Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 - Leigh Hunt
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He stopped long nowhere, except with Guido Novello; and when that
prince, whose downfal was at hand, sent him on the journey above
mentioned to Venice, the senate (whom the poet had never offended) were
so little aware of his being of consequence, that they declined giving
him an audience. He went back, and broke his heart. Boccaccio says, that
he would get into such passions with the very boys and girls in the
street, who plagued him with party-words, as to throw stones at them--a
thing that would be incredible, if persons acquainted with his great but
ultra-sensitive nation did not know what Italians could do in all ages,
from Dante's own age down to the times of Alfieri and Foscolo. It
would be as difficult, from the evidence of his own works and of the
exasperation he created, to doubt the extremest reports of his irascible
temper, as it would be not to give implicit faith to his honesty. The
charge of peculation which his enemies brought against this great poet,
the world has universally scouted with an indignation that does it
honour. He himself seems never to have condescended to allude to it;
and a biographer would feel bound to copy his silence, had not the
accusation been so atrociously recorded. But, on the other hand, who
can believe that a man so capable of doing his fellow-citizens good and
honour, would have experienced such excessive enmity, had he not carried
to excess the provocations of his pride and scorn? His whole history
goes to prove it, not omitting the confession he makes of pride as his
chief sin, and the eulogies he bestows on the favourite vice of the
age--revenge. His Christianity (at least as shewn in his poem) was not
that of Christ, but of a furious polemic. His motives for changing his
party, though probably of a mixed nature, like those of most human
beings, may reasonably be supposed to have originated in something
better than interest or indignation. He had most likely not agreed
thoroughly with any party, and had become hopeless of seeing dispute
brought to an end, except by the representative of the Caesars. The
inconsistency of the personal characters of the popes with the sacred
claims of the chair of St. Peter, was also calculated greatly to disgust
him; but still his own infirmities of pride and vindictiveness
spoiled all; and when he loaded every body else with reproach for the
misfortunes of his country, he should have recollected that, had his own
faults been kept in subjection to his understanding, he might possibly
have been its saviour. Dante's modesty has been asserted on the ground
of his humbling himself to the fame of Virgil, and at the feet of
blessed spirits; but this kind of exalted humility does not repay a
man's fellow-citizens for lording it over them with scorn and derision.
We learn from Boccaccio, that when he was asked to go ambassador
from his party to the pope, he put to them the following useless and
mortifying queries--"If I go, who is to stay?--and if I stay, who is to
go?" [21] Neither did his pride make him tolerant of pride in others.
A neighbour applying for his intercession with a magistrate, who had
summoned him for some offence, Dante, who disliked the man for riding in
an overbearing manner along the streets (stretching out his legs as wide
as he could, and hindering people from going by), did intercede with the
magistrate, but it was in behalf of doubling the fine in consideration
of the horsemanship. The neighbour, who was a man of family, was so
exasperated, that Sacchetti the novelist says it was the principal cause
of Dante's expatriation. This will be considered the less improbable,
if, as some suppose, the delinquent obtained possession of his derider's
confiscated property; but, at all events, nothing is more likely to
have injured him. The bitterest animosities are generally of a personal
nature; and bitter indeed must have been those which condemned a man of
official dignity and of genius to such a penalty as the stake.[22]
That the Florentines of old, like other half-Christianised people, were
capable of any extremity against an opponent, burning included, was
proved by the fates of Savonarola and others; and that Dante himself
could admire the burners is evident from his eulogies and beatification
of such men as Folco and St. Dominic. The tragical as well as "fantastic
tricks" which
"Man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,"
plays with his energy and bad passions under the guise of duty, is among
the most perplexing of those spectacles, which, according to a greater
understanding than Dante's, "make the angels weep." (Dante, by the way,
has introduced in his heaven no such angels as those; though he has
plenty that scorn and denounce.) Lope de Vega, though a poet, was an
officer of the Inquisition, and joined the famous Armada that was coming
to thumb-screw and roast us into his views of Christian meekness.
Whether the author of the story of _Paulo and Francesca_ could have
carried the Dominican theories into practice, had he been the banisher
instead of the banished, is a point that may happily be doubted; but at
all events he revenged himself on his enemies after their own fashion;
for he answered their decree of the stake by putting them into hell.
