the final damnation. It does not disconcert him—any more than it disconcerts his great admirer, Michelangelo—that unbaptised infants and heathens whose only crime was chronological should sigh in Limbo, and that Adam and Noah, Abraham and Moses themselves, should need for their salvation the special descent of Christ. For all his sublimity, his passionate metaphysic insight into the Godhead, he falls below the homely Rabbis of the Talmud, who taught eight or ten centuries earlier, “The righteous of all nations have a share in the World-to-Come.” Yet there are broken lights of this truth here and there.

“But lo! of those Who call, ‘Christ, Christ,’ there shall be many found In judgment, further off from Him by far Than such to whom His name was never known.”

And the fine temper of the man is shown in his struggle against the pitiful obsessions of a provincial theology; in his gratitude towards the great Teachers of Antiquity, his reverence for whom anticipated the Renaissance, albeit the Greeks among them were probably known to him only in Latin translations. A Dante of the Renaissance—if such were possible—might have placed Aristotle and Plato in Paradise by interposition of a Christ loving his Gospel tongue. Bernardo Pulci did, indeed, place Cicero and sundry Roman heroes in Heaven. But even during the Renaissance Savonarola proclaimed that Plato and Aristotle were in Hell, and the best that Dante in his rigider century could do for them was to put them in a painless Limbo, which they perambulate “with slow majestic port,” acquiring from their continuous earthly reputation grace which holds them thus far advanced, and which it seems not beyond all hoping may ultimately exalt them to bliss. And with Aristotle, the “maestro di color che sanno,” walk not only Homer and Euclid, but his Mohammedan commentator, Averroes, and even mythical figures like Orpheus and Hector. A Christendom that had never altogether lost touch with the classical world—were it only by way of Virgil, mediæval saint and sorcerer—a Christendom whose philosophers found ingenious inspiration in Aristotle, could not easily relegate to the flames either the classical writers or their works. Classic literature and mythology made a second Bible, as the lore of chivalry and general history a third; indeed, these were the three great circles in which swam the world of the mediæval _Mappamondo_, the Biblical circle outermost and nearest to Heaven. Yet it was a bold stroke of tolerance on Dante’s part to make Virgil his guide, chronology giving him no chance, as it gave with Statius, of a legendary conversion to Christianity. And this penchant for the great Pagans accentuates his intolerance to the great Christian heretics. But if Virgil himself was excluded from Heaven “for no sin save lack of faith”—Virgil who could not possibly have believed—if even the merits of those who lived before the Gospel, could not profit them because they had missed baptism, it is not surprising to find the Christian heretics collected in the ninth canto in burning sepulchres of carefully graduated temperatures. One wishes that they, rather than Farinata degli Uberti, had held their heads high, with a fine disdain foreshadowing Milton’s Satan. How Socrates would have smiled over the perverted morality of the Christian poet, as we smile over the constricted foot of a Chinese lady! Despite the attempt of a recent writer to moralise his scheme of salvation, the best that can be said for Dante is that he probably followed Aquinas in holding that there is no positive pain in that absence of the divine vision which St. Chrysostom made the severest part of the punishment of the damned. But in tolerance as well as humour he falls far below the _Ha-Tofet weha-Eden_ (“Hell and Paradise”) of his Jewish friend and imitator, Immanuel. It is in vain that Émile Gebhart (in “L’Italie Mystique”) points to his revolutionary liberalism in placing Ripheus the Pagan and Trajan, the Roman Emperor, in Paradise. These apparent exceptions only bring out his lack of tolerance and humour more vividly. For, though the Æneid describes the fallen hero, Ripheus, as “justissimus unus” among the Trojans and “the most observant of right,” yet it is not by the simple force of his own goodness but by some complex operation of grace under which he believes in the Christ that has not yet been born, and even turns missionary, that he penetrates among the “luci sante.” As for the Emperor Trajan, complexity is still worse confounded, for he—despite the title he had won of _Optimus_—must serve his time in hell, and is only popped into Paradise after being resuscitated, converted and baptized by St. Gregory four hundred years after his first decease. Thus both Ripheus and Trajan died Christians, Dante assures us gravely, not Gentiles as the world imagines; one believing in the Crucifixion that was to be, and the other in the Crucifixion that had been.

“Cristiani, in ferma fede Quel de’ passuri, e quel de’ passi piedi.”

