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 DANTE 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS
 
 DANTE 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 R. W. CHURCH 
 
 BOHBT1HK DEAN OK ST. PAUL'* 
 
 Hon&on 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 1893 
 
 All rights rtttrvtd
 
 First Edition 1888 
 Rtfrinttd 1889, 1891, 1893
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 DANTE . ... 1 
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH . 193 
 
 'SORDELLO* . 221
 
 DANTE 1 
 
 [JAN. 1850] 
 
 THE Divina Commedia is one of the landmarks of 
 history. More than a magnificent poem, more than 
 the beginning of a language and the opening of a 
 national literature, more than the inspirer of art, and 
 
 1 Dante's Divine Comedy, the Inferno ; a literal Prose Trans- 
 lation, with the Text of the Original. By J. A. CARLYLE, M.D., 
 London : 1849. I have never quite forgiven myself for not 
 having said more of the unpretending but honest and most 
 useful volume which stood at the head of this essay when it 
 first appeared as an article. It was placed there, according to 
 what was then a custom of article writers, as a peg to hang 
 remarks upon which might or might not be criticisms of the 
 particular book so noticed. It did not offer itself specially to 
 my use, and my attention was busy with my own work. But 
 this was no excuse for availing myself of a good book, and not 
 giving it the notice which it deserved. To an English student 
 beginning Dante, and wishing to study him in a scholarly 
 manner, it is really more useful than a verse translation can be ; 
 and I have always greatly regretted that the plan of translating 
 the whole work was dropped for want of the appreciation which 
 . . the first instalment ought to have had. (1878.) 
 
 & B
 
 2 DANTE 
 
 the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare 
 and solemn monuments of the mind's power, which 
 measure and test what it can reach to, which rise 
 up ineffaceably and for ever as time goes on, mark- 
 ing out its advance by grander divisions than its 
 centuries, and adopted as epochs by the consent of 
 all who come after. It stands with the Iliad and 
 Shakespeare's Plays, with the writings of Aristotle 
 and Plato, with the Novum Organon and the Principia, 
 with Justinian's Code, with the Parthenon and St. 
 Peter's. It is the first Christian poem ; and it opens 
 European literature, as the Iliad did that of Greece 
 and Rome. And, like the Iliad, it has never become 
 out of date ; it accompanies in undiminished freshness 
 the literature which it began. 
 
 We approach the history of such works, in which 
 genius seems to have pushed its achievements to a 
 new limit, with a kind of awe. The beginnings of all 
 things, their bursting out from nothing, and gradual 
 evolution into substance and shape, cast on the mind 
 a solemn influence. They come too near the fount 
 of being to be followed up without our feeling the 
 shadows which surround it. We cannot but fear, 
 cannot but feel ourselves cut off from this visible and 
 familiar world as we enter into the cloud. And as 
 with the processes of nature, so it is with those off- 
 springs of man's mind, by which he has added per
 
 DANTE 3 
 
 manently one more great feature to the world, and 
 created a new power which is to act on mankind to 
 the end The mystery of the inventive and creative 
 faculty, the subtle and incalculable combinations by 
 which it was led to its work, and carried through it, 
 are out of the reach of investigating thought. Often 
 the idea recurs of the precariousness of the result ; 
 by how little the world might have lost one of its 
 ornaments by one sharp pang, or one chance meet- 
 ing, or any other among the countless accidents 
 among which man runs his course. And then the 
 solemn recollection supervenes, that powers were 
 formed, and life preserved, and circumstances ar- 
 ranged, and actions controlled, that thus it should be : 
 and the work which man has brooded over, and at 
 last created, is the foster-child too of that " Wisdom 
 which reaches from end to end, strongly and sweetly 
 disposing all things." 
 
 It does not abate these feelings that we can follow 
 in some cases and to a certain extent, the progress of 
 a work. Indeed, the sight of the particular accidents 
 among which it was developed which belong per- 
 haps to a heterogeneous and widely discordant order 
 of things, which are out of proportion and out of 
 harmony with it, which do not explain it, which have, 
 as it may seem to us, no natural right to be connected 
 with it, to bear on its character, or contribute to its
 
 4 DANTE 
 
 accomplishment, to which we feel, as it were, ashamed 
 to owe what we can least spare, yet on which its 
 forming mind and purpose were dependent, and with 
 which they had to conspire affects the imagination 
 even more than cases where we see nothing. We are 
 tempted less to musing and wonder by the Iliad, a 
 work without a history, cut off from its past, the sole 
 relic and vestige of its age, unexplained in its origin 
 and perfection, than by the Divina Commedia, destined 
 for the highest ends and most universal sympathy, 
 yet the reflection of a personal history, and issuing 
 seemingly from its chance incidents. 
 
 The Divina Commedia is singular among the great 
 works with which it ranks, for its strong stamp of 
 personal character and history. In general we asso- 
 ciate little more than the name not the life of a 
 great poet with his works ; personal interest belongs 
 more usually to greatness in ita active than its crea- 
 tive forms. But the whole idea and purpose of the 
 Commedia, as well as its filling up and colouring, are 
 determined by Dante's peculiar history. The loftiest, 
 perhaps, in its aim and flight of all poems, it is also 
 the most individual ; the writer's own life is chronicled 
 in it, as well as the issues and upshot of all things. 
 It is at once the mirror to all time of the sins and 
 perfections of men, of the judgments and grace of 
 God, and the record, often the only one, of the trans-
 
 DANTE 5 
 
 lent names, and local factions, and obscure ambitions, 
 and forgotten crimes, of the poet's own day ; and in 
 that awful company to which he leads us, in the most 
 unearthly of his scenes, we never lose sight of himself. 
 And when this peculiarity sends us to history, it 
 seems as if the poem which was to hold such a place 
 in Christian literature hung upon and grew out of 
 chance events, rather than the deliberate design of 
 its author. History indeed here, as generally, is but 
 a feeble exponent of the course of growth in a great 
 mind and great ideas. It shows us early a bent and 
 purpose the man conscious of power and intending 
 to use it and then the accidents among which he 
 worked : but how that current of purpose threaded 
 its way among them, how it was thrown back, de- 
 flected, deepened, by them, we cannot learn from 
 history. It presents but a broken and mysterious 
 picture. A boy of quick and enthusiastic temper 
 grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady 
 of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her 
 still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a Saint in 
 Paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, 
 a strange and perplexing work of fiction quaint and 
 subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit ; but, on the 
 other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep 
 feeling. It is a first essay ; he closes it abruptly as 
 if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution
 
 6 DANTE 
 
 of raising at a future day a worthy monument to the 
 memory of her whom he has lost. It is the promise 
 and purpose of a great work. But a prosaic change 
 seems to come over this half-ideal character. The 
 lover becomes the student the student of the thir- 
 teenth century struggling painfully against difficul- 
 ties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight 
 and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active -minded 
 and sanguine, but omnivorous, overflowing with dialec- 
 tical forms, loose in premiss and ostentatiously rigid 
 in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of half- 
 awakened taste, and the mannerisms of the Proven- 
 cals. Boethius and Cicero, and the mass of mixed 
 learning within his reach, are accepted as the conso- 
 lation of his human griefs; he is filled with the 
 passion of universal knowledge, and the desire to 
 communicate it. Philosophy has become the lady of 
 his soul to write allegorical poems in her honour, 
 and to comment on them with all the apparatus of 
 his learning in prose, his mode of celebrating her. 
 Further, he marries ; it is said, not happily. The 
 antiquaries, too, have disturbed romance by discover- 
 ing that Beatrice also was married some years before 
 her death. He appears, as time goes on, as a burgher 
 of Florence, the father of a family, a politician, an 
 envoy, a magistrate, a partisan, taking his full share 
 in the quarrels of the day. At length we see him,
 
 DANTE 7 
 
 at once an exile, and the poet of the Commedia. 
 Beatrice reappears shadowy, melting at times into 
 symbol and figure but far too living and real, 
 addressed with too intense and natural feeling, to 
 be the mere personification of anything. The lady 
 of the philosophical Canzoni has vanished. The 
 student's dream has been broken, as the boy's had 
 been ; and the earnestness of the man, enlightened 
 by sorrow, overleaping the student's formalities and 
 abstractions, reverted in sympathy to the earnestness 
 of the boy, and brooded once more on that Saint in 
 Paradise, whose presence and memory had once been 
 so soothing, and who now seemed a real link between 
 him and that stable country, " where the angels are 
 in peace." Round her image, the reflection of purity, 
 and truth, and forbearing love, was grouped that con- 
 fused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and suc- 
 cess, which the poet saw round him ; round her 
 image it arranged itself in awful order and that 
 image, not a metaphysical abstraction, but the living 
 memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the 
 softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice 
 Portinari no figment of imagination, but God's 
 creature and servant A childish love, dissipated by 
 study and business, and revived in memory by heavy 
 sorrow a boyish resolution, made in a moment of 
 feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous to
 
 8 DANTE 
 
 say in Dante's case, laid aside, for apparently more 
 manly studies, gave the idea and suggested the form 
 of the " Sacred poem of earth and heaven." 
 
 And the occasion of this startling unfolding of the 
 poetic gift, of this passage of a soft and dreamy boy, 
 into the keenest, boldest, sternest of poets, the free 
 and mighty leader of European song, was, what is 
 not ordinarily held to be a source of poetical inspira- 
 tion, the political life. The boy had sensibility, 
 high aspirations, and a versatile and passionate nature ; 
 the student added to this energy, various learning, 
 gifts of language, and noble ideas on the capacities 
 and ends of man. But it was the factions of Florence 
 which made Dante a great poet. But for them, he 
 might have been a modern critic and essayist born 
 before his time, and have held a high place among 
 the writers of fugitive verses ; in Italy, a graceful 
 but trifling and idle tribe, often casting a deep and 
 beautiful thought into a mould of expressive diction, 
 but oftener toying with a foolish and glittering con- 
 ceit, and whose languid genius was exhausted by a 
 sonnet. He might have thrown into the shade the 
 Guidos and Cinos of his day, to be eclipsed by 
 Petrarch. But he learned in the bitter feuds of Italy 
 not to trifle ; they opened to his view, and he had an 
 eye to see, the true springs and abysses of this mortal 
 life motives and passions stronger than lovers'
 
 DANTE 9 
 
 sentiments, evils beyond the consolations of Boethius 
 and Cicero ; and from that fiery trial which without 
 searing his heart, annealed his strength and purpose, 
 he drew that great gift and power by which he stands 
 pre-eminent even among his high compeers, the gift 
 of being real. And the idea of the Commedia took 
 shape, and expanded into its endless forms of terror 
 and beauty, not under the roof-tree of the literary 
 citizen, but when the exile had been driven out to 
 the highways of the world, to study nature on the 
 sea or by the river or on the mountain track, and to 
 study men in the courts of Verona and Ravenna, 
 and in the schools of Bologna and Paris perhaps 
 of Oxford. 
 
 The connexion of these feuds with Dante's poem 
 has given to the middle age history of Italy an interest 
 of which it is not undeserving in itself, full as it is of 
 curious exhibitions of character and contrivance, but 
 to which politically it cannot lay claim, amid the 
 social phenomena, so far grander in scale and purpose 
 and more felicitous in issue, of the other western 
 nations. It is remarkable for keeping up an antique 
 phase, which, in spite of modern arrangements, it has 
 not yet lost. It is a history of cities. In ancient 
 history all that is most memorable and instructive 
 gathers round cities; civilisation and empire were 
 concentrated within walls ; and it baffled the ancient
 
 10 DANTE 
 
 mind to conceive how power should be possessed arid 
 wielded, by numbers larger than might be collected 
 in a single market-place. The Roman Empire indeed 
 aimed at being one in its administration and law; 
 but it was not a nation, nor were its provinces nations. 
 Yet everywhere but in Italy it prepared them for 
 becoming nations. And while everywhere else parts 
 were uniting and union was becoming organisation 
 and neither geographical remoteness, nor unwieldiness 
 of numbers, nor local interests and differences, were 
 untractable obstacles to that spirit of fusion which 
 was at once the ambition of the few and the instinct 
 of the many ; and cities, even where most powerful, 
 had become the centres of the attracting and joining 
 forces, knots in the political network while this was 
 going on more or less happily throughout the rest of 
 Europe, in Italy the ancient classic idea lingered in 
 its simplicity, its narrowness and jealousy, wherever 
 there was any political activity. The history of 
 Southern Italy indeed is mainly a foreign one, the 
 history of modern Rome merges in that of the Papacy ; 
 but Northern Italy has a history of its own, and that 
 is a history of separate and independent cities points 
 of reciprocal and indestructible repulsion, and within, 
 theatres of action where the blind tendencies and 
 traditions of classes and parties weighed little on the 
 freedom of individual character, and citizens could
 
 DANTE 11 
 
 watch and measure and study one another with the 
 minuteness of private life. 
 
 Two cities were the centres of ancient history in 
 its most interesting time. And two cities of modern 
 Italy represent, with entirely undesigned but curiously 
 exact coincidence, the parts of Athens and Eome. 
 Venice, superficially so unlike, is yet in many of its 
 accidental features, and still more in its spirit, the 
 counterpart of Rome, in its obscure and mixed origin, 
 in its steady growth, in its quick sense of order and 
 early settlement of its polity, in its grand and serious 
 public spirit, in its subordination of the individual to 
 the family, and the family to the state, in its combina- 
 tion of remote dominion with the liberty of a solitary 
 and sovereign city. And though the associations and 
 the scale of the two were so different though Rome 
 had its hills and its legions, and Venice its lagunes 
 and galleys the long empire of Venice, the heir of 
 Carthage and predecessor of England on the seas, the 
 great aristocratic republic of a thousand years, is the 
 only empire that has yet matched Rome in length and 
 steadiness of tenure. Brennus and Hannibal were 
 not resisted with greater constancy than Doria and 
 Louis XII. ; and that great aristocracy, long so proud, 
 so high-spirited, so intelligent, so practical, who com- 
 bined the enterprise and wealth of merchants, the self- 
 devotion of soldiers and gravity of senators, with the
 
 12 DANTE 
 
 uniformity and obedience of a religious order, may 
 compare without shame its Giustiniani, and Zenos, 
 and Morosini, with Roman Fabii and Claudii. And 
 Rome could not be more contrasted with Athens than 
 Venice with Italian and contemporary Florence 
 stability with fitfulness, independence impregnable 
 and secure, with a short-lived and troubled liberty, 
 empire meditated and achieved, with a course of 
 barren intrigues and quarrels. Florence, gay, capri- 
 cious, turbulent, the city of party, the head and busy 
 patroness of democracy in the cities round her 
 Florence, where popular government was inaugurated 
 with its utmost exclusiveness and most pompous 
 ceremonial ; waging her little summer wars against 
 Ghibelline tyrants, revolted democracies, and her own 
 exiles ; and further, so rich in intellectual gifts, in 
 variety of individual character, in poets, artists, wits, 
 historians Florence in its brilliant days recalled the 
 image of ancient Athens, and did not depart from its 
 prototype in the beauty of its natural site, in its noble 
 public buildings, in the size and nature of its territory. 
 And the course of its history is similar and the result 
 of similar causes a traditional spirit of freedom, with 
 its accesses of fitful energy, its periods of grand 
 display and moments of glorious achievement, but 
 producing nothing politically great or durable, and 
 sinking at length into a resigned servitude. It had
 
 DANTE 13 
 
 its Peisistratidae more successful than those of Athens ; 
 it had, too, its Harmodius and Aristogeiton ; it had 
 its great orator of liberty, as potent and as unfortunate 
 as the antagonist of Philip. And finally, like Athens, 
 it became content with the remembrance of its former 
 glory, with being the fashionable and acknowledged 
 seat of refinement and taste, with being a favoured 
 dependency on the modern heir of the Caesars. But 
 if to Venice belongs a grander public history, Floren- 
 tine names and works, like Athenian, will be living 
 among men, when the Brenta shall have been left 
 unchecked to turn the lagunes into ploughland, and 
 when Home herself may no longer be the seat of the 
 popes. 
 
 The year of Dante's birth was a memorable one 
 in the annals of Florence, of Italy, and of Chris- 
 tendom. 1 The year 1265 was the year of that great 
 victory of Benevento, where Charles of Anjou over- 
 threw Manfred of Naples, and destroyed at one blow 
 the power of the house of Swabia. From that time 
 till the time of Charles V., the emperors had no 
 footing in Italy. Further, that victory set up the 
 French influence in Italy, which, transient in itself, 
 produced such strange and momentous consequences, 
 by the intimate connexion to which it led between 
 
 1 May 1265. (Pelli.) Battle of Benevento: Feb. 26, 126|. 
 The Florentine year began March 25.
 
 14 DANTE 
 
 the French kings and the popes. The protection of 
 France was dearly bought by the captivity of Avignon, 
 the great western schism, and the consequent secu- 
 larisation of the Papacy, which lasted on uninterrupted 
 till the Council of Trent. Nearly three centuries of 
 degradation and scandal, unrelieved by one heroic 
 effort among the successors of Gregory VII., connected 
 the Keformation with the triumph of Charles and the 
 Pope at Be ne veil to. Finally, by it the Guelf party 
 was restored for good in Florence ; the Guelf 
 democracy, which had been trampled down by the 
 Uberti and Manfred's chivalry at Monteaperti, once 
 more raised its head ; and fortune, which had long 
 wavered between the rival lilies, finally turned against 
 the white one, till the name of Ghibelline became a 
 proscribed one in Florence, as Jacobite was once in 
 Scotland, or Papist in England, or Royalist in France. 
 The names of Guelf and Ghibelline were the 
 inheritance of a contest which, in its original meaning, 
 had been long over. The old struggle between the 
 priesthood and the empire was still kept up tradi- 
 tionally, but its ideas and interests were changed: 
 they were still great and important ones, but not 
 those of Gregory VII. It had passed over from the 
 mixed region of the spiritual and temporal into the 
 purely political. The cause of the popes was that of 
 the independence of Italy the freedom and alliance
 
 DANTE 16 
 
 of the great cities of the north, and the dependence 
 of the centre and south on the Roman See. To keep 
 the Emperor out of Italy to create a barrier of 
 powerful cities against him south of the Alps to 
 form behind themselves a compact territory, rich, 
 removed from the first burst of invasion, and main- 
 taining a strong body of interested feudatories, had 
 now become the great object of the popes. It may 
 have been a wise policy on their part, for the main- 
 tenance of their spiritual influence, to attempt to 
 connect their own independence with the political 
 freedom of the Italian communities; but certain it 
 is that the ideas and the characters which gave a 
 religious interest and grandeur to the earlier part of 
 the contest, appear but sparingly, if at all, in its later 
 forms. 
 