Dante entitled the saddest poem in the world a Comedy, because it was
written in a middle style; though some, by a strange confusion of ideas,
think the reason must have been because it "ended happily!" that is,
because, beginning with hell (to some), it terminated with "heaven" (to
others). As well might they have said, that a morning's work in the
Inquisition ended happily, because, while people were being racked in
the dungeons, the officers were making merry in the drawing-room. For
the much-injured epithet of "Divine," Dante's memory is not responsible.
He entitled his poem, arrogantly enough, yet still not with that impiety
of arrogance, "The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by nation but
not by habits." The word "divine" was added by some transcriber; and it
heaped absurdity on absurdity, too much of it, alas! being literally
infernal tragedy. I am not speaking in mockery, any further than the
fact itself cannot help so speaking. I respect what is to be respected
in Dante; I admire in him what is admirable; would love (if his
infernalities would let me) what is loveable; but this must not hinder
one of the human race from protesting against what is erroneous in his
fame, when it jars against every best feeling, human and divine. Mr.
Cary thinks that Dante had as much right to avail himself of "the
popular creed in all its extravagance" as Homer had of his gods, or
Shakspeare of his fairies. But the distinction is obvious. Homer did not
personally identify himself with a creed, or do his utmost to perpetuate
the worst parts of it in behalf of a ferocious inquisitorial church, and
to the risk of endangering the peace of millions of gentle minds.
The great poem thus misnomered is partly a system of theology, partly an
abstract of the knowledge of the day, but chiefly a series of passionate
and imaginative pictures, altogether forming an account of the author's
times, his friends, his enemies, and himself, written to vent the spleen
of his exile, and the rest of his feelings, good and bad, and to reform
church and state by a spirit of resentment and obloquy, which highly
needed reform itself. It has also a design strictly self-referential.
The author feigns, that the beatified spirit of his mistress has
obtained leave to warn and purify his soul by shewing him the state of
things in the next world. She deputes the soul of his master Virgil
to conduct him through hell and purgatory, and then takes him herself
through the spheres of heaven, where Saint Peter catechises and confirms
him, and where he is finally honoured with sights of the Virgin Mary, of
Christ, and even a glimpse of the Supreme Being!
His hell, considered as a place, is, to speak geologically, a most
fantastical formation. It descends from beneath Jerusalem to the centre
of the earth, and is a funnel graduated in circles, each circle being a
separate place of torment for a different vice or its co-ordinates, and
the point of the funnel terminating with Satan stuck into ice. Purgatory
is a corresponding mountain on the other side of the globe, commencing
with the antipodes of Jerusalem, and divided into exterior circles of
expiation, which end in a table-land forming the terrestrial paradise.
From this the hero and his mistress ascend by a flight, exquisitely
conceived, to the stars; where the sun and the planets of the Ptolemaic
system (for the true one was unknown in Dante's time) form a series of
heavens for different virtues, the whole terminating in the empyrean, or
region of pure light, and the presence of the Beatific Vision.
The boundaries of old and new, strange as it may now seem to us, were so
confused in those days, and books were so rare, and the Latin poets held
in such invincible reverence, that Dante, in one and the same poem,
speaks of the false gods of Paganism, and yet retains much of its lower
mythology; nay, invokes Apollo himself at the door of paradise. There
was, perhaps, some mystical and even philosophical inclusion of the
past in this medley, as recognising the constant superintendence of
Providence; but that Dante partook of what may be called the literary
superstition of the time, even for want of better knowledge, is clear
from the grave historical use he makes of poetic fables in his treatise
on Monarchy, and in the very arguments which he puts into the mouths of
saints and apostles. There are lingering feelings to this effect even
now among the peasantry of Italy; where, the reader need not be told,
Pagan customs of all sorts, including religious and most reverend ones,
are existing under the sanction of other names;--heathenisms christened.
A Tuscan postilion, once enumerating to me some of the native poets,
concluded his list with Apollo; and a plaster-cast man over here, in
London, appeared much puzzled, when conversing on the subject with a
friend of mine, how to discrepate Samson from Hercules.