With all Dante’s stippling and geometric chart-drawing, his conception of the after-world is not really clear. The sinners are able to deliver long monologues, amid all their agony; they foreknow things terrestrial, exactly like the Manes of Paganism; they quarrel with one another; there are even high jinks in Hell, which according to Burckhardt show an Aristophanic humour. (But then Burckhardt is a German.) Moreover, a certain free will reigns. The undefined powers of the demons import into Dante’s excursion through their dominions a deal of breathlessness and terror from which one should be exempt who travels with a “safe-conduct” acquired by the interposition of powerful personages in Paradise.

Such are the nebulous rings hovering round Dante’s _Mappamondo Infernale_. But the circles of his _Mappamondo Terrestre_ are clear and resplendent. ’Twas within the illumination of these circles—unnecessarily narrowing though they were—that the Middle Ages, and even Ages later, built their sublime cathedrals, painted their lovely Madonnas, and wrote their great poems. For though doubtless much sacred art is merely splendid sensuous decoration, and some even of that which is indubitably spiritual may have been the work of free-thinking and free-living artists, it remains true that the Dark Ages had a light which electricity cannot replace.

But is our modern _Mappamondo_ as scientific as we think it? Can we girdle it with no circles amid which to sail securely again through the infinities?

ST. GIULIA AND FEMALE SUFFRAGE

Vastly strange are the wanderings of saints and pictures. When a Magnificent One ordered for his gilded _sala_ a Madonna—even with himself and his consort superadded—he was, for aught he knew, helping to decorate Hampton Court in Inghilterra, or the mansion of a master-butcher in undiscovered and unchristened Pennsylvania. And when a saint was born, an equal veil hid the place of his death or of his ultimate patronage. The fate of St. Francis, to live and die and be canonised in his birthplace, was of the rarest. His pendant, St. Dominic, came from Old Castile, and was buried in Bologna.

It is no surprise, therefore, to find St. Giulia, of Carthage, in possession of Brescia, though I must confess that until I stumbled upon the frescoes consecrated to her in the church of S. Maria del Solario her name and fame were unknown to me. Luini painted these frescoes, the sacristan said, though the connoisseurs omit to chronicle them and will doubtless repudiate the attribution. The date of 1520 appended to the somewhat free and easy Latin epigraph beneath does indeed bring them well within Luini’s working period, but their authenticity interests me less than the story they tell.

St. Giulia, it would appear, was born in the seventh century of a noble Carthaginian family, and was endowed with holy learning and every spiritual grace.

“Stemate præsignis Carthagine nata libellos Docta sacros, anima, corpus gestuque pudica, Curatu patiens, humilis, jejuniaque pollens.”

Such a maiden could only become an apostle to the heathen. Accordingly, we see her arrive at Corsica in a boat with neither oar nor sail, and start praying to the true God. A good-natured citizen warns her of the risks of such heresy, and the kindly ruler of Corsica himself adjures her to discretion, his monitions being emphasised by a man with an axe who stands behind him. But holding her prayer-book, and already crowned with her halo, she prays on. The next fresco shows the inevitable sequel. She is hanging by her hair to the bough of a pretty tree, while an executioner prods at her bleeding breasts with a three-pronged fork, though his head is turned away, as if he were not over-proud of his job. The kindly ruler, however, continues his remonstrances. In the distance a small, dim angel wings his way to her. Finally, she is stretched on a cross, and two ruffians batter her with massive clubs, but angels hold the palm and wreath over her head, and the Dove flies towards her. These celestial visions are a true interpretation and externalisation of the psychology of the martyr: these alone could support her. In our own day the visions of our martyrs are less concrete; they die for some far-seen ideal of Justice or Freedom, and this suffices to sustain them in Spanish prisons or under the Russian knout.

But what is peculiarly noteworthy in the story of Giulia is the status of woman in the Dark Ages and under the Catholic Church. St. Giulia appears to enjoy as great a roving licence as St. Augustine, her fellow-citizen in Carthage and “The City of God.” She is not considered unsexed, nor does her teaching rank below man’s, and she is canonised equally with the male. In fact, in leaving the home-nest to preach to the heathen, she is only following the model of Thekla in the Apocryphal “Acts of St. Paul,” whose story, though it was forged by a pious elder, is none the less proof of woman’s position in that highest of all ancient spheres, Religion. “I recommend unto you Phœbe, our sister,” says the misogynous St. Paul himself (Romans xvi), “for she hath been a succourer of many and of myself also. Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my helpers in Christ Jesus; who have for my life laid down their own necks.”