 The two parties did not care to keep in view 
 principles which their chiefs had lost sight of. The 
 Emperor and the Pope were both real powers, able 
 to protect and assist ; . and they divided between 
 them those who required protection and assistance. 
 Geographical position, the rivalry of neighbourhood, 
 family tradition, private feuds, and above all private 
 interest, were the main causes which assigned cities, 
 families, and individuals to the Ghibelline or Guelf 
 party. One party called themselves the Emperor's 
 liegemen, and their watchward was authority and
 
 16 DANTE 
 
 law; the other side were the liegemen of Holy 
 Church, and their cry was liberty ; and the distinc- 
 tion as a broad one is true. But a democracy would 
 become Ghibelline, without scruple, if its neighbour 
 town was Guelf ; and among the Guelf liegemen of 
 the Church and liberty, the pride of blood and love 
 of power were not a whit inferior to that of their 
 opponents. Yet, though the original principle of 
 the contest was lost, and the political distinctions 
 of parties were often interfered with by interest or 
 accident, it is not impossible to trace in the two 
 factions differences of temper, of moral and political 
 inclinations, which though visible only on a large 
 scale and in the mass, were quite sufficient to give 
 meaning and reality to their mutual opposition. 
 These differences had come down, greatly altered of 
 course, from the quarrel in which the parties took 
 their rise. The Ghibellines as a body reflected the 
 worldliness, the licence, the irreligion, the reckless 
 selfishness, the daring insolence, and at the same 
 time the gaiety and pomp, the princely magnificence 
 and generosity and largeness of mind of the house of 
 Swabia ; they were the men of the court and camp, 
 imperious and haughty from ancient lineage or the 
 Imperial cause, yet not wanting in the frankness and 
 courtesy of nobility; careless of public opinion and 
 public rights, but not dead to the grandeur of public
 
 DANTE 17 
 
 objects and public services. Among them were found, 
 or to them inclined, all who, whether from a base or 
 a lofty ambition, desired to place their will above 
 law l the lord of the feudal castle, the robber-knight 
 of the Apennine pass, the magnificent but terrible 
 tyrants of the cities, the pride and shame of Italy, 
 the Visconti and Scaligers. That renowned Ghibel- 
 line chief, whom the poet finds in the fiery sepulchres 
 of the unbelievers with the great Ghibelline emperor 
 and the princely Ghibelline cardinal the disdainful 
 and bitter but lofty spirit of Farinata degli Uberti, 
 the conqueror, and then singly and at his own risk, 
 the saviour of his country which had wronged him, 
 represents the good as well as the bad side of his 
 party 
 
 The Guelfs, on the other hand, were the party of 
 the middle classes ; they rose out of and held to the 
 people ; they were strong by their compactness, their 
 organisation in cities, their commercial relations and 
 interests, their command of money. Further, they 
 
 1 "Maghinardo da Susinana (il Demonic, Purg. 14) fu uno 
 grande e savio tiranno . . . gran castellano, e con molti fedeli : 
 savio fu di guerra e beue avventuroso in piu battaglie, e al suo 
 tempo fece gran cose. Ghibellino era di sua nazione e in sue 
 opere ; ma co' Fiorentini era Guelfo e nirnico di tutti i loro 
 nimici, o Guelfi o Ghibellini che fossono." G. Vill. vii. 149. 
 A Ghibelline by birth and disposition j yet, from circumstances, 
 a close ally of the Guelfs of Florence. 
 
 C
 
 18 DANTE 
 
 were professedly the party of strictness and religion, 
 a profession which fettered them as little as their 
 opponents were fettered by the respect they claimed 
 for imperial law. But though by personal unscrupu- 
 lousness and selfishness, and in instances of public 
 vengeance, they sinned as deeply as the Ghibellines, 
 they stood far more committed as a party to a public 
 meaning and purpose to improvement in law and 
 the condition of the poor, to a protest against the 
 insolence of the strong, to the encouragement of 
 industry. The genuine Guelf spirit was austere, 
 frugal, independent, earnest, religious, fond of its 
 home and Church, and of those celebrations which 
 bound together , Church and home ; but withal very 
 proud, very intolerant ; in its higher form intolerant 
 of evil, but intolerant always to whatever displeased 
 it Yet there was a grave and noble manliness about 
 it which long kept it alive in Florence. It had not 
 as yet turned itself against the practical corruptions 
 of the Church, which was its ally ; but this also it 
 was to do, when the popes had forsaken the cause of 
 liberty, and leagued themselves with the brilliant 
 tyranny of the Medici. Then Savonarola invoked, 
 and not in vain, the stern old Guelf spirit of resist- 
 ance, of domestic purity and severity, and of domestic 
 religion, against unbelief and licentiousness even in 
 the Church ; and the Guelf " Piagnoni " presented, in
 
 DANTE 19 
 
 a more simple and generous shape, a resemblance to 
 our own Puritans, as the Ghibellines often recall the 
 coarser and worse features of our own Cavaliers. 
 
 In Florence, these distinctions had become mere 
 nominal ones, confined to the great families who 
 carried on their private feuds under the old party 
 names, when Frederick II. once more gave them 
 their meaning. " Although the accursed Guelf and 
 Ghibelline factions lasted amongst the nobles of 
 Florence, and they often waged war among them- 
 selves out of private grudges, and took sides for the 
 said factions, and held one with another, and those 
 who called themselves Guelf s desired the establish- 
 ment of the Pope and Holy Church, and those who 
 called themselves Ghibellines favoured the Emperor 
 and his adherents, yet withal the people and common- 
 alty of Florence maintained itself in unity, to the 
 wellbeing and honour and establishment of the 
 commonwealth." l But the appearance on the scene 
 of an emperor of such talent and bold designs revived 
 the languid contest, and gave to party a cause, and 
 to individual passions and ambition an impulse and 
 pretext The division between Guelf and Ghibelline 
 again became serious, involved all Florence, armed 
 house against house, and neighbourhood against 
 neighbourhood, issued in merciless and vindictive 
 1 G. VUlani, vi 33.
 
 20 DANTE 
 
 warfare, grew on into a hopeless and deadly breach, 
 and finally lost to Florence, without remedy or repair, 
 half her noble houses and the love of the greatest of 
 her sons. The old badge of their common country 
 became to the two factions the sign of their impla- 
 cable hatred ; the white lily of Florence, borne by the 
 Ghibellines, was turned to red by the Guelfs, and 
 the flower of two colours marked a civil strife as 
 cruel and as fatal, if on a smaller scale, as that of 
 the English roses. 1 
 
 It was waged with the peculiar characteristics of 
 Italian civil war. There the city itself was the scene 
 of battle. A thirteenth-century city in Italy bore 
 on its face the evidence that it was built and arranged 
 for such emergencies. Its crowded and narrow streets 
 were a collection of rival castles, whose tall towers, 
 rising thick and close over its roofs, or hanging 
 perilously over its close courts, attested the emulous 
 pride and the insecurity of Italian civic life. There, 
 within a separate precinct, flanked and faced by 
 jealous friends or deadly enemies, were clustered to- 
 gether the dwellings of the various members of each 
 great house their common home and the monument 
 of their magnificence and pride, and capable of being, 
 as was so often necessary, their common refuge. 
 In these fortresses of the leading families, scattered 
 1 G. Villani, vi. 33, 43 ; Farad. 19.
 
 DANTE 21 
 
 about the city, were the various points of onset and 
 recovery in civic battle ; in the streets barricades 
 were raised, mangonels and crossbows were plied 
 from the towers, a series of separate combats raged 
 through the city, till chance at length connected the 
 attacks of one side, or some panic paralysed the 
 resistance of the other, or a conflagration interposed 
 itself between the combatants, burning out at once 
 Guelf and Ghibelline, and laying half Florence in 
 ashes. Each party had their turn of victory ; each, 
 when vanquished, went into exile, and carried on 
 the war outside the walls ; each had their opportunity 
 of remodelling the orders and framework of govern- 
 ment, and each did so relentlessly at the cost of their 
 opponents. They excluded classes, they proscribed 
 families, they confiscated property, they sacked and 
 burned warehouses, they levelled the palaces, and 
 outraged the pride of their antagonists. To destroy 
 was not enough, without adding to it the keenest 
 and newest refinement of insult. Two buildings in 
 Florence were peculiarly dear among their "can 
 luoghi " to the popular feeling and the Guelf party : 
 the Baptistery of St. John, " il mio bel San Giovanni," 
 " to which all the good people resorted on Sundays," l 
 where they had all received baptism, where they 
 had been married, where families were solemnly 
 1 G. Villani, vL 33, iv. 10 ; Inf. 19 ; Farad. 25.
 
 22 DANTE 
 
 reconciled ; and a tall and beautiful tower close by 
 it, called the "Torre del Guardamorto," where the 
 bodies of the "good people," who of old were 
 all buried at San Giovanni, rested on their way to 
 the grave. The victorious Ghibellines, when they 
 levelled the Guelf towers, overthrew this one, and 
 endeavoured to make it crush in its fall the sacred 
 church, " which," says the old chronicler, " was pre- 
 vented by a miracle." The Guelfs, when their day 
 came, built the walls of Florence with the stones of 
 Ghibelline palaces. 1 One great family stands out 
 pre-eminent in this fierce conflict as the victim and 
 monument of party war. The head of the Ghibellines 
 was the proud and powerful house of the Uberti, 
 who shared with another great Ghibelline family, 
 the Pazzi, the valley of the upper Arno. They 
 lighted up the war in the Emperor's cause. They 
 supported its weight and guided it. In time of 
 peace they were foremost and unrestrained in defiance 
 of law and in scorn of the people in war, the 
 people's fiercest and most active enemies. Heavy 
 sufferers, in their property, and by the sword 
 and axe, yet untamed and incorrigible, they led 
 the van in that battle, so long remembered to 
 their cost by the Guelfs, the battle of Monteaperti 
 (1260) 
 
 1 G. Villani, vi. 39, 65.
 
 DANTE 23 
 
 Lo strazio, e '1 gran scempio 
 
 Che fece 1' Arbia colorata in rossa. Inf. 10. 1 
 
 That the head of their house, Farinata, saved 
 Florence from the vengeance of his meaner associates, 
 was not enough to atone for the unpardonable wrongs 
 which they had done to the Guelfs and the demo- 
 cracy. When the red lily of the Guelfs finally 
 supplanted the white one as the arms of Florence, 
 and the badge of Guelf triumph, they were pro- 
 scribed for ever, like the Peisistratidae and the 
 Tarquins. In every amnesty their names were 
 excepted. The site on which their houses had stood 
 was never again to be built upon, and remains the 
 Great Square of Florence; the architect of the 
 Palace of the People was obliged to sacrifice its 
 symmetry, and to place it awry, that its walls might 
 not encroach on the accursed ground. 2 " They had 
 been," says a writer, contemporary with Dante, 
 speaking of the time when he also became an exile ; 
 " they had been for more than forty years outlaws 
 from their country, nor ever found mercy nor pity, 
 remaining always abroad in great state, nor ever 
 abased their honour, seeing that they ever abode 
 
 1 The slaughter and great havoc, I replied, 
 
 That coloured Arbia's flood with crimson stain. 
 * G. Villani, vi. 33, viii. 26 ; Vasari, Arnol/o di Lapo, i. 255 
 (Fir. 1846).
 
 24 DANTE 
 
 with kings and lords, and to great things applied 
 themselves." 1 They were loved as they were hated. 
 When, under the protection of a cardinal, one of them 
 visited the city, and the chequered blue and gold 
 blazon of their house was, after an interval of half a 
 century, again seen in the streets of Florence ; " many 
 ancient Ghibelline men and women pressed to kiss the 
 arms," 2 and even the common people did him honour. 
 
 But the fortunes of Florentine factions depended 
 on other causes than merely the address or vigour of 
 their leaders. From the year of Dante's birth and 
 Charles's victory, Florence, as far as we shall have to 
 do with it, became irrevocably Guelf. Not that the 
 whole commonalty of Florence formally called itself 
 Guelf, or that the Guelf party was coextensive with 
 it; but the city was controlled by Guelf councils, 
 devoted to the objects of the great Guelf party, and 
 received in return the support of that party in 
 curbing the pride of the nobles and maintaining 
 democratic forms. The Guelf party of Florence, 
 though it was the life and soul of the republic, and 
 irresistible in its disposal of the influence and arms 
 of Florence, and though it embraced a large number 
 of the most powerful families, is always spoken of as 
 something distinct from, and external to, the govern- 
 ing powers, and the whole body of the people. It 
 
 1 Ditto Compagni, p. 88. * Ibid. p. 107.
 
 DANTE 25 
 
 was a body with a separate and self-constituted 
 existence; in the state and allied to it, but an 
 independent element, holding on to a large and 
 comprehensive union without the state. Its organi- 
 sation in Florence is one of the most curious among the 
 many curious combinations which meet us in Italian 
 history. After the final expulsion of the Ghibellines 
 the Guelf party took form as an institution, with 
 definite powers, and a local existenca It appears 
 with as distinct a shape as the Jacobin Club or the 
 Orange Lodges, side by side with the government. 
 It was a corporate body with a common seal, common 
 property, not only in funds but lands officers, 
 archives, a common palace, 1 a great council, a 
 secret committee, and last of all, a public accuser of 
 the Ghibellines ; of the confiscated Ghibelline estates 
 one-third went to the republic, another third to 
 compensate individual Guelfs, the rest was assigned 
 to the Guelf party. 2 A pope (Clement IV., 1265-68) 
 had granted them his own arms ; 3 and their device, 
 a red eagle clutching a serpent, may be yet seen, 
 with the red lily, and the party-coloured banner of 
 the commonalty, on the battlements of the Palazzo 
 Vecchio. 
 
 But the expulsion of the Ghibellines did but little 
 
 1 Giotto painted in it : Vauari, Vtt. di Giotto, p. 814. 
 G. Villani, viL 2, 17. Ibid. viL 2.
 
 26 DANTE 
 
 to restore peace. The great Guelf families, as old 
 as many of the Ghibellines, had as little reverence 
 as they for law or civic rights. Below these, the 
 acknowledged nobility of Florence, were the leading 
 families of the " people," houses, created by successful 
 industry or commerce, and pushing up into that 
 privileged order, which, however ignored and even 
 discredited by the laws, was fully recognised by feel- 
 ing and opinion in the most democratic times of the 
 republic. Rivalries and feuds, street broils and con- 
 spiracies, high-handed insolence from the great men, 
 rough vengeance from the populace, still continued 
 to vex jealous and changeful Florence. The popes 
 sought in vain to keep in order their quarrelsome 
 liegemen ; to reconcile Guelf with Guelf, and even 
 Guelf with Ghibelline. Embassies went and came, 
 to ask for mediation and to proffer it ; to apply the 
 healing paternal hand ; to present an obsequious and 
 ostentatious submission. Cardinal legates came in 
 state, and were received with reverential pomp ; they 
 formed private committees, and held assemblies, and 
 made marriages ; they harangued in honeyed words, 
 and gained the largest promises ; on one occasion 
 the Great Square was turned into a vast theatre, and 
 on this stage one hundred and fifty dissidents on 
 each side came forward, and in the presence and 
 with the benediction of the cardinal kissed each other
 
 DANTE 27 
 
 on the mouth. 1 And if persuasion failed, the Pope's 
 representative hesitated not to excommunicate and 
 interdict the faithful but obdurate city. But whether 
 excommunicated or blessed, Florence could not be 
 at peace; however wise and subtle had been the 
 peacemaker's arrangements, his departing cortege 
 was hardly out of sight of the city before they were 
 blown to the winds. Not more successful were the 
 efforts of the sensible and moderate citizens who 
 sighed for tranquillity within its walls. Dino Com- 
 pagni's interesting though not very orderly narrative 
 describes with great frankness, and with the perplex- 
 ity of a simple-hearted man puzzled by the continual 
 triumph of clever wickedness, the variety and the 
 fruitlessness of the expedients devised by him and 
 other good citizens against the resolute and incor- 
 rigible selfishness of the great Guelfs ever, when 
 checked in one form, breaking out in another ; proof 
 against all persuasion, all benefits ; not to be bound 
 by law, or compact, or oath ; eluding or turning to 
 its own account the deepest and sagest contrivances 
 of constitutional wisdom. 
 
