Part 6

Nor does it seem that at bottom Dante’s political philosophy, any more than that of the Hebrew prophets, missed the great causes and the great aims of human progress. Behind mythical and narrow conceptions of history, he had a true sense for the moral principles that really condition our well-being. A better science need subtract nothing from the insight he had into the difference between political good and evil. What in his day seemed a dream--that mankind should be one great commonwealth--is now obvious to the idealist, the socialist, the merchant. Science and trade are giving, in a very different form, to be sure, a practical realization to that idea. And the other half of his theory, that of the Catholic Church, is maintained literally by that church itself to this day; and the outsider might see in that ideal of a universal spiritual society a symbol or premonition of the right of the mind to freedom from legal compulsions, or of the common allegiance of honest minds to science, and to their common spiritual heritage and destiny.

On the other hand, the sting of Dante’s private wrongs, like the enthusiasm of his private loves, lent a wonderful warmth and clearness to the great objects of his imagination. We are too often kept from feeling great things greatly for want of power to assimilate them to the little things which we feel keenly and sincerely. Dante had, in this respect, the art of a Platonic lover: he could enlarge the object of his passion, and keep the warmth and ardour of it undiminished. He had been banished unjustly--_Florentinus exul immeritus_, he liked to call himself. That injustice rankled, but it did not fester, in his heart; for his indignation spread to all wrong, and thundered against Florence, Europe, and mankind, in that they were corrupt and perfidious. Dante had loved. The memory of that passion remained also, but it did not degenerate into sentimentality; for his adoration passed to a larger object and one less accidental. His love had been a spark of that “love which moves the sun and the other stars.”[5] He had known, in that revelation, the secret of the universe. The spheres, the angels, the sciences, were henceforth full of sweetness, comfort, and light.

Of this Platonic expansion of emotion, till it suffuses all that deserves to kindle it, we have a wonderful version in Dante’s _Vita Nuova_. This book, on the surface, is an account of Dante’s meeting, at the age of nine, with Beatrice, a child even a little younger; of another meeting with her at the age of eighteen; of an overwhelming mystic passion which the lover wished to keep secret, so much so that he feigned another attachment as a blind; of a consequent estrangement; and of the death of Beatrice, whereupon the poet resolved not to speak publicly of her again, until he could praise her in such wise as no woman had ever been praised before.

This story is interspersed with poems of the most exquisite delicacy, both in sentiment and in versification. They are dreamlike, allegorical, musical meditations, ambiguous in their veiled meanings, but absolutely clear and perfect in their artful structure, like a work of tracery and stained glass, geometrical, mystical, and tender. A singular limpidity of accent and image, a singular naïveté, is strangely combined in these pieces with scholastic distinctions and a delight in hiding and hinting, as in a charade.

The learned will dispute for ever on the exact basis and meaning of these confessions of Dante. The learned are perhaps not those best fitted to solve the problem. It is a matter for literary tact and sympathetic imagination. It must be left to the delicate intelligence of the reader, if he has it; and if he has not, Dante does not wish to open his heart to him. His enigmatical manner is his protection against the intrusion of uncongenial minds.

Without passing beyond the sphere of learned criticism, I think we may say this: the various interpretations, in this matter, are not mutually exclusive. Symbolism and literalness, in Dante’s time, and in his practice, are simultaneous. For instance, in any history of mediaeval philosophy you may read that a great subject of dispute in those days was the question whether universal terms or natures, such as man, or humanity, existed before the particulars, in the particulars, or after the particulars, by abstraction of what was common to them all. Now, this matter was undoubtedly much disputed about; but there is one comprehensive and orthodox solution, which represents the true mind of the age, above the peculiar hobbies or heresies of individuals. This solution is that universal terms or natures exist before the particulars, _and_ in the particulars, _and_ after the particulars: for God, before he made the world, knew how he intended to make it, and had eternally in his mind the notions of a perfect man, horse, etc., after which the particulars were to be modelled, or to which, in case of accident, they were to be restored, either by the healing and recuperative force of nature, or by the ministrations of grace. But universal terms or natures existed also _in_ the particulars, since the particulars illustrated them, shared in them, and were what they were by virtue of that participation. Nevertheless, the universals existed also after the particulars: for the discursive mind of man, surveying the variety of natural things, could not help noticing and abstracting the common types that often recur in them; and this _ex postfacto_ idea, in the human mind, is a universal term also. To deny any of the three theories, and not to see their consistency, is to miss the mediaeval point of view, which, in every sense of the word, was Catholic.