Dante accordingly, while, with the frightful bigotry of the schools, he
puts the whole Pagan world into hell-borders (with the exception of two
or three, whose salvation adds to the absurdity), mingles the hell of
Virgil with that of Tertullian and St. Dominic; sets Minos at the door
as judge; retains Charon in his old office of boatman over the Stygian
lake; puts fabulous people with real among the damned, Dido, and Cacus,
and Ephialtes, with Ezzelino and Pope Nicholas the Fifth; and associates
the Centaurs and the Furies with the agents of diabolical torture. It
has pleased him also to elevate Cato of Utica to the office of warder of
purgatory, though the censor's poor good wife, Marcia, is detained in
the regions below. By these and other far greater inconsistencies,
the whole place of punishment becomes a _reductio ad absurdum_, as
ridiculous as it is melancholy; so that one is astonished how so great a
man, and especially a man who thought himself so far advanced beyond his
age, and who possessed such powers of discerning the good and beautiful,
could endure to let his mind live in so foul and foolish a region for
any length of time, and there wreak and harden the unworthiest of his
passions. Genius, nevertheless, is so commensurate with absurdity
throughout the book, and there are even such sweet and balmy as well as
sublime pictures in it occasionally, nay often, that not only will
the poem ever be worthy of admiration, but when those increasing
purifications of Christianity which our blessed reformers began, shall
finally precipitate the whole dregs of the author into the mythology to
which they belong, the world will derive a pleasure from it to an amount
not to be conceived till the arrival of that day. Dante, meantime, with
an impartiality which has been admired by those who can approve the
assumption of a theological tyranny at the expense of common feeling
and decency, has put friends as well as foes into hell: tutors of his
childhood, kinsmen of those who treated him hospitably, even the father
of his beloved friend, Guido Cavalcante--the last for not believing in a
God: therein doing the worst thing possible in behalf of the belief, and
totally differing both with the pious heathen Plutarch, and the great
Christian philosopher Bacon, who were of opinion that a contumelious
belief is worse than none, and that it is far better and more pious to
believe in "no God at all," than in a God who would "eat his children
as soon as they were born." And Dante makes him do worse; for the whole
unbaptised infant world, Christian as well as Pagan, is in his Tartarus.
Milton has spoken of the "milder shades of Purgatory;" and truly they
possess great beauties. Even in a theological point of view they are
something like a bit of Christian refreshment after the horrors of the
_Inferno_. The first emerging from the hideous gulf to the sight of the
blue serenity of heaven, is painted in a manner inexpressibly charming.
So is the sea-shore with the coming of the angel; the valley, with the
angels in green; the repose at night on the rocks; and twenty other
pictures of gentleness and love. And yet, special and great has been the
escape of the Protestant world from this part of Roman Catholic belief;
for Purgatory is the heaviest stone that hangs about the neck of the
old and feeble in that communion. Hell is avoidable by repentance; but
Purgatory, what modest conscience shall escape? Mr. Cary, in a note on a
passage in which Dante recommends his readers to think on what follows
this expiatory state, rather than what is suffered there,[23] looks upon
the poet's injunction as an "unanswerable objection to the doctrine of
purgatory," it being difficult to conceive "how the best can meet death
without horror, if they believe it must be followed by immediate and
intense suffering." Luckily, assent is not belief; and mankind's
feelings are for the most part superior to their opinions; otherwise
the world would have been in a bad way indeed, and nature not been
vindicated of her children. But let us watch and be on our guard against
all resuscitations of superstition.