 A great battle won against Ghibelline Arezzo* 
 raised the renown and the military spirit of the 
 Guelf party, for the fame of the battle was very 
 
 1 G. Villani, vii. 56. 
 1 Campaldino, in 1289. O. VilL vii. 131 ; Dino Comp. p. 14.
 
 28 DANTE 
 
 great ; the hosts contained the choicest chivalry of 
 either side, armed and appointed with emulous splen- 
 dour. The fighting was hard, there was brilliant 
 and conspicuous gallantry, and the victory was com- 
 plete. It sealed Guelf ascendancy. The Ghibelline 
 warrior-bishop of Arezzo fell, with three of the 
 Uberti, and other Ghibelline chiefs. It was a day of 
 trial. "Many that day who had been thought of 
 great prowess were found dastards, and many who 
 had never been spoken of were held in high esteem." 
 It repaired the honour of Florence, and the citizens 
 showed their feeling of its importance by mixing up 
 the marvellous with its story. Its tidings came to 
 Florence so runs the tale in Villani, who declares 
 what he " heard and saw " himself at the very hour 
 in which it was won. The Priors of the Republic 
 were resting in their palace during the noonday heat ; 
 suddenly the chamber door was shaken, and the cry 
 heard : " Rise up ! the Aretini are defeated." The 
 door was opened, but there was no one ; their ser- 
 vants had seen no one enter the palace, and no one 
 came from the army till the hour of vespers, on a 
 long summer's day. In this battle the Guelf leaders 
 had won great glory. The hero of the day was the 
 proudest, handsomest, craftiest, most winning, most 
 ambitious, most unscrupulous Guelf noble in Florence 
 one of a family who inherited the spirit and reck-
 
 DANTE 29 
 
 lessness of the proscribed Uberti, and did not refuse 
 the popular epithet of "Afalefami" Corso Donati. 
 He did not come back from the field of Campaldino, 
 where he had won the battle by disobeying orders, 
 with any increased disposition to yield to rivals, or 
 court the populace, or respect other men's rights. 
 Those rivals, too and they also had fought gallantly 
 in the post of honour at Campaldino were such as 
 he hated from his soul rivals whom he despised, 
 and who yet were too strong for him. His blood 
 was ancient, they were upstarts ; he was a soldier, 
 they were traders ; he was poor, they the richest men 
 in Florence. They had come to live close to the 
 Donati, they had bought the palace of an old Ghibel- 
 line family, they had enlarged, adorned, and fortified 
 it, and kept great state there. They had crossed 
 him in marriages, bargains, inheritances. They had 
 won popularity, honour, influence ; and yet they were 
 but men of business, while he had a part in all the 
 political movements of the day. He was the friend 
 and intimate of lords and noblemen, with great con- 
 nexions and famous through all Italy ; they were the 
 favourites of the common people for their kindness 
 and good nature ; they even showed consideration for 
 Ghibellines. He was an accomplished man of the 
 world, keen and subtle, " full of malicious thoughts, 
 mischievous and crafty ;" they were inexperienced in
 
 30 DANTE 
 
 intrigue, and had the reputation of being clumsy and 
 stupid. He was the most graceful and engaging of 
 courtiers ; they were not even gentlemen. Lastly, in 
 the debates of that excitable republic he was the most 
 eloquent speaker, and they were tongue-tied. 1 
 
 "There was a family," writes Dino Compagni, 
 " who called themselves the Cerchi, men of low estate, 
 but good merchants and very rich ; and they dressed 
 richly, and maintained many servants and horses, and 
 made a brave show ; and some of them bought the 
 palace of the Conti Guidi, which was near the houses 
 of the Pazzi and Donati, who were more ancient of 
 blood but not so rich ; therefore, seeing the Cerchi 
 rise to great dignity, and that they had walled and 
 enlarged the palace, and kept great state, the Donati 
 began to have a great hatred against them." Villani 
 gives the same account of the feud. 2 " It began in 
 that quarter of scandal the Sesto of Porta St. Piero, 
 between the Cerchi and Donati, on the one side 
 through jealousy, on the other through churlish rude- 
 ness. Of the house of the Cerchi was head Messer 
 Vieri de' Cerchi, and he and those of his house were 
 people of great business, and powerful, and of great 
 relationships, and most wealthy traders, so that their 
 company was one of the greatest in the world ; men 
 they were of soft life, and who meant no harm; 
 1 Dino C<mp. pp. 32, 75, 94, 183. J G. VilL viii. 39
 
 DANTE 31 
 
 boorish and ill-mannered, like people who had come 
 in a short time to great state and power. The 
 Donati were gentlemen and warriors, and of no ex- 
 cessive wealth. . . . They were neighbours in Flor- 
 ence and in the country, and by the conversation of 
 their jealousy with the peevish boorishness of the 
 others, arose the proud scorn that there was between 
 them." The glories of Campaldino were not as oil 
 on these troubled waters. The conquerors flouted 
 each other all the more fiercely in the streets on their 
 return, and ill-treated the lower people with less 
 scruple. No gathering for festive or serious purposes 
 could be held without tempting strife. A marriage, 
 a funeral, a ball, a gay procession of cavaliers and 
 ladies any meeting where one stood while another 
 sat, where horse or man might jostle another, where 
 pride might be nettled or temper shown, was in 
 danger of ending in blood. The lesser quarrels 
 meanwhile ranged themselves under the greater 
 ones ; and these, especially that between the Cerchi 
 and Donati, took more and more a political character. 
 The Cerchi inclined more and more to the trading 
 classes and the lower people ; they threw themselves 
 on their popularity, and began to hold aloof from 
 the meetings of the " Parte Guelfa," while this organ- 
 ised body became an instrument in the hands of 
 their opponents, a club of the nobles. Corso Donati,
 
 32 DANTC 
 
 besides mischief of a more substantial kind, turned 
 his ridicule on their solemn dulness and awkward 
 speech, and his friends the jesters, one Scampolino 
 in particular, carried his gibes and nicknames all over 
 Florence. The Cerchi received all in sullen and 
 dogged indifference. They were satisfied with repel- 
 ling attacks, and nursed their hatred. 1 
 
 Thus the city was divided, and the attempts to 
 check the factions only exasperated them. It was 
 in vain that, when at times the government and 
 the populace lost patience, severe measures were 
 taken. It was in vain that the reformer, Gian della 
 Bella, carried for a time his harsh " orders of justice " 
 against the nobles, and invested popular vengeance 
 with the solemnity of law and with the pomp and 
 ceremony of a public act that when a noble had 
 been convicted of killing a citizen, the great officer, 
 "Standard- bearer," as he was called, "of justice," 
 issued forth in state and procession, with the banner 
 of justice borne before him, with all his train, and 
 at the head of the armed citizens, to the house of the 
 criminal, and razed it to the ground. An eye-witness 
 describes the effect of such chastisement : " I, Dino 
 Compagni, being Gonfalonier of Justice in 1293, 
 went to their houses, and to those of their relations, 
 and these I caused to be pulled down according to 
 1 Dino Compagni, pp. 32, 34, 38.
 
 DANTE 33 
 
 the laws. This beginning in the case of the other 
 Gonfaloniers came to an evil effect ; because, if they 
 demolished the houses according to the laws, the 
 people said that they were cruel ; and if they did not 
 demolish them completely, they said that they were 
 cowards ; and many distorted justice for fear of the 
 people." Gian della Bella was overthrown with few 
 regrets even on the part of the people. Equally vain 
 was the attempt to keep the peace by separating the 
 leaders of the disturbances. They were banished by 
 a kind of ostracism ; they departed in ostentatious 
 meekness, Corso Donato to plot at Rome, Vieri de' 
 Cerchi to return immediately to Florence. Anarchy 
 had got too fast a hold on the city, and it required a 
 stronger hand than that of the pope, or the signory 
 of the Republic, to keep it down. 
 
 Yet Florence prospered. Every year it grew 
 richer, more intellectual, more refined, more beautiful, 
 more gay. With its anarchy there was no stagna- 
 tion. Torn and divided as it was, its energy did not 
 slacken, its busy and creative spirit was not deadened, 
 its hopefulness not abated. The factions, fierce and 
 personal as they were, did not hinder that interest 
 in political ideas, that active and subtle study of 
 the questions of civil government, that passion and 
 ingenuity displayed in political contrivance, which now 
 pervaded Northern Italy, everywhere marvellously 
 
 D
 
 34 DANTE 
 
 patient and hopeful, though far from being equally 
 successful In Venice at the close of the thirteenth 
 century, that polity was finally settled and consoli- 
 dated, by which she was great as long as cities could 
 be imperial, and which even in its decay survived 
 the monarchy of Louis XIV. and existed within the 
 memory of living men. 1 In Florence the constructive 
 spirit of law and order only resisted, but never 
 triumphed. Yet it was resolute and sanguine, and not 
 yet dispirited by continual failure. Political interest, 
 however, and party contests were not sufficient to 
 absorb and employ the citizens of Florence. Their 
 genial and versatile spirit, so keen, so inventive, so 
 elastic, which made them such hot and impetuous 
 partisans, kept them from being only this. The time 
 was one of growth ; new knowledge, new powers, 
 new tastes were opening to men new pursuits 
 attracted them. There was commerce, there was the 
 school philosophy, there was the science of nature, 
 there was ancient learning, there was the civil law, 
 there were the arts, there was poetry, all rude as yet, 
 and unformed, but full of hope the living parents 
 of mightier offspring. Frederick II. had once more 
 opened Aristotle to the Latin world ; he had given 
 an impulse to the study of the great monuments of 
 Roman legislation which was responded to through 
 1 [This wu written in 1850.)
 
 DANTE 35 
 
 Italy ; himself a poet, his example and his splendid 
 court had made poetry fashionable. In the end of 
 the thirteenth century a great stride was made at 
 Florence. While her great poet was growing up to 
 manhood, as rapid a change went on in her streets, 
 her social customs, the wealth of her citizens, their 
 ideas of magnificence and beauty, their appreciation 
 of literature. It was the age of growing commerce 
 and travel ; Franciscan missionaries had reached 
 China, and settled there; 1 in 1294 Marco Polo 
 returned to Venice, the first successful explorer of 
 the East The merchants of Florence lagged not; 
 their field of operation was Italy and the West ; 
 they had their correspondents in London, Paris, and 
 Bruges ; they were the bankers of popes and kings. 2 
 And their city shows to this day the wealth and 
 magnificence of the last years of the thirteenth 
 century. The ancient buildings, consecrated in the 
 memory of the Florentine people, were repaired, 
 enlarged, adorned with marble and bronze Or San 
 Michele, the Badia, the Baptistery ; and new buildings 
 rose on a grander scale. In 1294 was begun the 
 
 1 See the curious letters of John de Monte Corvine about bia 
 mission in Cathay, 1289-1305, in Wadding, vi. 69. 
 
 1 E.g. the Motxi, of Greg. X. ; Peruazi, of Philip le Bel ; Spini, 
 of Boniface VIII. ; Cerchi del Oarbo, of Benedict XL (0. Vill. 
 ?iL 42, viii. 63, 71 ; Dino Camp. p. 35).
 
 36 DANTE 
 
 Mausoleum of the great Florentine dead, the Church 
 of St. Croce. In the same year, a few months later, 
 Arnolfo laid the deep foundations which were after- 
 wards to bear up Brunelleschi's dome, and traced the 
 plan of the magnificent cathedral. In 1298 he began 
 to raise a Town-hall worthy of the Republic, and of 
 being the habitation of its magistrates, the frowning 
 mass of the Palazzo Vecchio. In 1299 the third 
 circle of the walls was commenced with the bene- 
 diction of bishops, and the concourse of all the " lords 
 and orders" of Florence. And Giotto was now 
 beginning to throw Cimabue into the shade Giotto, 
 the shepherd's boy, painter, sculptor, architect, and 
 engineer at once, who a few years later was to 
 complete and crown the architectural glories of 
 Florence by that masterpiece of grace, his marble 
 Campanile. 
 
 Fifty years made then all that striking difference 
 in domestic habits, in the materials of dress, in the 
 value of money, which they have usually made in 
 later centuries. The poet of the fourteenth century 
 describes the proudest nobleman of a hundred years 
 before "with his leathern girdle and clasp of bone;" 
 and in one of the most beautiful of all poetic cele- 
 brations of the good old time, draws the domestic 
 life of ancient Florence in the household where his 
 ancestor was born :
 
 DANTE 37 
 
 A cod riposato, a cosl bello 
 
 Viver di cittadini, a cosl fida 
 
 Cittadinauza, a cod dolce ostello 
 
 Maria mi dife, chiamata in alte grida, Parad. c. 15. 1 
 
 There high-born dames, he says, still plied the distaff 
 and the loom ; still rocked the cradle with the words 
 which their own mothers had used ; or working with 
 their maidens, told them old tales of the forefathers 
 of the city, " of the Trojans, of Fiesole, and of Rome." 
 Villani still finds this rudeness within forty years of 
 the end of the century, almost within the limits of 
 his own and Dante's life ; and speaks of that " old 
 
 1 Florence, confined within that ancient wall, 
 
 Whence still the chimes at noon and evening sound, 
 Was sober, modest, and at peace with all. 
 
 Myself have seen Bellincion Berti pace 
 
 The street in leathern belt ; his lady come 
 Forth from her toilet with unpaiuted face. 
 
 Oh huppy wives ! e&ch sure to lay her head 
 
 In her own tomb ; and no one yet compelled 
 To weep deserted in a lonely bed. 
 
 To such pure life of beauty and repose 
 
 Such faithful citizens such happy men- 
 The Virgin gave me, when my mother's throe* 
 
 Forced her with cries to call on Mary's name. WRIGHT.
 
 38 DANTE 
 
 first people," il primo Popolo Vecchio, with their coarse 
 food and expenditure, their leather jerkins, and plain 
 close gowns, their small dowries and late marriages, 
 as if they were the first founders of the city, and 
 not a generation which had lasted on into his own. 1 
 Twenty years later his story is of the gaiety, the 
 riches, the profuse munificence, the brilliant festivities, 
 the careless and joyous life which attracted foreigners 
 to Florence as the city of pleasure ; of companies of 
 a thousand or more, all clad in white robes, under 
 a lord, styled " of Love," passing their time in 
 sports and dances ; of ladies and knights, " going 
 through the city with trumpets and other instruments, 
 with joy and gladness," and meeting together in ban- 
 quets evening and morning ; entertaining illustrious 
 strangers, and honourably escorting them on horse- 
 back in their passage through the city ; tempting by 
 their liberality, courtiers, and wits, and minstrels, 
 and jesters, to add to the amusements of Florence. 8 
 Nor were these the boisterous triumphs of unrefined 
 and coarse merriment How variety of character 
 was drawn out, how its more delicate elements were 
 elicited and tempered, how nicely it was observed, 
 and how finely drawn, let the racy and open-eyed 
 story-tellers of Florence testify. 
 
 1 O. Yill- vL 69 (1259). 
 > Ibid. vii. 89 (1283).
 
 DANTE 39 
 
 Not perhaps in these troops of revellers, but amid 
 music and song, and in the pleasant places of social 
 and private life, belonging to the Florence of arts and 
 poetry, not to the Florence of factions and strife, 
 should we expect to find the friend of the sweet 
 singer, Casella, and of the reserved and bold 
 speculator, Guido Cavalcanti ; the mystic poet of the 
 Vita Nuova, so sensitive and delicate, trembling at a 
 gaze or a touch, recording visions, painting angels, 
 composing Canzoni and commenting on them ; finally 
 devoting himself to the austere consolations of deep 
 study. To superadd to such a character that of a 
 democratic politician of the Middle Ages, seems an 
 incongruous and harsh combination. Yet it was a 
 real one in this instance. The scholar's life is, in our 
 idea of it. far separated from the practical and the 
 political j we have been taught by our experience to 
 disjoin enthusiasm in love, in art, in what is abstract 
 or imaginative, from keen interest and successful 
 interference in the affairs and conflicts of life. The 
 practical man may sometimes be also a dilettante; 
 but the dreamer or the thinker, wisely or indolently, 
 keeps out of the rough ways where real passions and 
 characters meet and jostle, or if he ventures, seldom 
 gains honour there. The separation, though a natural 
 one, grows wider as society becomes more vast and 
 manifold, as its ends, functions, and pursuits are dis-
 
 40 DANTE 
 
 entangled, while they multiply. But in Dante's time, 
 and in an Italian city, it was not such a strange thing 
 that the most refined and tender interpreter of feeling, 
 the popular poet, whose verses touched all hearts, and 
 were in every mouth, should be also at once the 
 ardent follower of all abstruse and difficult learning, 
 and a prominent character among those who admini- 
 stered the State. In that narrow sphere of action, 
 in that period of dawning powers and circumscribed 
 knowledge, it seemed no unreasonable hope or unwise 
 ambition to attempt the compassing of all science, 
 and to make it subserve and illustrate the praise of 
 active citizenship. 1 Dante, like other literary cele- 
 brities of the time, was not less from the custom of 
 the day, than from his own purpose, a public man. 
 He took his place among his fellow-citizens : he went 
 out to war with them ; he fought, it is said, among 
 the skirmishers at the great Guelf victory of Campal- 
 dino ; to qualify himself for office in the democracy, 
 he enrolled himself in one of the Guilds of the 
 people, and was matriculated in the "Art" of the 
 Apothecaries ; he served the State as its agent abroad ; 
 be went on important missions to the cities and 
 courts of Italy according to a Florentine tradition, 
 which enumerates fourteen distinct embassies, even 
 to Hungary and France. In the memorable year of 
 Vide the opening of the De Monarchia.
 