Just such a solution seems to me natural in the case of Beatrice. We have it on independent documentary evidence that in Dante’s time there actually lived in Florence a certain Bice Portinari; and there are many incidents in the _Vita Nuova_ and in the _Commedia_ which hardly admit of an allegorical interpretation; such as the death of Beatrice, and especially that of her father, on which occasion Dante writes a sympathetic poem.[6] can see no reason why this lady, as easily as any other person, should not have called forth the dreamful passion of our poet. That he had loved some one is certain. Most people have; and why should Dante, in particular, have found the language of love a natural veil for his philosophy, if the passion and the language of love had not been his mother-tongue? The language of love is no doubt usual in the allegories of mystics, and was current in the conventional poetry of Dante’s time; but mystics themselves are commonly crossed or potential lovers; and the troubadours harped on the string of love simply because it was the most responsive string in their own natures, and that which could most easily be made to vibrate in their hearers. Dante was not less sensitive than the average man of his generation; and if he followed the fashion of minstrels and mystics, it was because he shared their disposition. The beautiful, the unapproachable, the divine, had passed before him in some visible form; it matters nothing whether this vision came once only, and in the shape of the actual Beatrice, or continuously, and in every shape through which a divine influence may seem to come to a poet. No one would deserve this name of poet--and who deserves it more than Dante?--if real sights and sounds never impressed him; and he would hardly deserve it either, if they impressed him only physically, and for what they are in themselves. His sensibility creates his ideal.

If to deny the existence of an historical Beatrice seems violent and gratuitous, it would be a much worse misunderstanding not to perceive that Beatrice is _also_ a symbol. On one occasion, as we read in the _Vita Nuova_,[7] Dante found himself, in a church, in the presence of Beatrice. His eyes were inevitably fixed upon her; but as he wished to conceal his profound passion from the gossiping crowd, he chose another lady, who happened to stand in the direct line of vision between him and Beatrice, and pretended to be gazing at her, in reality looking beyond her to Beatrice. This intervening lady, _la donna gentile_, became the screen to his true love.[8] But his attentions to her were so assiduous that they were misinterpreted. Beatrice herself observed them, and thinking he was going too far and not with an honourable purpose, showed her displeasure by refusing to greet him as he passed. This sounds real and earthly enough: but what is our surprise when we read expressly, in the _Convito_, that the _donna gentile,_ the screen to Dante’s true love, is philosophy.[9] If the _donna gentile_ is philosophy, the _donna gentilissima,_ Beatrice, must be something of the same sort, only nobler. She must be theology, and theology Beatrice undoubtedly is. Her very name is played upon, if not selected, to mean that she is what renders blessed, what shows the path of salvation.

Now the scene in the church becomes an allegory throughout. The young Dante, we are given to understand, was at heart a religious and devout soul, looking for the highest wisdom. But intervening between his human reason and revealed truth (which he really was in love with, and wished to win and to understand) he found philosophy or, as we should say, science. To science he gave his preliminary attention; so much so that the mysteries of theology were momentarily obscured in his mind; and his faith, to his great sorrow, refused to salute him as he passed. He had fallen into materialistic errors; he had interpreted the spots on the moon as if they could be due to physical, not to Socratic, causes; and his religious philosophy had lost its warmth, even if his religious faith had not actually been endangered. It is certain, then, that Beatrice, besides being a woman, was also a symbol.

But this is not the end. If Beatrice is a symbol for theology, theology itself is not-final. It, too, is an avenue, an interpretation. The eyes of Beatrice reflect a supernal light. It is the ineffable vision of God, the beatific vision, that alone can make us happy and be the reason and the end of our loves and our pilgrimages.

A supreme ideal of peace and perfection which moves the lover, and which moves the sky, is more easily named than understood. In the last canto of the _Paradiso_, where Dante is attempting to describe the beatific vision, he says many times over that our notion of this ideal must be vague and inadequate. The value of the notion to a poet or a philosopher does not lie in what it contains positively, but in the attitude which it causes him to assume towards real experience. Or perhaps it would be better to say that to have an ideal does not mean so much to have any image in the fancy, any Utopia more or less articulate, but rather to take a consistent moral attitude towards all the things of this world, to judge and coordinate our interests, to establish a hierarchy of goods and evils, and to value events and persons, not by a casual personal impression or instinct, but according to their real nature and tendency. So understood, an ultimate ideal is no mere vision of the philosophical dreamer, but a powerful and passionate force in the poet and the orator. It is the voice of his love or hate, of his hope or sorrow, idealizing, challenging, or condemning the world.