It is, indeed, doubtful whether Christianity would ever have been established but for the courage and companionship of women. I feel sure they tidied up the catacombs and gave a feeling of home to the crypts and caves. “It was the women who spread Christianity in the family,” says Harnack. St. Augustine’s father was a heathen; it was his mother, Monica, who taught him to pray. The Virgin Martyr, like Santa Reparata of Florence, or St. Catherine of Alexandria, is a stock figure of the Roman calendar. As in all great movements, differences of station were forgotten, and Blandine, the servant-girl of Lyons, played as majestic a part as the royal-blooded St. Catherine, whose wheel of martyrdom finds such quaint perpetuation as a firework.

Popular imagination added the Madonna to the Trinity as a sort of female representative. In Tintoretto’s _Paradise_, as I have already noted, she figures as authoritatively as the Christ, and in a picture at Vicenza, attributed to Tiepolo, she stands on the world, crushing the snake with her foot.

Her companions were usually divided in sex and united in glory. Luca della Robbia, in his charming relief in the cathedral of Arezzo, scrupulously places one male and one female saint on her either hand, and even one male and female angel: doubtless had cherubs possessed sex possibilities, his cherubs too would have been impartially distributed. In the Accademia of Florence, Cimabue’s Madonna is entirely surrounded by female saints, though a few males loom below her throne; Giotto’s shows a female surplus; Bernardo Daddi’s redresses the balance. Fra Angelico gives us _Jesus carried to the Tomb_ by nine women to four men.

Italian art is full of symmetrical paradises of sex-equality, and if a church was decorated with male saints down one aisle, they would be scrupulously balanced by female saints along the other. An old Byzantine Basilica of Ravenna, which displays twenty-two virgins arrayed against thirty saints of the dominant sex, first set me wondering whether, since the Dark Ages, woman has not gone back in Christendom instead of forward. Here at least was the atmosphere for the legend, if not for the reality, of a Pope Joan, whereas at the period in which I first opened my eyes upon the world and woman, she appears to have become reduced to an absolute industrial dependence upon her lord like the fifteenth-century chicken in Giambattista della Porta’s “Book of Natural Magic.” For according to the delightful recipe (cited by Corvo) for inducing affection towards you in a chicken, you must—before it has its feathers—“break off its lower beak even to the jaw. Then, having not the wherewithal to peck up food, it must come to its master to be fed.”

I might cite in proof of woman’s retrogression since the Dark Ages the glorification of womanhood through “The Divine Comedy,” but the Italian poet’s translation of life into literature is, I fear, no more legal evidence of the real status of woman in the Middle Ages than her chivalrous deification at the hands of the Germanic or Provençal poets is a proof that she was treated even as an equal of her worshippers. Dante’s unknown Beatrice sounds like a woman who was snubbed by her husband and brothers. But Matilda, who plays second fiddle to her, and who is equally drawn by Dante as a mild flower-culling “bella Donna” was in reality the warrior Countess of Tuscany, and the fact that Dante feminises and floralises her shows that he had no real respect for feminine dominance in the actual shapes it took in life, and that he was only prepared to idealise woman on condition of her conforming to his ideal.

The scholars and commentators who have always been so puzzled at the metamorphosis of Matilda have forgotten man’s tendency to break off woman’s beak, whether in reality or in imagination. But even if Preger be correct in identifying Dante’s Matilda, not with the armoured Amazon of Tuscany, but with Mechtilde, the nun, whose mystic visions are the flowers she culls, it remains true that Dante’s ideal was never the “Virago,” a title of honour which was inscribed on her tomb, and which even at the epoch of the Renaissance implied nothing but praise. The word may serve to remind us that there is no sharp bisection of qualities between the sexes.