 DANTE 41 
 
 Jubilee, 1300, he was one of the Priors of the Re- 
 public. There is no shrinking from fellowship and 
 co-operation and conflict with the keen or bold men 
 of the market-place and council -hall, in that mind 
 of exquisite and, as drawn by itself, exaggerated 
 sensibility. The doings and characters of men, the 
 workings of society, the fortunes of Italy, were 
 watched and thought of with as deep an interest as 
 the courses of the stars, and read in the real spectacle 
 of life with as profound emotion as in the miraculous 
 page of Virgil ; and no scholar ever read Virgil with 
 such feeling no astronomer ever watched the stars 
 with more eager inquisitiveness. The whole man 
 opens to the world around him : all affections and 
 powers, soul and sense, diligently and thoughtfully 
 directed and trained, with free and concurrent and 
 equal energy, with distinct yet harmonious purposes, 
 seek out their respective and appropriate objects, 
 moral, intellectual, natural, spiritual, in that admirable 
 scene and hard field where man is placed to labour 
 and love, to be exercised, proved, and judged. 
 
 In a fresco in the chapel of the old palace of the 
 Podesta ! at Florence is a portrait of Dante, said to 
 be by the hand of his contemporary Giotto. It was 
 discovered in 1841 under the whitewash, and a tracing 
 
 1 The Bargello, a prison (1860); a museum (1878). Vvb 
 Vasnri, p. 811.
 
 42 DANTE 
 
 made by Mr. Seymour Kirkup has been reproduced 
 in facsimile by the Arundel Society. The fresco 
 was afterwards restored or repainted with no happy 
 success. He is represented as he might have been 
 in the year of Campaldiuo (1289). The countenance 
 is youthful yet manly, more manly than it appears in 
 the engravings of the picture ; but it only suggests 
 the strong deep features of the well-known traditional 
 face. He is drawn with much of the softness, and 
 melancholy pensive sweetness, and with something 
 also of the quaint stiffness of the Vita Nuova with 
 his flower and his book With him is drawn his 
 master, Brunette Latini, 1 and Corso Donati. We do 
 not know what occasion led Giotto thus to associate 
 him with the great "Baron." Dante was, indeed, 
 closely connected with the Donati. The dwelling 
 of his family was near theirs, in the "Quarter of 
 Scandal," the Ward of the Porta St Piero. He 
 married a daughter of their house, Madonna Gemma. 
 None of his friends are commemorated with more 
 affection than the companion of his light and way- 
 ward days, remembered not without a shade of 
 anxious sadness, yet with love and hope, Corso's 
 brother, Forese. 2 No sweeter spirit sings and smiles 
 in the illumined spheres of Paradise, than she whom 
 Forese remembers as on earth one, 
 1 He died in 1294. G. VU1. viii. 10. Purg. c. 23.
 
 DANTE 43 
 
 Che tra bella e buona 
 
 Non so qual fosse piu. Purg. c. 24. 1 
 
 and who, from the depth of her heavenly joy, teaches 
 the poet that in the lowest place among the blessed 
 there can be no envy 2 the sister of Forese and 
 Corso, Piccarda. The Commedia, though it speaks, 
 as if in prophecy, of Corso's miserable death, avoids 
 the mention of his name. 3 Its silence is so remark- 
 able as to seem significant. But though history does 
 not group together Corso and Dante, the picture 
 represents the truth their fortunes were linked 
 together. They were actors in the same scene at 
 this distance of time two of the most prominent ; 
 though a scene very different from that calm and 
 grave assembly which Giotto's placid pencil has drawn 
 on the old chapel wall. 
 
 The outlines of this part of Dante's history are so 
 well known that it is not necessary to dwell on them ; 
 and more than the outlines we know not The family 
 quarrels came to a head, issued in parties, and the 
 parties took names ; they borrowed them from two 
 rival factions in a neighbouring town, Pistoia, whose 
 feud was imported into Florence ; and the Guelfs 
 became divided into the Black Guelfs who were led 
 
 1 My sister, good and beautiful which moat I know not. 
 
 WRIGHT. 
 Farad, r. 3. Purg. c. 24, 82-87.
 
 44 DANTE 
 
 by the Donati, and the White Guelfs who sided with 
 the Cerchi. 1 It still professed to be but a family 
 feud, confined to the great houses ; but they were 
 too powerful and Florence too small for it not to 
 affect the whole /Republic. The middle classes and 
 the artisans looked on, and for a time not without 
 satisfaction, at the strife of the great men; but it 
 grew evident that one party must crush the other, 
 and become dominant in Florence ; and of the two, 
 the Cerchi and their White adherents were less 
 formidable to the democracy than the unscrupulous 
 and overbearing Donati, with their military renown 
 and lordly tastes ; proud not merely of being nobles, 
 but Guelf nobles ; always loyal champions, once the 
 martyrs, and now the hereditary assertors, of the 
 great Guelf cause. The Cerchi with less character 
 and less zeal, but rich, liberal, and showy, and with 
 more of rough kindness and vulgar good-nature for 
 the common people, were more popular in Guelf 
 Florence than the " Parte Guelfa ; " and, of course, 
 the Ghibellines wished them well. Both the con- 
 temporary historians of Florence lead us to think 
 that they might have been the governors and guides 
 of the Republic if they had chosen, and had known 
 how ; and both, though condemning the two parties 
 equally, seemed to have thought that this would have 
 1 In 1300. G. VUlani, viii. 38, 39.
 
 DANTE 45 
 
 been the best result for the State. But the accounts 
 of both, though they are very different writers, agree 
 in their scorn of the leaders of the White Guelfs. 
 They were upstarts, purse-proud, vain, and coarse- 
 minded ; and they dared to aspire to an ambition 
 which they were too dull and too cowardly to pursue, 
 when the game was in their hands. They wished to 
 rule ; but when they might, they were afraid. The 
 commons were on their side, the moderate men, the 
 party of law, the lovers of republican government, 
 and for the most part the magistrates; but they 
 shrank from their fortune, "more from cowardice 
 than from goodness, because they exceedingly feared 
 their adversaries." l Boniface VIII. had no prepos- 
 sessions in Florence, except for energy and an open 
 hand; the side which was most popular he would 
 have accepted and backed ; but " he would not lose," 
 he said, " the men for the women." " lo non voglio 
 perdere gli tiomini per le fcmminette," * If the Black 
 party furnished types for the grosser or fiercer forms 
 of wickedness in the poet's Hell, the White party 
 surely were the originals of that picture of stupid 
 and cowardly selfishness, in the miserable crowd who 
 moan and are buffeted in the vestibule of the Pit, 
 
 1 Dino Comp. p. 45. 
 
 1 I am not going to lose the men for the old women. 
 Ibid. p. 62.
 
 46 DANTE 
 
 mingled with the angels who dared neither to rebel 
 nor be faithful, but " were for themselves ; " and who- 
 ever it may be who is singled out in the " setta dei 
 ttivi," for deeper and special scorn he, 
 
 Che fece per vilta il gran rifiuto. Inf. c. 3, 60. 1 
 
 the idea was derived from the Cerchi in Florence. 
 
 A French prince was sent by the Pope to mediate 
 and make peace in Florence. The Black Guelfs and 
 Corso Donati came with him. The magistrates were 
 overawed and perplexed. The White party were, 
 step by step, amused, entrapped, led blindly into 
 false plots, entangled in the elaborate subtleties, and 
 exposed with all the zest and mockery, of Italian 
 intrigue finally chased out of their houses and from 
 the city, condemned unheard, outlawed, ruined in 
 name and property, by the Pope's French mediator. 
 With them fell many citizens who had tried to hold 
 the balance between the two parties ; for the leaders 
 of the Black Guelfs were guilty of no errors of weak- 
 ness. In two extant lists of the proscribed con- 
 demned by default, for corruption and various crimes, 
 especially for hindering the entrance into Florence of 
 Charles de Valois, to a heavy fine and banishment 
 then, two months after, for contumacy, to be burned 
 alive if he ever fell into the hands of the Republic 
 
 1 The coward who the great refusal made.
 
 DANTE 47 
 
 appears the name of Dante Alighieri ; and more than 
 this, concerning the history of his expulsion, we know 
 not. 1 
 
 Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more 
 than the general character. He acted for a time in 
 concert with the expelled party, when they attempted 
 to force their way back to Florence ; he gave them 
 up at last in scorn and despair ; but he never returned 
 to Florence. And he found no new home for the 
 rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his exile to 
 his death, he was a wanderer. The character is 
 stamped on his writings. History, tradition, docu- 
 ments, all scanty or dim, do but disclose him to us at 
 different points, appearing here and there, we are not 
 told how or why. One old record, discovered by 
 antiquarian industry, shows him in a village church 
 near Florence, planning, with the Cerchi and the 
 White party, an attack on the Black Guelfs. In 
 another, he appears in the Val di Mngra, making 
 peace between its small potentates : in another, as 
 the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The tra- 
 ditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect 
 his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell 
 in a convent In the recollections of the following 
 generation, his solemn and melancholy form mingled 
 
 1 Pelli, Memorie per terrire alia vita di Dante. Fir. 1823, 
 pp. 105, 106.
 
 48 DANTE 
 
 reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of 
 the Scaligers ; and scared the women, as a visitant 
 of the other world, as he passed by their doors in 
 the streets of Verona. Rumour brings him to the 
 West with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to 
 Oxford. But little certain can be made out about 
 the places where he was an honoured and admired, 
 but it may be, not always a welcome guest, till we find 
 him sheltered, cherished, and then laid at last to rest, 
 by the Lords of Ravenna. There he still rests, in a 
 small, solitary chapel, built, not by a Florentine, but 
 a Venetian. Florence, " that mother of little love, : ' 
 asked for his bones ; but rightly asked in vain. 1 
 His place of repose is better in those remote and 
 forsaken streets " by the shore of the Adrian Sea," 
 hard by the last relics of the Roman Empire the 
 mausoleum of the children of Theodosius, and the 
 mosaics of Justinian than among the assembled 
 dead of St. Croce, or amid the magnificence of Santa 
 Maria del Fiore. 8 
 
 1 See Dr. Barlow's Sixth Centenary Festivals of Dante. (1866.) 
 3 These notices have been carefully collected by Pelli, who 
 seems to have left little to glean (Afemoric, etc., Ed. 2d, 1828). 
 A few additions have been made by Oerini (Mem, Stor. delta 
 Lunigiana), and Troya ( Veltro Allegorico), but they are not of 
 much importance. Arrivdbene (Secolo di Dante) has brought 
 together a mass of illustration which is very useful, and would 
 be more so, if he were more careful and quoted his authorities.
 
 DANTE 49 
 
 The Commedia, at the first glance, shows the traces 
 of its author's life. It is the work of a wanderer. 
 The very form in which it is cast is that of a journey, 
 difficult, toilsome, perilous, and full of change. It is 
 more than a working out of that touching phraseology 
 of the Middle Ages, in which " the way " was the 
 technical theological expression for this mortal life ; 
 and " viator " meant man in his state of trial, as " com- 
 prehensor " meant man made perfect, having attained 
 to his heavenly country. It is more than merely 
 this. The writer's mind is full of the recollections 
 and definite images of his various journeys. The 
 permanent scenery of the Inferno and Purgatorio, very 
 variously and distinctly marked, is that of travel 
 The descent down the sides of the Pit, and the ascent 
 of the Sacred Mountain, show one familiar with such 
 scenes one who had climbed painfully in perilous 
 passes, and grown dizzy on the brink of narrow 
 ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery from the 
 gorges of the Alps and Apennines, or the terraces 
 and precipices of the Kiviera. Local reminiscences 
 abound : the severed rocks of the Adigo Valley the 
 waterfall of St. Benedetto the crags of Pietra-pana 
 and St. Leo, which overlook the plains of Lucca and 
 
 Balbo arranges these materials with sense and good feeling ; 
 though, as a writer, he is below his subject. A few traits and 
 anecdotes maybe found in the novelists as Sacchetti. [1850.] 
 

 
 50 DANTE 
 
 Ravenna the "fair river" that flows among the 
 poplars between Chiaveri and Sestri the marble 
 quarries of Carrara the "rough and desert ways 
 between Lerici and Turbia," and those towery cliffs, 
 going sheer into the deep sea at Noli, which travellers 
 on the Corniche road some thirty years ago may yet 
 remember with fear. Mountain experience furnished 
 that picture of the traveller caught in an Alpine mist 
 and gradually climbing above it ; seeing the vapours 
 grow thin, and the sun's orb appear faintly through 
 them; and issuing at last into sunshine on the 
 mountain top, while the light of sunset was lost 
 already on the shores below : 
 
 Ai raggi, morti g& nei baasi lidL Purg. 17. 1 
 
 or that image of the cold dull shadow over the tor- 
 rent, beneath the Alpine fir 
 
 Un' ombra smorta 
 Qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri 
 Sovra suoi freddi rivi, 1' Alpe porta. Purg. 33. 8 
 
 or of the large snowflakes falling without wind, 
 among the mountains 
 
 1 The beams on the low shores now lost and dead. 
 
 * A death-like shade 
 
 Like that beneath black boughs and foliage green 
 O'er the cold streams in Alpine glens display'd. WRIGHT.
 
 DANTE 51 
 
 d' un cader lento 
 Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde 
 Come di neve in Alpe senza venta Inf. 14. 1 
 
 He delights in a local name and local image the 
 boiling pitch, and the clang of the shipwrights in the 
 arsenal of Venice the sepulchral fields of Aries and 
 Pola the hot-spring of Viterbo the hooded monks 
 of Cologne the dykes of Flanders and Padua the 
 Maremma, with its rough brushwood, its wild boars, 
 its snakes, and fevers. He had listened to the south 
 wind among the pine tops, in the forest by the sea, 
 at Ravenna. He had watched under the Carisenda 
 tower at Bologna, and seen the driving clouds " give 
 away their motion " to it, and make it seem to be 
 falling ; and had noticed how at Rome the October 
 sun sets between Corsica and Sardinia. 2 His images 
 of the sea are numerous and definite the ship back- 
 ing out of the tier in harbour, the diver plunging after 
 the fouled anchor, the mast rising, the ship going fast 
 before the wind, the water closing in its wake, the 
 arched backs of the porpoises the forerunners of a 
 gale, the admiral watching everything from poop to 
 prow, the oars stopping altogether at the sound of 
 
 1 O'er all the samiy desert falling slow, 
 
 Were showerM dilated flakes of fire, like snow 
 
 On Alpine summits, when the wind is low. WuiOHT. 
 
 Inf. 31, 18.
 
 52 DANTE 
 
 the whistle, the swelling sails becoming slack when 
 the mast snaps and falls. 1 Nowhere could we find sc 
 many of the most characteristic and strange sensations 
 of the traveller touched with such truth. Every one 
 knows the lines which speak of the voyager's sinking 
 of heart on the first evening at sea, and of the long- 
 ings wakened in the traveller at the beginning of his 
 journey by the distant evening bell ; 2 the traveller's 
 morning feelings are not less delicately noted the 
 strangeness on first waking in the open air with the 
 sun high ; morning thoughts, as day by day he wakes 
 nearer home ; the morning sight of the sea- beach 
 quivering in the early light 
 
 Da lun tui 10 
 Conobbi il tremolar dcllu marina. Purg. 1, 117. 8 
 
 the tarrying and lingering, before setting out in the 
 
 morning 4 
 
 Noi cravam lunghesso '1 mare ancora, 
 Come gente che pensa al suo cammino, 
 Che va col cuore, e col corpo dimora. 6 
 
 Inf. 17, 16, 81 ; Purg. 24 ; Parad. 2 ; Inf. 22 ; Purg. 30 ; 
 Parad. 25 ; Inf. 7. Purg. 8. "Era gii 1' ora," etc. 
 
 3 I knew from far the sea-beach trembling. 
 * Purg. 19, 27, 1, 2. 
 
 4 By ocean's shore we still prolonged our stay 
 Like men, who, thinking of a journey near, 
 Advance in thought, while yet their limbs delay. WEIGHT.
 