It is here that the feverish sensibility of the young Dante stood him in good stead; it gave an unprecedented vigour and clearness to his moral vision; it made him the classic poet of hell and of heaven. At the same time, it helped to make him an upright judge, a terrible accuser, of the earth. Everything and everybody in his day and generation became to him, on account of his intense loyalty to his inward vision, an instance of divine graciousness or of devilish perversity. Doubtless this keenness of soul was not wholly due to the gift of loving, or to the discipline of love; it was due in part also to pride, to resentment, to theoretical prejudices. But figures like that of Francesca di Rimini and Manfred, and the light and rapture vibrating through the whole _Paradiso,_ could hardly have been evoked by a merely irritated genius. The background and the starting-point of everything in Dante is the _intelletto d’amore_, the genius of love.

Everybody has heard that God is love and that love makes the world go round; and those who have traced this latter notion back to its source in Aristotle may have some notion of what it means. It means, as we saw in the beginning, that we should not try to explain motion and life by their natural antecedents, for these run back _in infinitum_. We should explain motion and life rather by their purpose or end, by that unrealized ideal which moving and living things seem to aspire to, and may be said to love. What justifies itself is not any fact or law; for why should these not have been different? What justifies itself is what is good, what is as it ought to be. But things in motion, Aristotle conceived, declare, as it were, that they are not satisfied, and ought to be in some different condition. They look to a fulfilment which is as yet ideal. This fulfilment, if it included motion and life, could include them inwardly only; it would consist in a sustained activity, never lapsing nor suffering change. Such an activity is the unchanging goal towards which life advances and by which its different stages are measured: But since the purpose of things, and not their natural causes, is that which explains them, we may call this eventual activity their reason for being. It will be their unmoved mover.

But how, we may ask,--how can the unchanging, the ideal, the eventual, initiate anything or determine the disposition and tendency of what actually lives and moves? The answer, or rather the impossibility of giving an answer, may be expressed in a single word: magic. It is magic when a good or interesting result, because it would prove good or interesting, is credited with marshalling the conditions and evoking the beings that are to realize it. It is natural that I should be hungry, and natural that there should be things suitable for me to eat--for otherwise I should not be hungry long; but if my hunger, in case it is sharp enough, should be able of itself to produce the food it calls for, that would be magic. Nature would be evoked by the incantations of the will.

I do not forget that Aristotle, with Dante after him, asserts that the goal of life is a separate being already existing, namely, the mind of God, eternally realizing what the world aspires to. The influence of this mind, however, upon the world is no less magical than would be that of a non-existent ideal. For its operation is admittedly not transitive or physical. It itself does not change in working. No virtue leaves it; it does not, according to Aristotle and Plotinus, even know that it works. Indeed, it works only because other things are disposed to pursue it as their ideal; let things keep this disposition, and they will pursue and frame their ideal no less if it nowhere has an actual existence, than if by chance it exists elsewhere in its own person. It works only in its capacity of ideal; therefore, even if it exists, it works only by magic. The matter beneath feels the spell of its presence, and catches something of its image, as the waves of the sea might receive and reflect tremblingly the light shed by the moon. The world accordingly is moved and vivified in every fibre by magic, by the magic of the goal to which it aspires.

But this magic, on earth, bore the name of love. The life of the world was a love, produced by the magic attraction of a good it has never possessed and, so long as it remains a world, is incapable of possessing. Actual things were only suggestions of what the elements in that ulterior existence ought to be: they were mere symbols. The acorn was a mere prophecy--an existing symbol--for the ideal oak; because when the acorn falls into good ground it will be corrupted, but the idea of the oak will arise and be manifested in its place. The acorn was a sort of reliquary in which the miraculous power of the idea was somehow enshrined. In the vulgar attribution of causes we, like Anaxagoras, resemble a superstitious relic-worshipper who should forget that the intercession and merits of the saint really work the miracle, and should attribute it instead to the saint’s bones and garments in their material capacity. Similarly, we should attribute the power which things exerted over us, not to the rarer or denser substance, but to the eternal ideas that they existed by expressing, and existed to express. Things merely localized--like the saint’s relics--the influences which flowed to us from above. In the world of values they were mere symbols, accidental channels for divine energy; and since divine energy, by its magic assimilation of matter, had created these things, in order to express itself, they were symbols altogether not merely in their use, but in their origin and nature.