Matilda was, in fact, a sufficient refutation in herself of the notion that there is a rigid division between the qualities of men and women. Such a difference as is implied does, indeed, exist, but it is between men and men, and between women and women, as well as between men and women, and the popular nomenclature, which calls certain women mannish and certain men effeminate, recognises the possibility of deviation from the normal. Indeed, considering that both parents affect their child, the attempt to breed a special feminine psychology, immune from politics and fighting, must be perpetually thwarted by the criss-cross action of heredity, as upon the daughters of warriors and statesmen. Matilda—sired by the Magnificent Monster, Boniface—was a man in ten thousand. She led her own armies. She patronised learning and founded the law schools of Bologna. If she kept her husbands in subjection, casting off one after the other, she had none of the vices of the male despot; indeed, her second marriage-contract stipulated only a sexless union. There was nothing, indeed, except these vices in which she ranks below the Magnificent Monsters who preceded her in the lordship of Lucca or Lombardy. I must admit that the Countess of Tuscany fell under the influence of her spiritual director (as the Male Magnificent falls under the influence of his unspiritual directress), and that she used her power, and her treasure, as it is feared women will, to bolster up the Church; in fact, she, with her mother Beatrice, attended the Council of Rome in 1074, at which investiture by lay hands was declared illegal, and hers was the Castle of Canossa, to which Henry IV came to abase himself before the Pope. And that dubious temporal power of the Pope’s might not have come into such solid being had she not left her possessions to the See of Rome, and thus practically founded the States of the Church. This, of course, is the secret of her high position in the earthly paradise of the Purgatory. But, after all, religious zeal is not a female monopoly, and even Bloody Mary could not hold a candle to Torquemada.

Catherine of Siena exercised an equally critical influence upon the fortunes of the Papacy and upon European history when she persuaded Gregory XI to move the Papal seat back from Avignon to Rome; a mission in which Rienzi had failed a generation earlier. Catherine, for all her ecstasies and self-scourgings, had far more common sense than the male mystics.

It was in allowing for such divergences from the normal that the Dark Ages surpassed our electric-lit era, whose logic confounds the optional with the compulsory, and the individual with the general. It was not pretended that every woman can or must be a warrior, but she who had military genius was not debarred from developing it. It was not claimed that every woman can or must be a saint, but St. Clara stood equal with St. Francis, and St. Catherine of Siena with St. Dominic. And at the Renaissance Boccaccio devotes a book to celebrated females, and Michelangelo writes most humble love-sonnets to the poetess, Vittoria Colonna (whose _Rime_ still sell, and who unlike Matilda stood for religious reform). Vittoria’s noble classic head, especially as seen helmeted in Michelangelo’s design, suggests a very Minerva, and from various quarters we hear of the political woman, the learned woman, the patroness of the arts, and the female physician, while at the foot of the staircase of Padua University stands a statue of a lady Professor, a happier Hypatia. I forget if this is Lucrezia Cornaro, who was made a Doctor of this University and a member of so many learned societies throughout Europe, but no enumeration of Italian heroines should omit her brilliant ancestress, Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, whose court at Asolo was one of the centres of the Renaissance.

“The education given to women in the upper classes,” says Burckhardt, the learned historian of “The Renaissance in Italy,” “was essentially the same as that given to men. . . . There was no question of ‘women’s rights’ or female emancipation, because the thing in itself was a matter of course. The educated woman no less than the man strove naturally after a characteristic and complete individuality.”

When one remembers the struggle in nineteenth century England for the higher education of women, and particularly the desperate resistance to their studying and practising medicine, one realises the fallacy of expecting melioration from the mere movement of time. There is no automatic progress. What is automatic is retrogression, so that the price even of stability is perpetual vigilance.

But what has St. Giulia, born at Carthage and crucified in Corsica, to do with Brescia? I have already pointed out the free trade in saints, by which they were liable to posthumous export. St. Giulia’s body was transported from Corsica by Desiderio, a noble Brescian, who ascended the Longobardian throne in 735. She was placed in the church dedicated to St. Michael, the patron saint of the Longobardi, whom she ousted in 915, from which date the Church was known as St. Giulia’s. A Nunnery of S. Giulia had existed from about 750, and remained in being for over a thousand years, till its suppression in 1797 by the inevitable Napoleon. Coryat, who visited it in 1608, describes it as having been in time past “a receptacle of many royall Ladies.” It is now a Museum of Christian Art, and there I saw St. Giulia depicted in sculpture by Giovanni Carra, her figure nude to the waist and stretched on a real wooden cross with real nails in her hands and feet. Alas for Christian Art!