 DANTE 53 
 
 He lias recorded equally the anxiety, the curiosity, 
 the suspicion with which, in those times, stranger 
 met and eyed stranger on the road ; and a still more 
 characteristic trait is to be found in those lines where 
 he describes the pilgrim gazing around in the church 
 of his vow, and thinking how he shall tell of it : 
 
 E quasi peregrin che si ricrea 
 Nel tempio del suo voto riguardando, 
 E spera g& ridir coin' ello stea Parad. 3 1. 1 
 
 or again, in that description, so simple and touching, 
 of his thoughts while waiting to see the relic for which 
 he left his home : 
 
 Quale e colui che forse di Croazia 
 Viene a veder la Veronica nostra, 
 Che per 1' antica fama non si sazia, 
 
 Ma dice nel pensier, I'm che si mostra ; 
 Signer mio Gesu Cristo, Dio veracc, 
 Or fu si fatta la serabianza vostra ? Parad. 31.* 
 
 1 And like a pilgrim who with fond delight 
 Surreys the temple he has vow'd to see, 
 And hopes one day its wonders to recite. WEIGHT 
 
 8 Like one who, from Croatia come to see 
 Our Veronica (image long adored), 
 Gazes, as though content he ne'er could be 
 Thus musing, while the relic is pourtray'd 
 " Jesus my God, my Saviour and my Lord, 
 were thy features these I see display'd ? " WRIGHT. 
 Quella imagine benedetta U qnale Gesu Criato lascio a
 
 54 DANTE 
 
 Of these years then of disappointment and exile 
 the Divina Commedia was the labour and fruit. A 
 story in Boccaccio's life of Dante, told with some 
 detail, implies indeed that it was begun, and some 
 progress made in it, while Dante was yet in Florence 
 begun in Latin, and he quotes three lines of it 
 continued afterwards in Italian. This is not impos- 
 sible; indeed the germ and presage of it may be 
 traced in the Vita Nuova. The idealised saint is there, 
 in all the grace of her pure and noble humbleness, 
 the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul. She 
 is already in glory with Mary the queen of angels. 
 She already beholds the face of the Everblessed. And 
 the envoye of the Vila, Nuova is the promise of the 
 Commedia. "After this sonnet" (in which he de- 
 scribes how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his 
 love had beheld a lady receiving honour, and dazzling 
 by her glory the unaccustomed spirit) " After this 
 sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in 
 which I saw things which made me resolve not to 
 
 noi per esempio della sua bellissima figura. Vita, Nuova, page 
 
 353. 
 
 He speaks of the pilgrims going to Rome to see it ; compare 
 
 also the sonnet to the pilgrims, Vita Nuova, p. 355 : 
 Deh peregrini, che pensosi andate 
 Forsc di cosa che non v'e presente, 
 Venite voi di si lontana gente, 
 Com' alia vista voi ne dimostratc T
 
 DANTE 55 
 
 speak more of this blessed one, until such time as I 
 should be able to indite more worthily of her. And 
 to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power, 
 as she truly knows. So that, if it shall be the plea- 
 sure of Him, by whom all things live, that my life 
 continue for some years, I hope to say of her that 
 which never hath been said of any woman. And 
 afterwards, may it please Him, who is the Lord of 
 kindness, that my soul may go to behold the glory 
 of her lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who 
 gloriously gazes on the countenance of Him, qui est per 
 omnia secula benedictus." l It would be wantonly 
 violating probability and the unity of a great life, to 
 suppose that this purpose, though transformed, was 
 ever forgotten or laid aside. The poet knew not 
 indeed what ho was promising, what he was pledging 
 himself to through what years of toil and anguish 
 he would have to seek the light and the power he 
 had asked ; in what form his high venture should be 
 realised. But the Corn-media is the work of no light 
 resolve, and we need not be surprised at finding the 
 resolve and the purpose at the outset of the poet's 
 life. We may freely accept the key supplied by the 
 words of the Vita Nuova. The spell of boyhood is 
 never broken, through the ups and downs of life. Hia 
 
 1 Vita Nwna, last paragraph. Se Purg. 80 ; Farad. 30, 6, 
 28-33.
 
 56 DANTE 
 
 course of thought advances, alters, deepens, but ia 
 continuous. From youth to age, from the first glimpse 
 to the perfect work, the same idea abides with him, 
 " even from the flower till the grape was ripe." It 
 may assume various changes an image of beauty, a 
 figure of philosophy, a voice from the other world, a 
 type of heavenly wisdom and joy but still it holds, 
 in self-imposed and willing thraldom, that creative 
 and versatile and tenacious spirit. It was the dream 
 and hope of too deep and strong a mind to fade and 
 come to naught to be other than the seed of the 
 achievement and crown of life. But with all faith in 
 the star and the freedom of genius, we may doubt 
 whether the prosperous citizen would have done that 
 which was done by the man without a home. Bea- 
 trice's glory might have been sung in grand though 
 barbarous Latin to the literati of the fourteenth cen- 
 tury ; or a poem of new beauty might have fixed the 
 language and opened the literature of modern Italy ; 
 but it could hardly have been the Commedia. That 
 belongs, in its date and its greatness, to the time 
 when sorrow had become the poet's daily portion, and 
 the condition of his life. 
 
 The Commedia is a novel and startling apparition 
 in literature. Probably it has been felt by some, who 
 have approached it with the reverence due to a work 
 of such renown, that the world has been generous in
 
 DANTE f>7 
 
 placing it so high. It seems so abnormal, so lawless, 
 so reckless of all ordinary proprieties and canons of 
 feeling, taste, and composition. It is rough and 
 abrupt ; obscure in phrase and allusion, doubly obscure 
 in purpose. It is a medley of all subjects usually 
 kept distinct : scandal of the day and transcendental 
 science, politics and confessions, coarse satire and 
 angelic joy, private wrongs, with the mysteries of 
 the faith, local names and habitations of earth, with 
 visions of hell and heaven. It is hard to keep up 
 with the ever- changing current of feeling, to pass 
 as the poet passes, without effort or scruple, from 
 tenderness to ridicule, from hope to bitter scorn or 
 querulous complaint, from high-raised devotion to the 
 calmness of prosaic subtleties or grotesque detail. 
 Each separate clement and vein of thought has its 
 precedent, but not their amalgamation. Many had 
 written visions of the unseen world, but they had 
 not blended with them their personal fortunes. St. 
 Augustine had taught the soul to contemplate its own 
 history, and had traced its progress from darkness to 
 light ; l but he had not interwoven with it the history 
 of Italy, and the consummation of all earthly destinies. 
 Satire was no new thing ; Juvenal had given it a 
 moral, some of the Provencal poets a political turn ; 
 St. Jerome had kindled into it fiercely and bitterly 
 1 See Convitv, 1 . 2.
 
 58 DANTE 
 
 even while expounding the Prophets; but here it 
 streams forth in all its violence, within the precincts 
 of the eternal world, and alternates with the hymns 
 of the blessed. Lucretius had drawn forth the poetry 
 of nature and its laws ; Virgil and Livy had unfolded 
 the poetry of the Roman Empire ; St Augustine, the 
 still grander poetry of the history of the City of God ; 
 but none had yet ventured to weave into one the 
 three wonderful threads. And yet the scope of the 
 Italian poet, vast and comprehensive as the issue of 
 all things, universal as the government which directs 
 nature and intelligence, forbids him not to stoop to 
 the lowest caitiff he has ever despised, the minutest 
 fact in nature that has ever struck his eye, the merest 
 personal association which hangs pleasantly in his 
 memory. Writing for all time, he scruples not to 
 mix with all that is august and permanent in history 
 and prophecy, incidents the most transient, and names 
 the most obscure ; to waste an immortality of shame 
 or praise on those about whom his own generation 
 were to inquire in vain. Scripture history runs into 
 profane; Pagan legends teach their lesson side by 
 side with Scripture scenes and miracles ; heroes and 
 poets of heathenism, separated from their old classic 
 world, have their place in the world of faith, dis- 
 course with Christians of Christian dogmas, and even 
 mingle with the Saints; Virgil guides the poet
 
 DANTE 59 
 
 through his fear and his penitence to the gates of 
 Paradise. 
 
 This feeling of harsh and extravagant incongruity, 
 of causeless and unpardonable darkness, is perhaps 
 the first impression of many readers of the Commedia. 
 But probably as they read on, there will mingle with 
 this a sense of strange and unusual grandeur, arising 
 not alone from the hardihood of the attempt, and the 
 mystery of the subject, but from the power and the 
 character of the poet. It will strike them that words 
 cut deeper than is their wont ; that from that wild 
 uncongenial imagery, thoughts emerge of singular 
 truth and beauty. Their dissatisfaction will be 
 chequered, ever, disturbed for we can often bring 
 ourselves to sacrifice much for the sake of a clear and 
 consistent view by the appearance, amid much that 
 repels them, of proofs undeniable and accumulating 
 of genius as mighty as it is strange. Their perplexity 
 and disappointment may grow into distinct condemna- 
 tion, or it may pass into admiration and delight j but 
 no one has ever come to the end of the Commedia 
 without feeling that if it has given him a new view 
 and specimen of the wildness and unaccountable 
 waywardness of the human mind, it has also added, 
 as few other books have, to his knowledge of its 
 feelings, its capabilities, and its grasp, and suggested 
 larger and more serious thoughts, for which he may
 
 60 DANTE 
 
 be grateful, concerning that unseen world of which 
 he is even here a member. 
 
 Dante would not have thanked his admirers for 
 becoming apologists. Those in whom the sense of 
 imperfection and strangeness overpowers sympathy 
 for grandeur, and enthusiasm for nobleness, and joy 
 in beauty, he certainly would have left to themselves. 
 But neither would he teach any that he was leading 
 them along a smooth and easy road. The Commedia 
 will always be a hard and trying book ; nor did the 
 writer much care that it should be otherwise. Much 
 if thii is no doubt to be set down to its age ; much 
 of its roughness and extravagance, as well as of its 
 beauty its allegorical spirit, its frame and scenery. 
 The idea of a visionary voyage through the worlds of 
 pain and bliss is no invention of the poet it was one 
 of the commonest and most familiar mediaeval vehicles 
 of censure or warning ; and those who love to trace 
 the growth and often strange fortunes of popular 
 ideas, or whose taste leads them to disbelieve in 
 genius, and track the parentage of great inventions to 
 the foolish and obscure, may find abundant materials 
 in the literature of legends. 1 But his own age 
 the age which received the Commedia with mingled 
 enthusiasm and wonder, and called it the Divine, was 
 as much perplexed as we are, though probably rather 
 1 Vide Oranam, DanU, pp. 535, iqq. Ed. 2*.
 
 DAKTE 61 
 
 pleaded thereby than offended. That within a century 
 after its composition, in the most famous cities and 
 universities of Italy, Florence, Venice, Bologna, and 
 Pisa, chairs should have been founded, and illustrious 
 men engaged to lecture on it, is a strange homage to 
 its power, even in that time of quick feeling ; but as 
 strange and great a proof of its obscurity. What is 
 dark and forbidding in it was scarcely more clear to 
 the poet's contemporaries. And he, whose last object 
 was amusement, invites no audience but a patient and 
 confiding one. 
 
 O voi che siete in piccioletta barca, 
 Desiderosi di ascoltar, seguiti 
 Dietro al mio legno che cantando varca, 
 
 Tornate a riveder 11 vostri liti : 
 Non vi mettete in pelago, che foree 
 Perdendo me rimarreste smarritL 
 
 L' acqua ch' io prendo giammai non si corse : 
 Minerva spira, e conducemi Apollo, 
 E nuove muse mi dimostran 1' One. 
 
 Voi altri pochi, che drizzaste '1 collo 
 Per tempo al pan degli angeli, del quale 
 Vivesi qui, ma non si vien satollo, 
 
 Metier potete ben per 1' alto sale 
 Vostro navigio, servando mio solco 
 Dinanzi all' acqua che ritorna eguale.
 
 62 DANTE 
 
 Que gloriosi che passaro a Colco, 
 Non s' ammiraron, come voi farete, 
 Quando Jason vider fatto bifolco. Parad. 2. 1 
 
 The character of the Commedia belongs much 
 more, in its excellence and its imperfections, to the 
 poet himself and the nature of his work, than to 
 his age. That cannot screen his faults ; nor can it 
 arrogate to itself, it must be content to share, his 
 glory. His leading idea and line of thought w:u> 
 
 1 ye who fain would listen to my song, 
 Following in little bark full eagerly 
 My venturous ship, that chanting hies along 
 
 Turn back unto your native shores again ; 
 Tempt not the deep, lest haply losing me, 
 In unknown paths bewildered ye remain. 
 
 I am the first this voyage to essay ; 
 
 Minerva breathes Apollo is my guide ; 
 And new-born muses do the Bears display. 
 
 Ye other few, who have look'd up on high 
 For angels' food betimes, e'en here supplied 
 Largely, but not enough to satisfy, 
 
 Mid the deep ocean ye your course may take, 
 My track pursuing the pure waters through, 
 Ere reunites the quickly-closing wake. 
 
 Those glorious ones, who drove of yore their prow 
 To Colchos, wonder'd not as ye will do, 
 When they saw Jason working nt the plough. 
 
 WRIGHT'S Dante
 
 DANTE 63 
 
 much more novel then than it is now, and belongs 
 much more to the modern than the mediaeval world. 
 The Story of a Life, the poetry of man's journey 
 through the wilderness to his true country, is now 
 in various and very different shapes as hackneyed a 
 form of imagination, as an allegory, an epic, a legend 
 of chivalry were in former times. Not, of course, 
 that any time has been without its poetical feelings 
 and ideas on the subject ; and never were they deeper 
 and more diversified, more touching and solemn, 
 than in the ages that passed from St. Augustine and 
 St. Gregory to St. Thomas and St. Bonaventura. 
 But a philosophical poem, where they were not 
 merely the colouring, but the subject, an epos of the 
 soul, placed for its trial in a fearful and wonderful 
 world, with relations to time and matter, history 
 and nature, good and evil, the beautiful, the intel- 
 ligible, and the mysterious, sin and grace, the infinite 
 and the eternal and having in the company and 
 under the influences of other intelligences, to make 
 its choice, to struggle, to succeed or fail, to gain the 
 light, or be lost this was a new and unattempted 
 theme. It has been often tried since, in faith or 
 doubt, in egotism, in sorrow, in murmuring, in 
 affectation, sometimes in joy in various forms, in 
 prose and verse, completed or fragmentary, in reality 
 or fiction, in the direct or the shadowed story, in the
 
 64 DANTE 
 
 Pilgrim's Progress, in Rousseau's Confessions, in 
 Meister and Faust, in the Excursion. It is common 
 enough now for the poet, in the faith of human 
 sympathy, and in the sense of the unexhausted 
 vastness of his mysterious subject, to believe that his 
 fellows will not see without interest and profit, 
 glimpses of his own path and fortunes hear from 
 his lips the disclosure of his chief delights, his warn- 
 ings, his fears follow the many-coloured changes, 
 the impressions and workings of a character, at once 
 the contrast and the counterpart to their own. But 
 it was a new path then ; and he needed to be, and 
 was, a bold man, who first opened it a path never 
 trod without peril, usually with loss or failure. 
 
 And certainly no great man ever made less secret 
 to himself of his own genius. He is at no pains to 
 rein in or to dissemble his consciousness of power, 
 which he has measured without partiality, and feels 
 sure will not fail him. " Fidandomi di me piu che 
 di un altro " ' is a reason which he assigns without 
 reserve. We look with the distrust and hesitation 
 of modern days, yet, in spite of ourselves, not with- 
 out admiration and regret, at such frank hardihood. 
 It was more common once than now. When the 
 world was young, it was more natural and allowable 
 it was often seemly and noble. Men knew not 
 1 Truntinjj myself more than any one else. Convito, 1, 10.
 
 DANTE 65 
 
 their difficulties as we know them we, to whom 
 time, which has taught so much wisdom, has brought 
 so many disappointments we who have seen how 
 often the powerful have fallen short, and the noble 
 gone astray, and the most admirable missed their 
 perfection. It is becoming in us to distrust ourselves 
 to be shy if we cannot be modest ; it is but a 
 respectful tribute to human weakness and our 
 brethren's failures. But there was a time when 
 great men dared to claim their greatness not in 
 foolish self-complacency, but in unembarrassed and 
 majestic simplicity, in magnanimity and truth, in 
 the consciousness of a serious and noble purpose, and 
 of strength to fulfil it. Without passion, without 
 elation as without shrinking, the poet surveys his 
 superiority and his high position, as something 
 external to him ; he has no doubts about it, and 
 affects none. He would be a coward, if he shut his 
 eyes to what he could do ; as much a trifler in dis- 
 playing reserve as ostentation. Nothing is more 
 striking in the Commedia than the serene and un- 
 hesitating confidence with which he announces himself 
 the heir and reviver of the poetic power so long lost 
 to the world the heir and reviver of it in all its 
 fulness. He doubts not of the judgment of posterity. 
 One has arisen who shall throw into the shade all 
 modern reputations, who shall bequeath to Christen- 
 
 F
 
 66 DANTE 
 
 dom the glory of that name of Poet, " che pih dura o 
 pih onora," hitherto the exclusive boast of heathenism, 
 and claim the rare honours of the laurel : 
 
 Si rade volte, padre, se ne coglie 
 Per trionfare o Cesare o poeta 
 (Colpa e vergogna dell' umane voglie), 
 
 Che partorir letizia in su la lieta 
 Delfica ilriu dovria la fronda 
 Peneia quando alcun di se asseta. Parad. I. 1 
 
 He has but to follow his star to be sure of the 
 glorious port: 2 he is the master of language ; he can 
 give fame to the dead no task nor enterprise appals 
 him, for whom spirits keep watch in heaven, and 
 angels have visited the shades "tal si parti dal 
 cantar alleluia:" who is Virgil's foster-child and 
 familiar friend. Virgil bids him lay aside the last 
 vestige of fear. Virgil is to " crown him king and 
 priest over himself," 8 for a higher venture than 
 
 1 For now so rarely Poet gathers these, 
 Or Ctesar, winning an immortal praise 
 (Shame nnto man's degraded energies), 
 That joy should to the Delphic God arise 
 When haply any one aspires to gain 
 The high reward of the Peneian prize. WRIGHT. 
 * Brunette Latini's Prophecy, Inf. 15. 
 4 See the grand ending of Purg. 27 : 
 
 Tratto t' ho qui con ingegno e con arto : 
 Lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce : 
 Fuor se' dell" erte vie, fuor se' dell' arte.
 