As to our Florentine's Heaven, it is full of beauties also, though
sometimes of a more questionable and pantomimical sort than is to be
found in either of the other books. I shall speak of some of them
presently; but the general impression of the place is, that it is no
heaven at all. He says it is, and talks much of its smiles and its
beatitude; but always excepting the poetry--especially the similes
brought from the more heavenly earth--we realise little but a
fantastical assemblage of doctors and doubtful characters, far more
angry and theological than celestial; giddy raptures of monks and
inquisitors dancing in circles, and saints denouncing popes and
Florentines; in short, a heaven libelling itself with invectives against
earth, and terminating in a great presumption. Many of the people put
there, a Calvinistic Dante would have consigned to the "other place;"
and some, if now living, would not be admitted into decent society. At
the beginning of one of the cantos, the poet congratulates himself,
with a complacent superiority, on his being in heaven and occupied with
celestial matters, while his poor fellow-creatures are wandering and
blundering on earth. But he had never got there! A divine--worthy of
that name--of the Church of England (Dr. Whichcote), has beautifully
said, that "heaven is first a temper, and then a place." According to
this truly celestial topography, the implacable Florentine had not
reached its outermost court. Again, his heavenly mistress, Beatrice,
besides being far too didactic to sustain the womanly part of her
character properly, alternates her smiles and her sarcasms in a way that
jars horribly against the occasional enchantment of her aspect. She does
not scruple to burst into taunts of the Florentines in the presence of
Jesus himself; and the spirit of his ancestor, Cacciaguida, in the very
bosom of Christian bliss, promises him revenge on his enemies! Is this
the kind of zeal that is to be exempt from objection in a man who
objected to all the world? or will it be thought a profaneness against
such profanity, to remind the reader of the philosopher in Swift, who
"while gazing on the stars, was betrayed by his lower parts into a
ditch!"
The reader's time need not be wasted with the allegorical and other
mystical significations given to the poem; still less on the question
whether Beatrice is theology, or a young lady, or both; and least of all
on the discovery of the ingenious Signor Rossetti, that Dante and all
the other great old Italian writers meant nothing, either by their
mistresses or their mythology, but attacks on the court of Rome. Suffice
it, that besides all other possible meanings, Dante himself has told us
that his poem has its obvious and literal meaning; that he means a spade
by a spade, purgatory by purgatory, and truly and unaffectedly to devote
his friends to the infernal regions whenever he does so. I confess I
think it is a great pity that Guido Cavalcante did not live to read the
poem, especially the passage about his father. The understanding of
Guido, who had not the admiration for Virgil that Dante had (very likely
for reasons that have been thought sound in modern times), was in all
probability as good as that of his friend in many respects, and perhaps
more so in one or two; and modern criticism might have been saved some
of its pains of objection by the poet's contemporary.
The author did not live to publish, in any formal manner, his
extraordinary poem, probably did not intend to do so, except under those
circumstances of political triumph which he was always looking for; but
as he shewed portions of it to his friends, it was no doubt talked of
to a certain extent, and must have exasperated such of his enemies as
considered him worth their hostility. No wonder they did all they could
to keep him out of Florence. What would they have said of him, could
they have written a counter poem? What would even his friends have said
of him? for we see in what manner he has treated even those; and yet how
could he possibly know, with respect either to friends or enemies, what
passed between them and their consciences? or who was it that gave
him his right to generate the boasted distinction between an author's
feelings as a man and his assumed office as a theologian, and parade
the latter at the former's expense? His own spleen, hatred, and avowed
sentiments of vengeance, are manifest throughout the poem; and there is
this, indeed, to be said for the moral and religious inconsistencies
both of the man and his verse, that in those violent times the spirit
of Christian charity, and even the sentiment of personal shame, were so
little understood, that the author in one part of it is made to blush by
a friend for not having avenged him; and it is said to have been thought
a compliment to put a lady herself into hell, that she might be talked
of, provided it was for something not odious. An admirer of this
infernal kind of celebrity, even in later times, declared that he would
have given a sum of money (I forget to what amount) if Dante had but
done as much for one of his ancestors. It has been argued, that in all
the parties concerned in these curious ethics there is a generous love
of distinction, and a strong craving after life, action, and sympathy
of some kind or other. Granted; there are all sorts of half-good,
half-barbarous feelings in Dante's poem. Let justice be done to the
good half; but do not let us take the ferocity for wisdom and piety; or
pretend, in the complacency of our own freedom from superstition, to see
no danger of harm to the less fortunate among our fellow-creatures in
the support it receives from a man of genius. Bedlams have been filled
with such horrors; thousands, nay millions of feeble minds are suffering
by them or from them, at this minute, all over the world. Dante's best
critic, Foscolo, has said much of the heroical nature of the age in
which the poet lived; but he adds, that its mixture of knowledge and
absurdity is almost inexplicable. The truth is, that like everything
else which appears harsh and unaccountable in nature, it was an excess
of the materials for good, working in an over-active and inexperienced
manner; but knowing this, we are bound, for the sake of the good, not
to retard its improvement by ignoring existing impieties, or blind
ourselves to the perpetuating tendencies of the bigotries of great men.