A mind persuaded that it lives among things that, like words, are essentially significant, and that what they signify is the magic attraction, called love, which draws all things after it, is a mind poetic in its intuition, even if its language be prose. The science and philosophy of Dante did not have to be put into verse in order to become poetry: they were poetry fundamentally and in their essence. When Plato and Aristotle, following the momentous precept of Socrates, decreed that observation of nature should stop and a moral interpretation of nature should begin, they launched into the world a new mythology, to take the place of the Homeric one which was losing its authority. The power the poets had lost of producing illusion was possessed by these philosophers in a high degree; and no one was ever more thoroughly under their spell than Dante. He became to Platonism and Christianity what Homer had been to Paganism; and if Platonism and Christianity, like Paganism, should ever cease to be defended scientifically, Dante will keep the poetry and wisdom of them alive; and it is safe to say that later generations will envy more than they will despise his philosophy. When the absurd controversies and factious passions that in some measure obscure the nature of this system have completely passed away, no one will think of reproaching Dante with his bad science, and bad history, and minute theology. These will not seem blemishes in his poetry, but integral parts of it.

A thousand years after Homer, Alexandrian critics were expounding his charming myths as if they were a revealed treatise of physics and morals. A thousand years after Dante we may hope that his conscientious vision of the universe, where all is love, magic, and symbolism, may charm mankind exclusively as poetry. So conceived, the _Divine Comedy_ marks high noon in that long day-dream of which Plato’s dialogues mark the beginning: a pause of two thousand years in the work of political reason, during which the moral imagination spun out of itself an allegorical philosophy, as a boy, kept at home during a rainy day with books too hard and literal for his years, might spin his own romance out of his father’s histories, and might define, with infantile precision, his ideal lady-love, battles, and kingdoms. The middle age saw the good in a vision. It is for the new age to translate those delightful symbols into the purposes of manhood.

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In a letter which tradition assigns to Dante, addressed to his protector, Cangrande della Scala, lord of Verona and Vicenza, are these words about the _Divine Comedy_: “The subject of the whole work, taken merely in its literal sense, is the state of souls after death, considered simply as a fact. But if the work is understood in its allegorical intention, the subject of it is man, according as, by his deserts and demerits in the use of his free-will, he is justly open to rewards and punishments.” This by no means exhausts, however, the significations which we may look for in a work of Dante’s. How many these may be is pointed out to us in the same letter, and illustrated by the beginning of the one hundred and fourteenth Psalm: “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language; Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion.” Here, Dante tells us, “if we look to the _letter_ only, what is conveyed to us is the deliverance of the children of Israel out of Egypt in the time of Moses; if we look to the _allegory_ of it, what is signified is our redemption accomplished through Christ; if we consider the _moral sense_, what is signified is the conversion of the soul from her present grief and wretchedness to a state of grace; and if we consider the _anagogical sense_ [that is, the revelation contained concerning our highest destiny], what is signified is the passing of the sanctified soul from the bondage of earthly corruption to the freedom of everlasting glory.”

When people brooded so much over a simple text as to find all these meanings in it, we may expect that their own works, when meant to be profound, should have stage above stage of allegorical application. So in the first canto of the _Inferno_ we find a lion that keeps Dante from approaching a delectable mountain; and this lion, besides what he is in the landscape of the poem, is a symbol for pride or power in general, for the king of France in particular, and for whatever political ambitions in Dante’s personal life may have robbed him of happiness or distracted him from faith and from piety. Thus, throughout the _Divine Comedy_, meaning and meaning lurk beneath the luminous pictures; and the poem, besides being a description of the other world, and of the rewards and punishment meted out to souls, is a dramatic view of human passions in this life; a history of Italy and of the world; a theory of Church and State; the autobiography of an exile; and the confessions of a Christian, and of a lover, conscious of his sins and of the miracle of divine grace that intervenes to save him.

The subject-matter of the _Divine Comedy_ is accordingly the moral universe in all its levels,--romantic, political, religious. To present these moral facts in a graphic way, the poet performed a double work of imagination. First he chose some historical personage that might plausibly illustrate each condition of the soul. Then he pictured this person in some characteristic and symbolic attitude of mind and of body, and in an appropriate, symbolic environment. To give material embodiment to moral ideas by such a method would nowadays be very artificial, and perhaps impossible; but in Dante’s time everything was favourable to the attempt. We are accustomed to think of goods and evils as functions of a natural life, sparks struck out in the chance shock of men with things or with one another. For Dante, it was a matter of course that moral distinctions might be discerned, not merely as they arise incidentally in human experience, but also, and more genuinely, as they are displayed in the order of creation. The Creator himself was a poet producing allegories. The material world was a parable which he had built out in space, and ordered to be enacted. History was a great charade. The symbols of earthly poets are words or images; the symbols of the divine poet were natural things and the fortunes of men. They had been devised for a purpose; and this purpose, as the Koran, too, declares, had been precisely to show forth the great difference there is in God’s sight between good and evil.