 DANTE 67 
 
 heathen poetry had dared ; in Virgil's company he 
 takes his place without diffidence, and without vain- 
 glory, among the great poets of old a sister soul. 1 
 
 Poiche la voce fu restata e queta, 
 Vidi quattro grand' ombre a noi venire : 
 Sembianza avean ne trista ne lieta : 
 
 Vedi il sole cho 'n fronte ti riluce. 
 Vede 1" erbetta, i fieri, e gli arboscelli 
 Che questa terra sol da se produce. 
 
 Mentre clie vegnon lieti gli occhi belli 
 Che lagrimando a te veuir mi fenno, 
 Seder ti puoi e puoi andar tra ellL 
 
 Non aspettar mio dir piu ne niio cenno : 
 Libero, dritto, sano e tuo arbitrio, 
 E fallo fora non fare a suo senno : 
 
 Perch' io te sopra te corono e raitrio. 
 
 Thus far with art and skill thy steps I've nrged. 
 Take thou thy pleasure for thine escort now 
 Forth of the steep and narrow ways emerged. 
 
 Behold the sun upon thy forehead thrown 
 Behold the trees, the flowers, of every hue, 
 In this most happy soil spontaneous sown. 
 
 Here may'st thou stray, or rest beneath the shade, 
 Till, bright with joy, those eyes shall greet thy view 
 While erst suffused with tears, implored my aid. 
 
 No more from me expect or sign or word : 
 Thy will henceforth is upright, free, and sound : 
 To slight its impulse were a sin : then, lord, 
 
 Be o'er thyself; be mitred, and be crowned. WRIGHT. 
 1 Purg. c. 21.
 
 68 DANTE 
 
 Cos! vidi adunar la bella scuola 
 Di quel signer dell' altissimo canto 
 Che sovra gli altri come aquila vola. 
 
 Da ch' ebber ragionato insieme alquanto 
 Volsersi a me con salutevol cenno 
 E '1 mio maestro sorrise di tanto. 
 
 E pin <T onore ancora assai mi fenno : 
 Ch' essi mi fecer della loro schiera, 
 SI ch' io fui sesto tra cotanto senno. Inf. 4. 1 
 
 This sustained magnanimity and lofty self-reli- 
 ance, which never betrays itself, is one of the main 
 elements in the grandeur of the Commedia. It is an 
 imposing spectacle to see such fearlessness, such 
 freedom and such success in an untried path, amid 
 unprepared materials and rude instruments, models 
 
 1 Ceased had the voice when in composed array 
 Four mighty shades approaching I snrvey'd ; 
 Nor joy, nor sorrow did their looks betray. 
 
 Assembled thus, was offered to my sight 
 The school of him, the Prince of poetry, 
 Who, eagle-like, o'er others takes his flight 
 
 When they together had conversed awhile, 
 They turned to me with salutation bland, 
 Which from my master drew a friendly smile : 
 
 And greater glory still they bade me share, 
 Making me join their honourable band 
 The sixth united to such genius rare. WEIGHT
 
 DANTE 69 
 
 scanty and only half understood, powers of language 
 still doubtful and suspected, the deepest and strongest 
 thought still confined to unbending forms and the 
 harshest phrase ; exact and extensive knowledge, as 
 yet far out of reach ; with no help from time, which 
 familiarises all things, and of which, manner, elabora- 
 tion, judgment, and taste, are the gifts and inherit- 
 ance ; to see the poet, trusting to his eye " which saw 
 everything," 1 and his searching and creative spirit, 
 venture undauntedly into all regions of thought and 
 feeling, to draw thence a picture of the government 
 of the universe. 
 
 But such greatness had to endure its price and 
 its counterpoise. Dante was alone, except in his 
 visionary world, solitary and companionless. The 
 blind Greek had his throng of listeners j the blind 
 Englishman his home and the voices of his daughters; 
 Shakespeare had his free associates of the stage ; 
 Goethe, his correspondents, a court, and all Germany 
 to applaud. Not so Dante. The friends of his youth 
 are already in the region of spirits, and meet him 
 there Casella, Forese ; Guido Cavalcanti will soon 
 be with them. In this upper world he thinks and 
 writes as a friendless man to whom all that he had 
 held dearest was either lost or embittered ; he thinks 
 and writes for himself. 
 
 1 " Dante che tutto vedea. " SaecfuUi, Nov. 114.
 
 70 DANTE 
 
 And so he is his own law ; he owns no tribunal of 
 opinion or standard of taste, except among the great 
 dead. He hears them exhort him to " let the world 
 talk on to stand like a tower unshaken by the 
 winds." 1 He fears to be " a timid friend to truth," 
 " to lose life among those who shall call this present 
 time antiquity." 2 He belongs to no party. He is 
 
 1 Purg. 5. 
 
 a La luce in che rideva il mio tesoro 
 Ch' io trovai 11, si fe' prima corrusca, 
 Qualo a raggio di sole specchio d'oro ; 
 
 Indi rispose : coscienza fusca 
 della propria o dell' altrui vergogna 
 Pur sentira la tua parola brusca ; 
 
 Ma nondimen, rimossa,ogni menzogna, 
 Tutta tua vision fa manifesta, 
 E lascia pur grattar dov' e la rogna : 
 
 Che se la voce tua sara molesta 
 Nel primo gusto, vital nutrimento 
 Lascera poi quando sara digests, 
 
 Questo tuo grido fara come vento 
 Che le piii altc cime piu percuote : 
 E ci6 non fia d' onor poco argomento. 
 
 Pero ti son mostrate, in queste ruote. 
 Nel montc, e nella valle dolorosa, 
 Par 1" anime che son di fama note. 
 
 Che 1' aniino di quel ch' ode non jiosa, 
 Ne ferma fede, per esemplo ch' aja 
 La sua radice incognito e nascosa, 
 
 Nfc per altro argumento che non paja. Parad. 17.
 
 DANTE 71 
 
 his own arbiter of the beautiful and the becoming ; 
 his own judge over right and injustice, innocence and 
 guilt He has no followers to secure, no school to 
 humour, no public to satisfy ; nothing to guide him, 
 and nothing to consult, nothing to bind him, nothing 
 to fear, out of himself. In full trust in heart and 
 will, in his sense of truth, in his teeming brain, he 
 gives himself free course. If men have idolised the 
 
 The light so dear to me, whence smiles were flowing, 
 Assumed at first a garb of livelier flame, 
 Like golden mirror, in the sunset glowing : 
 
 Then answered me : " The conscience that is dyed 
 Or with its own, or with another's shame, 
 May not the sharpness of your words abide : 
 
 Nevertheless, each false disguise removed, 
 Be all the vision fully manifested ; 
 And let him wince who feels himself reproved ; 
 
 For if thy words be deemed a harsh repast, 
 
 When tasted first, yet still, when well digested, 
 A wholesome food shall they afford at last. 
 
 This thy reproof shall like the wind be found, 
 Which chiefly doth the loftiest heights assail ; 
 And hence a greater glory shall redound. 
 
 Wherefore no spirits here to thee are shown, 
 Or in the mount, or in the dolorous vale, 
 Save those whose names and characters are known. 
 
 For he who hears thee, will not be inclined 
 To give full credence, and to rest secure, 
 If the example brought before his mind 
 
 Be based on root ignoble or obscure." WRIOHT.
 
 72 DANTE 
 
 worthless, and canonised the base, he reverses their 
 award without mercy, and without apology ; if they 
 have forgotten the just because he was obscure, he 
 remembers him : if "Monna Berta and Ser Martino," 1 
 the wimpled and hooded gossips of the day, with their 
 sage company, have settled it to their own satisfaction 
 that Providence cannot swerve from their general 
 rules, cannot save where they have doomed, or reject 
 where they have approved he both fears more and 
 hopes more. Deeply reverent to the judgment of the 
 ages past, reverent to the persons whom they have 
 immortalised for good and even for evil, in his own 
 day he cares for no man's person and no man's judg- 
 ment. And he shrinks not from the auguries and 
 forecastings of his mind about their career and fate. 
 Men reasoned rapidly in those days on such subjects, 
 and without much scruple ; but not with his deliber- 
 ate and discriminating sternness. The most popular 
 and honoured names in Florence, 
 
 1 Non creda Monna Berta e Ser Martino 
 Per vedere tm furare, altro oflerere, 
 Vederli dentro al consiglio divino : 
 Che quel pu6 surger, e quel pu6 cadere. Farad. 18. 
 
 Let not Sir Martin or Dame Bertha say 
 Seeing one steal, another sacrifice 
 That they have looked into the judgment day : 
 
 For still the one may fall, the other rise. WRIGHT,
 
 DANTE 73 
 
 Farinata e 1 Tegghiaio, che fur si degni, 
 Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, e '1 Mosca 
 E gli altri, ch' a ben far poser gl" ingegni ; l 
 
 have yet the damning brand: no reader of the 
 Inferno can have forgotten the shock of that terrible 
 reply to the poet's questionings about their fate : 
 
 Ei son tra le anime piu nere. Inf. 6. 2 
 
 If he is partial, it is no vulgar partiality : friendship 
 and old affection do not venture to exempt from its 
 fatal doom the sin of his famous master, Brunette 
 Latini; 8 nobleness and great deeds, a kindred char- 
 acter and common wrongs, are not enough to redeem 
 Farinata ; and he who could tell her story bowed to 
 the eternal law, and dared not save Francesca. If 
 he condemns by a severer rule than that of the 
 world, he absolves with fuller faith in the possibilities 
 of grace. Many names of whom history has recorded 
 no good, are marked by him for bliss ; yet not with- 
 
 1 Tegghiaio, Farinata, names of worth, 
 And Rusticucci, Mosca, with the rest, 
 Who bent their minds to working good on earth. 
 1 Mid blacker souls," he said, "they're doomed to dwell." 
 
 WRIGHT 
 
 8 Che in la mente m' e fitta, ed or m 1 accuora, 
 La cara buona imagine pattrna. In/. 15. 
 For still, deep fixed within my memory 
 Lives your paternal image, good and dear. WRIGHT.
 
 74 DANTE 
 
 out full respect for justice. The penitent of the last 
 hour is saved, but he suffers loss. Manfred's soul is 
 rescued ; mercy had accepted his tears, and forgiven 
 his great. sins ; and the excommunication of his enemy 
 did not bar his salvation : 
 
 Per lor maladizion si non si perde 
 Che non possa tornar 1' eterno amore 
 Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde. Purg. 3. 1 
 
 Yet his sin, though pardoned, was to keep him for 
 long years from the perfection of heaven. 2 And with 
 the same independence with which he assigns their 
 fate, he selects his instances instances which are to 
 be the types of character and its issues. No man 
 ever owned more unreservedly the fascination of 
 greatness, its sway over the imagination and the 
 heart ; no one prized more the grand harmony and 
 sense of fitness which there is, when the great man 
 and the great office are joined in one, and reflect each 
 other's greatness. The famous and great of all ages 
 are gathered in the poet's vision ; the great names 
 
 1 But their fell curses cannot fix onr doom, 
 
 Nor stay the Eternal Love from His intent, 
 While Hope remaining bears her verdant bloom. 
 1 Charles of Anjou, his Guelf conqueror, is placed above him, 
 in the valley of the kings (Purg. 7), " Colui dal mascliio naso," 
 notwithstanding the charges afterwards made against him. 
 (Purg. 20).
 
 DANTE 75 
 
 even of fable Geryon and the giants, the Minotaur 
 and Centaurs, and the heroes of Thebes and Troy. 
 But not the great and famous only : this is too narrow, 
 too conventional a sphere ; it is not real enough. He 
 felt, what the modern world feels so keenly, that 
 wonderful histories are latent in the inconspicuous 
 paths of life, in the fugitive incidents of the hour, 
 among the persons whose faces we have seen. The 
 Church had from the first been witness to the deep 
 interest of individual life. The rising taste for novels 
 showed that society at large was beginning to be alive 
 to it And it is this feeling that behind the veil 
 there may be grades of greatness but nothing insigni- 
 ficant that led Dante to refuse to restrict himself to 
 the characters of fame. He will associate with them 
 the living men who have stood round him ; they are 
 part of the same company with the greatest. That 
 they have interested him, touched him, moved his 
 indignation or pity, struck, him as examples of great 
 vicissitude or of a perfect life, have pleased him, loved 
 him this is enough why they should live in his poem 
 as they have lived to him. He chooses at will ; 
 history, if it has been negligent at the time about 
 those whom he thought worthy of renown, must be 
 content with its loss. He tells their story, or touches 
 them with a word like the most familiar names, 
 according as he pleases. The obscure highway
 
 76 DANTE 
 
 robber, the obscure betrayer of his sister's honour 
 Rinier da Corneto and Rimer Pazzo, and Caccianimico 
 are ranked, not according to their obscurity, but 
 according to the greatness of their crimes, with the 
 famous conquerors, and "scourges of God," and 
 seducers of the heroic age, Pyrrhus and Attila, and 
 the great Jason of " royal port, who sheds no tear in 
 his torments." l He earns as high praise from Virgil 
 for his curse on the furious wrath of the old frantic 
 Florentine burgher, as if he had cursed the disturber 
 of the world's peace. 2 And so in the realms of joy, 
 among the faithful accomplishes of the highest trusts, 
 kings and teachers of the nations, founders of orders, 
 sainted empresses, appear those whom, though the 
 world had forgotten or misread them, the poet had 
 enshrined in his familiar thoughts, for their sweetness, 
 their gentle goodness, their nobility of soul; the 
 penitent, the nun, the old crusading ancestor, the 
 pilgrim who had deserted the greatness which he had 
 created, the brave logician, who " syllogised unpalat- 
 able truths" in the Quartier Latin of Paris. 8 
 
 There is small resemblance in all this this 
 
 1 See the magnificent picture, Inf. 18. 2 Ibid. 8. 
 
 * Cunizza, Piccarda, Cacciagnida, Romeo. (Parad. 9, 3, 
 
 15, 6, 10). 
 
 La luce eterna di Sigieri 
 
 Che leggendo nel rico degli Strami 
 Sillogizz6 invidiosi veri Parad. 10.
 
 DANTE 77 
 
 arbitrary and imperious tone, this range of ideas, 
 feelings, and images, this unshackled freedom, this 
 harsh reality to the dreamy gentleness of the Vita 
 Nuova, or even the staid argumentation of the more 
 mature Convito. The Vita Nuova is all self-concentra- 
 tion a brooding, not unpleased, over the varying 
 tides of feeling, which are little influenced by the 
 world without ; where every fancy, every sensation, 
 every superstition of the lover is detailed with the 
 most whimsical subtlety. The Commedia, too, has its 
 tenderness and that more deep, more natural, more 
 true, than the poet had before adapted to the tradi- 
 tionary formulae of the " Courts of Love," the eyes 
 of Beatrice are as bright, and the " conquering light 
 of her smile ; " l they still culminate, but they are 
 not alone, in the poet's heaven. And the professed 
 subject of the Commedia is still Dante's own story 
 and life ; he still makes himself the central point. 
 And steeled as he is by that high and hard experience 
 of which his poem is the projection and type " Ben 
 
 Sigieri ! dear and everlasting light ; 
 
 Who in the Street of Straw as erst he taught, 
 Raised by the truths he told, invidious spite : 
 
 in company with St. Thomas Aquinas, in the sphere of the Sun. 
 Ozanam gives a few particulars of this forgotten professor of the 
 "Rue du Fouarre," pp. 820-323. 
 
 1 Vincendo me col lume d'un sorriso. Parcul. 18.
 
 78 DANTE 
 
 tetragono ai colpi di ventura" a stern and brief- 
 spoken man, set on objects, and occupied with a 
 theme, lofty and vast as can occupy man's thoughts, 
 he still lets escape ever and anon some passing avowal 
 of delicate sensitiveness, 1 lingers for a moment on 
 
 1 For instance, his feeling of distress at gazing at the blind, 
 who were not aware of his presence 
 
 A me pareva andando fare oltrnggio 
 
 Vedendo altrui, non essendo veduto : Purg. 13. 
 
 To me it seemed a want of courtesy, 
 Unseen myself, in other's face to peer. 
 
 and of shame, at being tempted to listen to a quarrel between 
 
 two lost spirits : 
 
 Ad ascoltarli er* io del tutto fisso, 
 
 Quando '1 Maestro mi disse : or pur mira, 
 Che per poco e, che teco non mi risso. 
 Quando io '1 senti' a me parlnr con ira 
 Volsimi verso lui con tal vergogna, 
 Ch' ancor per la memoria mi ai gira, etc. Inf. 80. 
 
 Listening I stood intent, with all my mind, 
 When unto me the master said ; Take heed ; 
 To quarrel with thee I am much inclined. 
 
 When I perceived him speak in angry strain, 
 I turned to him with such remorse, I deem 
 My mind for aye the impression will retain. 
 
 c.ml the burst, 
 
 O dignitosa coscienza e netta, 
 
 Come t' e picciol fallo amaro rnorso. Purg. 8. 
 
 noble conscience, upright and refined, 
 
 How slight a fault inflicts a bitter sting. WBIGDT.
 