Oh! had the first indoctrinators of Christian feeling, while enlisting
the "divine Plato" into the service of diviner charity, only kept the
latter just enough in mind to discern the beautiful difference between
the philosopher's unmalignant and improvable evil, and their own
malignant and eternal one, what a world of folly and misery they might
have saved us! But as the evil has happened, let us hope that even this
form of it has had its uses. If Dante thought it salutary to the world
to maintain a system of religious terror, the same charity which can
hope that it may once have been so, has taught us how to commence a
better. But did he, after all, or did he not, think it salutary? Did
he think so, believing the creed himself? or did he think it from an
unwilling sense of its necessity? Or, lastly, did he write only as a
mythologist, and care for nothing but the exercise of his spleen and
genius? If he had no other object than that, his conscientiousness would
be reduced to a low pitch indeed. Foscolo is of opinion he was not only
in earnest, but that he was very near taking himself for an apostle, and
would have done so had his prophecies succeeded, perhaps with success to
the pretension.[24] Thank heaven, his "Hell" has not embittered the mild
reading-desks of the Church of England.
If King George the Third himself, with all his arbitrary notions, and
willing religious acquiescence, could not endure the creed of St.
Athanasius with its damnatory enjoinments of the impossible, what would
have been said to the inscription over Dante's hell-gate, or the
account of Ugolino eating an archbishop, in the gentle chapels of Queen
Victoria? May those chapels have every beauty in them, and every air of
heaven, that painting and music can bestow--divine gifts, not unworthy
to be set before their Divine Bestower; but far from them be kept the
foul fiends of inhumanity and superstition!
It is certainly impossible to get at a thorough knowledge of the
opinions of Dante even in theology; and his morals, if judged according
to the received standard, are not seldom puzzling. He rarely thinks as
the popes do; sometimes not as the Church does: he is lax, for instance,
on the subject of absolution by the priest at death.[25] All you can be
sure of is, the predominance of his will, the most wonderful poetry, and
the notions he entertained of the degrees of vice and virtue. Towards
the errors of love he is inclined to be so lenient (some think because
he had indulged in them himself), that it is pretty clear he would not
have put Paulo and Francesca into hell, if their story had not been
too recent, and their death too sudden, to allow him to assume their
repentance in the teeth of the evidence required. He avails himself of
orthodox license to put "the harlot Rahab" into heaven ("cette bonne
fille de Jericho," as Ginguene calls her); nay, he puts her into the
planet Venus, as if to compliment her on her profession; and one of her
companions there is a fair Ghibelline, sister of the tyrant Ezzelino, a
lady famous for her gallantries, of whom the poet good-naturedly says,
that she "was overcome by her star"--to wit, the said planet Venus; and
yet he makes her the organ of the most unfeminine triumphs over the
Guelphs. But both these ladies, it is to be understood, repented--for
they had time for repentance; their good fortune saved them. Poor
murdered Francesca had no time to repent; therefore her mischance was
her damnation! Such are the compliments theology pays to the Creator.
In fact, nothing is really punished in Dante's Catholic hell but
impenitence, deliberate or accidental. No delay of repentance, however
dangerous, hinders the most hard-hearted villain from reaching his
heaven. The best man goes to hell for ever, if he does not think he has
sinned as Dante thinks; the worst is beatified, if he agrees with him:
the only thing which every body is sure of, is some dreadful duration
of agony in purgatory--the great horror of Catholic death beds.
Protestantism may well hug itself on having escaped it. O Luther!
vast was the good you did us. O gentle Church of England! let nothing
persuade you that it is better to preach frightful and foolish ideas of
God from your pulpits, than loving-kindness to all men, and peace above
all things.