 DANTE 79 
 
 some indulged self -consciousness, some recollection 
 of his once quick and changeful mood "io che son 
 trasmutabil per tutte guise " l or half playfully 
 alludes to the whispered name of a lady, 2 whose 
 pleasant courtesy has beguiled a few days of exile. 
 But he is no longer spell-bound and entangled in 
 fancies of his own weaving absorbed in the un- 
 profitable contemplation of his own internal sensations. 
 The man is indeed the same, still a Florentine, still 
 metaphysical, still a lover. He returns to the haunts 
 and images of youth, to take among them his poet's 
 crown ; but " with other voice and other garb," 8 a 
 penitent and a prophet with larger thoughts, wider 
 sympathies, freer utterance j sterner and fiercer, yet 
 nobler and more genuine in his tenderness as one 
 whom trial has made serious and keen and intolerant 
 of evil, but not sceptical or callous; yet with the 
 impressions and memories of a very different scene 
 from his old day-dreams. 
 
 After that it was the pleasure of the citizens of that 
 fairest and moat famous daughter of Rome, Florence, to 
 cast me forth from her most sweet bosom (wherein I had 
 been nourished up to the maturity of my life, and in 
 which, with all peace to her, I long with all my heart to 
 rest my weary soul, and finish the time which is given 
 me), I have passed through almost all the regions to which 
 
 1 Parad. 6. - Purg. 24. farad. 25.
 
 30 DANTE 
 
 this language reaches, a wanderer, almost a beggar, dis- 
 playing, against my will, the stroke of fortune, which is 
 ofttimes unjustly wont to be imputed to the person stricken. 
 Truly, I have been a ship without a sail or helm, carried 
 to divers harbours and gulfs and shores by that parching 
 wind which sad poverty breathes ; and I have seemed vile 
 in the eyes of many, who perchance, from some fame, had 
 imagined of me in another form ; in the sight of whom 
 not only did my presence become nought, but every work 
 of mine less prized, both what had been and what was to 
 be wrought Convito, Tr. i. c. 3. 
 
 Thus proved, and thus furnished thus independ- 
 ent and confident, daring to trust his instinct and 
 genius in what was entirely untried and unusual, he 
 entered on his great poem, to shadow forth, under 
 the figure of his own conversion and purification, not 
 merely how a single soul rises to its perfection, but 
 how this visible world, in all its phases of nature, life, 
 and society, is one with the invisible, which borders 
 on it, actuates, accomplishes, and explains it. It is 
 this vast plan to take into his scope, not the soul 
 only in its struggles and triumph, but all that the soul 
 finds itself engaged with in its course ; the accidents 
 of the hour, and of ages past ; the real persons, great 
 and small, apart from and without whom it cannot 
 think or act; the material world, its theatre and 
 home it is this which gives so many various sides to 
 the Commedia, which makes it so novel and strange.
 
 DANTE 81 
 
 It is not a mere personal history, or a pouring forth 
 of feeling, like the Vita Nuova, though he is himself 
 the mysterious voyager, and he opens without reserve 
 his actual life and his heart ; he speaks, indeed, in 
 the first person, yet he is but a character of the drama, 
 and in great part of it with not more of distinct 
 personality than in that paraphrase of the penitential 
 Psalms, in which he has preluded so much of the 
 Commedia. Yet the Commedia is not a pure allegory ; 
 it admits, and makes use of the allegorical, but the 
 laws of allegory are too narrow for it ; the real in it 
 is too impatient of the veil, and breaks through in all 
 its hardness and detail, into what is most shadowy. 
 History is indeed viewed not in its ephemeral look, 
 but under the light of God's final judgments ; in its 
 completion, not in its provisional and fragmentary 
 character ; viewed therefore but in faith ; but its 
 issues, which in this confused scene we ordinarily 
 contemplate in the gross, the poet brings down to 
 detail and individuals ; he faces and grasps the 
 tremendous thought that the very men and women 
 whom we see and speak to, are now the real repre- 
 sentatives of sin and goodness, the true actors in 
 that scene which is so familiar to us as a picture 
 unflinching and terrible heart, he endures to face it 
 in its most harrowing forms. But he wrote not for 
 sport, nor to give poetic pleasure ; he wrote to warn ; 
 
 G
 
 82 DANTE 
 
 the seed of the Commedia was sown in tears, and 
 reaped in misery; and the consolations which it 
 offers are awful as they are real. 
 
 Thus, though he throws into symbol and image 
 what can only be expressed by symbol and image, 
 we can as little forget, in reading him, this real world 
 in which we live, as we can in one of Shakespeare's 
 plays. It is not merely that the poem is crowded 
 with real personages, most of them having the single 
 interest to us of being real. But all that is associated 
 with man's history and existence is interwoven with 
 the main course of thought all that gives character 
 to life, all that gives it form and feature, even to 
 quaintness, all that occupies the mind, or employs 
 the hand speculation, science, arts, manufactures, 
 monuments, scenes, customs, proverbs, ceremonies, 
 games, punishments, attitudes of men, habits of 
 living creatures. The wildest and most unearthly 
 imaginations, the most abstruse thoughts take up 
 into, and incorporate with themselves the forcible 
 and familiar impressions of our mother earth, and 
 do not refuse the company and aid even of the 
 homeliest. 
 
 This is not mere poetic ornament, peculiarly, 
 profusely, or extravagantly employed. It is one of 
 the ways in which his dominant feeling expresses 
 itself spontaneous and instinctive in each several
 
 DANTE 83 
 
 instance of it, but the kindling and effluence of 
 deliberate thought, and attending on a clear purpose 
 the feeling of the real and intimate connexion 
 between the objects of sight and faith. It is not that 
 he sees in one the simple counterpart and reverse of 
 the other, or sets himself to trace out universally their 
 mutual correspondences ; he has too strong a sense of 
 the reality of this familiar life to reduce it merely to 
 a shadow and type of the unseen. What he struggles 
 to express in countless ways, with all the resources of 
 his strange and gigantic power, is, that this world and 
 the next are both equally real, and both one parts, 
 however different, of one whole. The world to come 
 we know but in " a glass darkly " ; man can only 
 think and imagine of it in images, which he knows 
 to be but broken and faint reflections : but this world 
 we know, not in outline, and featureless idea, but by 
 name, and face, and shape, by place and person, by 
 the colours and forms which crowd over its surface, 
 the men who people its habitations, the events which 
 mark its moments. Detail fills the sense here, and is 
 the mark of reality. And thus he seeks to keep alive 
 the feeling of what that world is which he connects 
 with heaven and hell ; not by abstractions, not much 
 by elaborate and highly-finished pictures, but by 
 names, persons, local features, definite images. Widely 
 and keenly has he ranged over and searched into the
 
 84 DANTE 
 
 world with a largeness of mind which disdained not 
 to mark and treasure up, along with much unheeded 
 beauty, many a characteristic feature of nature, un- 
 noticed because so common. All his pursuits and 
 interests contribute to the impression, which, often 
 instinctively it may be, he strives to produce, of the 
 manifold variety of our life. As a man of society, his 
 memory is full of its usages, formalities, graces, follies, 
 fashions of expressive motions, postures, gestures, 
 looks of music, of handicrafts, of the conversation of 
 friends or associates of all that passes, so transient, 
 yet so keenly pleasant or distasteful, between man 
 and man. As a traveller, he recalls continually the 
 names and scenes of the world ; as a man of specula- 
 tion, the secrets of nature the phenomena of light, 
 the theory of the planets' motions, the idea and laws 
 of physiology. As a man of learning, he is filled 
 with the thoughts and recollections of ancient fable 
 and history; as a politician, with the thoughts, 
 prognostications, and hopes, of the history of the day ; 
 as a moral philosopher he has watched himself, his 
 external sensations and changes, his inward passions, 
 his mental powers, his ideas, his conscience ; he has 
 far and wide noted character, discriminated motives, 
 classed good and evil deeds. All that the man of 
 society, of travel, of science, of learning, the politician, 
 the moralist, could gather, is used at will in the great
 
 DANTE 85 
 
 poetic structure ; but all converges to the purpose, 
 and is directed by the intense feeling of the theologian, 
 who sees this wonderful and familiar scene melting 
 into, and ending in another yet more wonderful, but 
 which will one day be as familiar who sees the diffi- 
 cult but sure progress of the manifold remedies of the 
 Divine government to their predestined issue ; and, 
 over all, God and His saints. 
 
 So comprehensive in interest is the Commedia. 
 Any attempt to explain it, by narrowing that interest 
 to politics, philosophy, the moral life, or theology 
 itself, must prove inadequate. Theology strikes the 
 key-note; but history, natural and metaphysical 
 science, poetry, and art, each in their turn join in the 
 harmony, independent, yet ministering to the whole. 
 If from the poem itself we could be for a single 
 moment in doubt of the reality and dominant place 
 of religion in it, the plain-spoken prose of the Conviio 
 would show how he placed " the Divine Science, full 
 of all peace, and allowing no strife of opinions and 
 sophisms, for the excellent certainty of its subject, 
 which is God," in single perfection above all other 
 sciences, " which are, as Solomon speaks, but queens, 
 or concubines, or maidens ; but she is the ' Dove,' and 
 the ' perfect one ' ' Dove,' because without stain of 
 strife 'perfect,' because perfectly she makes us 
 behold the truth, in which our soul stills itself and is
 
 86 DANTE 
 
 at rest." But the same passage 1 shows likewise how 
 he viewed all human knowledge and human interests, 
 as holding their due place in the hierarchy of wisdom, 
 and among the steps of man's perfection. No account 
 of the Commedia will prove sufficient, which does not 
 keep in view, first of all, the high moral purpose and 
 deep spirit of faith with which it was written, and then 
 the wide liberty of materials and means which the 
 poet allowed himself in working out his design. 
 
 Doubtless, his writings have a political aspect. 
 The "great Ghibelline poet" is one of Dante's 
 received synonyms ; of his strong political opinions, 
 and the importance he attached to them, there can be 
 no doubt. And he meant his poem to be the vehicle 
 of them, and the record to all ages of the folly and 
 selfishness with which he saw men governed. That 
 he should take the deepest interest in the goings on 
 of his time, is part of his greatness ; to suppose that 
 he stopped at them, or that he subordinated to 
 political objects or feelings all the other elements of 
 his poem, is to shrink up that greatness into very 
 narrow limits. Yet this has been done by men of 
 mark and ability, by Italians, by men who read the 
 Commedia in their own mother-tongue. It has been 
 maintained as a satisfactory account of it maintained 
 with great labour and pertinacious ingenuity that 
 1 Conviio, Tr. 2, c. 14, 15.
 
 DANTE 87 
 
 Dante meant nothing more by his poem than the 
 conflicts and ideal triumph of a political party. The 
 hundred cantos of that vision of the universe are but 
 a manifesto of the Ghibelline propaganda, designed, 
 under the veil of historic images and scenes, to insin- 
 uate what it was dangerous to announce ; and Bea- 
 trice, in all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen 
 of the jargon, cant, and slang of Ghibelline free- 
 masonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade 
 the greatest name of their country to a depth of 
 laborious imbecility, to which the trifling of school- 
 men and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve 
 the enigma of Dante's works, by imagining for him 
 a character in which it is hard to say which predomi- 
 nates, the pedant, mountebank, or infidel. After that 
 we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and even 
 enter with gravity on the examination of Father 
 Hardouin's Historic Doubts. The fanaticism of an 
 outraged liberalism, produced by centuries of injustice 
 and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse 
 blindness. 1 
 
 Dante was not a Ghibelline, though he longed for 
 the interposition of an Imperial power. Historically 
 
 1 In the Remains of Arthur Henry Hallam is a paper, in 
 which he examines and disposes of this theory with a courteous 
 and forbearing irony, which would have deepened probably into 
 something more, on thinking over it a second time.
 
 88 DANTE 
 
 he did not belong to the Ghibelline party. It is true 
 that he forsook the Guelfs, with whom he had been 
 brought up, and that the White Guelfs, with whom 
 he was expelled from Florence, were at length merged 
 and lost in the Ghibelline party; 1 and he acted with 
 them for a time. 2 But no words can be stronger 
 than those in which he disjoins himself from that 
 " evil and foolish company," and claims his independ- 
 ence 
 
 A te fia bello 
 Avertifatto parte per te stesso. Parad. 17. 3 
 
 And it is not easy to conceive a Ghibelline partisan 
 putting into the mouth of Justinian, the type of law 
 and empire, a general condemnation of his party as 
 heavy as that of their antagonists, the crime of 
 having betrayed, as the Guelfs had resisted, the great 
 symbol of public right 
 
 Omai puoi giudicar di que' cotali 
 Ch' io accusai di sopra, e de' lor falli 
 Che son cagion di tutti i vostri mail. 
 
 L' uno al pubblico segno i gigli gialli 
 
 Oppone, e quel s' appropria I' altro a parte, 
 SI ch' b forte a veder qual piu ai falli. 
 
 1 Dino Comp. pp. 89-91. 
 
 1 His name appears among the White delegates in 1307. 
 Telli. p. 117. 
 
 * So will a greater fame redound to thce, 
 To have formed a party by thyself alone.
 
 DANTTf 89 
 
 Faccian li Ghibellin, facdan lor arte 
 Sot? aUro segno ; eke mal segue quello 
 Sempre chi la giustizia e lui diparte. Par ad, 6. 1 
 
 And though, as the victim of the Guelfs of Florence, 
 he found refuge among Ghibelline princes, he had 
 friends among Guelfs also. His steps and his tongue 
 were free to the end. And in character and feeling, 
 in his austerity, his sturdiness and roughness, his 
 intolerance of corruption and pride, his strongly- 
 marked devotional temper, he was much less a Ghibel- 
 line than like one of those stern Guelfs who hailed 
 Savonarola. 
 
 But he had a very decided and complete political 
 theory, which certainly was not Guelf ; and, as parties 
 then were, it was not much more Ghibelline. Most 
 assuredly no set of men would have more vigorously 
 resisted the attempt to realise his theory, would have 
 joined more heartily with all immediate opponents 
 Guelfs, Black, White, and Green, or even Boniface 
 
 1 Now may'st form an estimate of those 
 
 Whom I before accused ; and clearly scan 
 
 How great their crimes, the cause of all your woes. 
 
 This 'gainst the public banner doth array 
 The yellow lilies->-this a partisan 
 Would make it ; which most wrong, 'tis hard to say 
 
 Let, let the Ghibellines pursue their arts 
 Beneath some other ensign ; for accurst 
 Is he who it and equity disparts. WIUOHT.
 
 90 DANTE 
 
 VIII., to keep out such an emperor as Dante ima- 
 gined, than the Ghibelline nobles and potentates. 
 
 Dante's political views were a dream ; though a 
 dream based on what had been, and an anticipation 
 of what was, in part at least, to come. It was a dream 
 in the Middle Ages, in divided and republican Italy, 
 the Italy of cities of a real and national government, 
 based on justice and law. It was the dream of a real 
 state. He imagined that the Roman Empire had been 
 one great state ; he persuaded himself that Christen- 
 dom might be such. He was wrong in both instances ; 
 but in this case, as in so many others, he had already 
 caught the spirit and ideas of a far-distant future ; 
 and the political organisation of modern times, so 
 familiar to us that we cease to think of its exceeding 
 wonder, is the practical confirmation, though in a 
 form very different from what he imagined, of the 
 depth and farsightedness of those expectations which 
 are in outward form so chimerical " i miei non fcdsi 
 errori." 
 
 He had studied the "infinite disorders of the 
 world " in one of their most unrestrained scenes, the 
 streets of an Italian republic. Law was powerless, 
 good men were powerless, good intentions came to 
 naught ; neither social habits nor public power could 
 resist, when selfishness chose to have its way. The 
 Church was indeed still the salt of the nations ; but it
 
 DANTE 91 
 
 had once dared and achieved more ; it had once been 
 the only power which ruled them. And this it could 
 do no longer. If strength and energy had been 
 enough to make the Church's influence felt on govern- 
 ment, there was a Pope who could have done it a 
 man who was undoubtedly the most wondered at and 
 admired of his age, whom friend or foe never charac- 
 terised, without adding the invariable epithet of his 
 greatness of soul the " magnanimus peccator," 1 whose 
 Roman grandeur in meeting his unworthy fate fasci- 
 nated into momentary sympathy even Dante. 2 But 
 
 1 Benvenuto da Imola. 
 
 * Veggio in Alagna entrar lo fiordaliso, 
 E nel vicario suo Cristo esser catto ; 
 
 Veggiolo on' altra volta esser deriso ; 
 Veggio rinnovellar 1'aceto e '1 fele, 
 E tra vivi ladroni essere anciso. Purg. 20. 
 
 Entering Alagna, to the fleur-de-lis, 
 
 And in his Vicar Christ a captive led, 
 I see Him mocked a second time ; again 
 The vinegar and gall produced I see ; 
 And Christ Himself 'twixt living robbers slain. 
 
 WEIGHT. 
 
 O. Villani, viii. 63. Come magnanimo e valente, disse, 
 Dacchlper tradimento, come Gait Crislo, voglio esstr prcso e mi 
 convitne morire, almeno voglio morire come Papa ; e di presente 
 si fece parare dell' ammanto di San Piero, e colla corona di Con- 
 stantino in capo, e colle chiavi e croce in mano, e in su la scdia 
 papale si pose a sedere, e giunto a lui Sciarra e gli altri suoi 
 nimici, con villane parole lo scherniro.
 
 92 DANTE 
 
 among the things which Boniface VIII. could not 
 do, even if he cared about it, was the maintaining 
 peace and law in Italian towns. And while this great 
 political power was failing, its correlative and anta- 
 gonist was paralysed also. "Since the death of 
 Frederic II.," says Dante's contemporary, " the fame 
 and recollections of the empire were wellnigh extin 
 guished." 1 Italy was left without government 
 " come nave senza nocchiero in gran tempesta " to 
 the mercies of her tyrants : 
 
 Che le terre d'ltalia tutte piene 
 
 Son di tiranni, e un Marcel diventa 
 
 Ogiii villan, che parteggiando viene. Purg. 6. 8 
 
 In this scene of violence and disorder, with the 
 Papacy gone astray, the empire debased and impotent, 
 the religious orders corrupted, power meaning lawless- 
 ness, the well-disposed become weak and cowardly, 
 religion neither guide nor check to society, but only 
 the consolation of its victims Dante was bold and 
 hopeful enough to believe in the Divine appointment, 
 and in the possibility, of law and government of a 
 state. In his philosophy the institutions which pro- 
 vide for man's peace and liberty in this life are part 
 
 1 Dino Compagni, p. 135. 
 * That full of tyrants is Italia's land ; 
 And Marcellus straight accounted is 
 Each peasant vile that wields a factions hand. WRIGHT.
 
 DANTE 93 
 
 of God's great order for raising men to perfection ; 
 not indispensable, yet ordinary parts ; having their 
 important place, though but for the present time; 
 and though imperfect, real instruments of His moral 
 government. He could not believe it to be the 
 intention of Providence that on the introduction of 
 higher hopes and the foundation of a higher society, 
 civil society should collapse and be left to ruin, as 
 henceforth useless or prejudicial in man's trial and 
 training. He saw the significant intimations of 
 nature, that law and its results, justice, peace, and 
 stability, ought to be and might be realised among 
 men ; he could not think that they had lost their 
 meaning and faded away before the announcement 
 of a kingdom not of this world. And if the per- 
 fection of civil society had not been superseded by 
 the Church, it had become clear, if events were to 
 be read as signs, that she was not intended to supply 
 its political offices and functions. She had taught, 
 elevated, solaced, blessed, not only individual souls, 
 but society ; she had for a time even governed it : 
 but though her other powers remained, she could 
 govern it no longer. Failure had made it certain 
 that, in his strong and quaint language, " Ftrtus author- 
 izandi regnum nostrce mortalitatis est contra nafuram 
 ecdesice; ergo non est de numero virtutum suarum." 1 
 1 The power to grant authority in that which is the king-
 
 94 DANTE 
 
 Another and distinct organisation was required for 
 this, unless the temporal order was no longer worthy 
 the attention of Christians. 
 
 This is the idea of the De Monarchia ; and 
 though it holds but a place in the great scheme of the 
 Commedia, it is prominent there also an idea seen 
 but in a fantastic shape, encumbered and confused 
 with most grotesque imagery, but the real idea of 
 polity and law, which the experience of modern 
 Europe has attained to. 
 
 He found in clear outline in the Greek philosophy 
 the theory of merely human society ; and raising its 
 end and purpose, "finem totius humance civilitatis," to 
 a height and dignity which Heathens could not fore- 
 cast, he adopted it in its more abstract and ideal 
 form. He imagined a single authority, unselfish, 
 inflexible, irresistible, which could make all smaller 
 tyrannies to cease, and enable every man to live in 
 peace and liberty, so that he lived in justice. It is 
 simply what each separate state of Christendom has 
 by this time more or less perfectly achieved. The 
 theoriser of the Middle Ages could conceive of its 
 accomplishment only in one form, as grand as it was 
 impossible a universal monarchy. 
 
 dom of oar mortal state is contrary to the nature of the Church. 
 Therefore it is not in the number of the Church's powers. De 
 Monarch, lib. iii. p. 188, Ed. FraticellL
 
 DANTE 95 
 
 But he did not start from an abstraction. He 
 believed that history attested the existence of such a 
 monarchy. The prestige of the Roman Empire was 
 then strong. Europe still lingers on the idea, and 
 cannot even yet bring itself to give up its part in that 
 great monument of human power. But in the Middle 
 Ages the empire was still believed to exist. It was 
 the last greatness which had been seen in the world, 
 and the world would not believe that it was over. 
 Above all, in Italy, a continuity of lineage, of lan- 
 guage, of local names, and in part of civilisation and 
 law, forbad the thought that the great Roman people 
 had ceased to be. Florentines and Venetians boasted 
 that they were Romans : the legends which the 
 Florentine ladies told to their maidens at the loom 
 were tales of their mother city, Rome. The Roman 
 element, little understood, but profoundly reverenced 
 and dearly cherished, was dominant; the conductor 
 of civilisation, and enfolding the inheritance of all 
 the wisdom, experience, feeling, art, of the past, it 
 elevated, even while it overawed, oppressed, and 
 enslaved. A deep belief in Providence added to the 
 intrinsic grandeur of the empire a sacred character. 
 The flight of the eagle has been often told and often 
 sung; but neither in Livy nor Virgil, Gibbon nor 
 Bossuet, with intenser sympathy or more kindred 
 power, than in those rushing and unflagging verses in
 
 96 DANTE 
 
 which the Middle- Age poet hears the imperial legis 
 lator relate the fated course of the "sacred sign," 
 from the day when Pallas died for it till it accom- 
 plished the vengeance of heaven in Judaea, and 
 afterwards, under Charlemagne, smote down the 
 enemies of the Church. 1 
 
 The following passage, from the De Monarchia, 
 will show the poet's view of the Roman Empire, and 
 its office in the world : 
 
 To the reasons above alleged, a memorable experience 
 brings confirmation : I mean that state of mankind which 
 the Son of God, when He would for man's salvation take 
 man upon Him, either waited for, or ordered when so He 
 willed. For if from the fall of our first parents, which 
 was the starting-point of all our wanderings, we retrace 
 the various dispositions of men and their times, we shall 
 not find at any time, except under the divine monarch 
 Augustus, when a perfect monarchy existed, that the world 
 was everywhere quiet And that then mankind was 
 happy in the tranquillity of universal peace, this all 
 writers of history, this famous poets, this even the Scribe 
 of the meekness of Christ has deigned to attest And 
 lastly, Paul has called that most blessed condition, the 
 fulness of time. Truly time, and the things of time, 
 were full, for no mystery of our felicity then lacked ite 
 minister. But how the world has gone on from the time 
 when that seamless robe was first torn by the claws of 
 covetousness, we may read, and would that we might not 
 
 1 Farad, c. 6.
 
 DANTE 97 
 
 also see. race of men, by how great storms and losses, 
 by how great shipwrecks hast thou of necessity been vexed 
 since, transformed into a beast of many heads, thou hast 
 been struggling different ways, sick in understanding, 
 equally sick in heart. The higher intellect, with its 
 invincible reasons, thou reckest not of ; nor of the inferior, 
 with its eye of experience ; nor of affection, with the 
 sweetness of divine suasion, when the trumpet of the 
 Holy Ghost sounds to thee " Behold, how good is it, 
 and how pleasant, brethren, to dwell together in unity." 
 De Monarch, lib. i. p. 54. 
 
 Yet this great Roman Empire existed still unim- 
 paired in name not unimposing even in what really 
 remained of it. Dante, to supply a want, turned it 
 into a theory a theory easy to smile at now, but 
 which contained and was a beginning of unknown or 
 unheeded truth. What he yearns after is the pre- 
 dominance of the principle of justice in civil society. 
 That, if it is still imperfect, is no longer a dream in 
 our day ; but experience had never realised it to him, 
 and he takes refuge in tentative and groping theory. 
 The divinations of the greatest men have been vague 
 and strange, and none have been stranger than those 
 of the author of the De Monarchia. The second 
 book, in which he establishes the title of the Roman 
 people to Universal Empire, is as startling a piece of 
 mediaeval argument as it would be easy to find. 
 
 As when we cannot attain to look upon a cause, we 
 
 U
 
 98 DANTE 
 
 commonly wonder at a new effect, so when we know the 
 cause, we look down with a certain derision on those who 
 remain in wonder. And I indeed wondered once how 
 the Roman people had, without any resistance, been set 
 over the wprld ; and looking at it superficially, I thought 
 that they had obtained this by no right, but by mere force 
 of arms. But when I fixed deeply the eyes of my mind 
 on it, and by most effectual signs knew that Divine Provi- 
 dence had wrought this, wonder departed, and a certain 
 scornful contempt came in its stead, when I perceived the 
 nations raging against the pre- eminence of the Roman 
 people : when I see the people imagining a vain thing, 
 as I once used to do ; when, moreover, I grieve over kings 
 and princes agreeing in this only, to be against their Lord 
 and his anointed Roman Emperor. Wherefore in derision, 
 not without a certain grief, I can cry out, for that glorious 
 people and for Caesar, with him who cried in behalf of the 
 Prince of Heaven, "Why did the nations rage, and the 
 people imagine vain things ; the kings of the earth stood 
 up, and the rulers were joined in one against the Lord 
 and his anointed." But (because natural love suffers 
 not derision to be of long duration, but, like the summer 
 sun, which, scattering the morning mists, irradiates the 
 east with light, so prefers to pour forth the light of 
 correction) therefore to break the bonds of the ignorance 
 of such kings and rulers, to show that the human race is 
 free from their yoke, I will exhort myself, in company 
 with the most holy Prophet, taking up hia following 
 words, " Let us break their bonds, and cast away from ua 
 their yoke." De Monarch, lib. ii. p. 68. 
 
 And to prove this pre-eminence of right in the
 
 DANTE 99 
 
 Roman people, and their heirs, the Emperors of 
 Christendom, he appeals not merely to the course of 
 Providence, to their high and noble ancestry, to the 
 blessings of their just and considerate laws, to their 
 unselfish guardianship of the world " Romanum 
 imperium de fonte nascitur pietatis;" not merely 
 to their noble examples of private virtue, self-devo- 
 tion, and public spirit " those most sacred victims 
 of the Decian house, who laid down their lives for 
 the public weal, as Livy not as they deserved, but 
 as he was able tells to their glory; and that un- 
 speakable sacrifice of freedom's sternest guardians, 
 the Catos ; " not merely to the " judgment of God " 
 in that great duel and wager of battle for empire, in 
 which heaven declared against all other champions 
 and "co-athletes" Alexander, Pyrrhus, Hannibal, 
 and by all the formalities of judicial combat awarded 
 the great prize to those who fought, not for love or 
 hatred, but justice " Quis igiiur nunc adeo obtusce mentis 
 est, qui non videat, sub jure duelli gloriosum populum 
 coronam totius orbis esse lucratumf" not merely to 
 arguments derived "from the principles of the 
 Christian faith" but to miracles. "The Roman 
 empire," he says, "was, in order to its perfections, 
 aided by the help of miracles ; therefore it was willed 
 by God ; and, by consequence, both was, and is, of 
 right." And these miracles, "proved by the testi-
 
 100 DANTE 
 
 mony of illustrious authorities," are the prodigies of 
 Livy the ancile of Numa, the geese of the Capitol, 
 the escape of Clelia, the hail-storm which checked 
 Hannibal. 1 
 
 The intellectual phenomenon is a strange one. 
 It would be less strange if Dante were arguing in the 
 schools, or pleading for a party. But even Henry of 
 Luxemburg cared little for such a throne as the poet 
 wanted him to fill, much less Can Grande and the 
 Visconti. The idea, the theory, and the argument, 
 are of the writer's own solitary meditation. We may 
 wonder. But there are few things more strange than 
 the history of argument. How often has a cause or 
 an idea turned out, in the eyes of posterity, so much 
 better than its arguments. How often have we seen 
 argument getting as it were into a groove, and unable 
 to extricate itself, so as to do itself justice. The 
 everyday cases of private experience, of men defend- 
 ing right conclusions on wrong or conventional 
 grounds, or in a confused form, entangled with con- 
 clusions of a like yet different nature ; of arguments, 
 theories, solutions, which once satisfied, satisfying us 
 no longer on a question about which we hold the 
 same belief of one party unable to comprehend the 
 arguments of another of one section of the same 
 
 1 De Monarch, lib. ii. pp. 62, 66, 78, 82, 84. 108-114, 116, 
 72-76.
 
 DANTE 101 
 
 side smiling at the defence of their common cause by 
 another are all reproduced on a grander scale in 
 the history of society. There too, one age cannot 
 comprehend another; there too it takes time to 
 disengage, subordinate, eliminate. Truth of this sort 
 is not the elaboration of one keen or strong mind, 
 but of the secret experience of many; "nihil sine 
 cetate est, omnia tempus expectant" l But a counterpart 
 to the De M&narchia is not wanting in our own day ; 
 theory has not ceased to be mighty. In warmth 
 and earnestness, in sense of historic grandeur, in its 
 support of a great cause and a great idea, not less 
 than in the thought of its motto, cts Koipavos <rra>, 
 De Maistre's volume Du Pape, recalls the antagonist 
 De M&narchia ; but it recalls it not less in its bold 
 dealing with facts, and its bold assumption of prin- 
 ciples, though the knowledge and debates of five 
 more busy centuries, and the experience of modern 
 courts and revolutions, might have guarded the 
 Piedmontese nobleman from the mistakes of the old 
 Florentine. 
 
 But the idea of the De Monarchia is no key to the 
 Commedia. The direct and primary purpose of the 
 Commedia is surely its obvious one. It is to stamp a 
 deep impression on the mind, of the issues of good 
 
 1 "Nothing is without its age and date ; all things wait for 
 their time." Tertull.
 
 102 DANTE 
 
 and ill doing here of the real worlds of pain and 
 joy. To do this forcibly, it is done in detail of 
 course it can only be done in figure. Punishment, 
 purification, or the fulness of consolation are, as he 
 would think, at this very moment, the lot of all the 
 numberless spirits who have ever lived here spirits 
 still living and sentient as himself: parallel with 
 our life, they too are suffering or are at rest. Without 
 pause or interval, in all its parts simultaneously, this 
 awful scene is going on the judgments of God are 
 being fulfilled could we but see it. It exists, it 
 might be seen, at each instant of time, by a soul 
 whose eyes were opened, which was carried through 
 it. And this he imagines. It had been imagined 
 before ; it is the working out, which is peculiar to 
 him. It is not a barren vision. His subject is, 
 besides the eternal world, the soul which contemplates 
 it ; by sight, according to his figures in reality, by 
 faith. As he is led on from woe to deeper woe, then 
 through the tempered chastisements and resignation 
 of Purgatory to the beatific vision, he is tracing the 
 course of the soul on earth, realising sin and weaning 
 itself from it of its purification and preparation for 
 its high lot, by converse with the good and wise, by 
 the remedies of grace, by efforts of will and love, 
 perhaps by the dominant guidance of some single 
 pure and holy influence, whether of person, or insti-
 
 DANTE 103 
 
 tution, or thought. Nor will we say but that beyond 
 this earthly probation, he is not also striving to grasp 
 and imagine to himself something of that awful 
 process and training, by which, whether in or out of 
 the flesh, the spirit is made fit to meet its Maker, its 
 Judge, and its Chief Good. 
 
 Thus it seems that even in its main design the 
 poem has more than one aspect ; it is a picture, a 
 figure, partially a history, perhaps an anticipation. 
 And this is confirmed, by what the poet has himself 
 distinctly stated, of his ideas of poetic composition. 
 His view is expressed generally in his philosophical 
 treatise, the Convito ; but it is applied directly to the 
 Commedia, in a letter, which, if in its present form of 
 doubtful authenticity, without any question represents 
 his sentiments, and the substance of which is incorpo- 
 rated in one of the earliest writings on the poem, 
 Boccaccio's commentary. The following is his account 
 of the subject of the poem : 
 
 For the evidence of what is to be said, it is to be noted, 
 that this work is not of one single meaning only, but may 
 be said to have many meanings ("polysensuum"). For 
 the first meaning is that of the letter another is that of 
 things signified by the letter ; the first of these is called 
 the literal sense, the second, the allegorical or moral. 
 This mode of treating a subject may for clearness' sake be 
 considered in those verses of the psalm, " In exitu Israel" 
 " When Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob
 
 104 DANTE 
 
 from the strange people, Judah was his sanctuary, and 
 Israel his dominion." For if we look at the Utter only, 
 there is here signified the going out of the children of 
 Israel in the time of Moses if at the allegory there is 
 signified our redemption through Christ if at the moral 
 sense there is signified to us the conversion of the soul 
 from the mourning and misery of sin to the state of grace 
 if at the anagogic sense, 1 there is signified the passing 
 out of the holy soul from the bondage of this corruption 
 to the liberty of everlasting glory. And these mystical 
 meanings, though called by different names, may all be 
 called allegorical as distinguished from the literal or 
 historical sense. . . . This being considered, it is plain 
 that there ought to be a twofold subject, concerning which 
 the two corresponding meanings may proceed. Therefore 
 we must consider first concerning the subject of this work 
 as it is to be understood literally, then as it is to be con- 
 sidered allegorically. The subject then of the whole 
 work, taken literally only, is the state of souk after death 
 considered in itself. For about this, and on this, the 
 whole work turns. But if the work be taken allegorically 
 its subject is man, as, by his freedom of choice deserving 
 well or ill, he is subject to the justice which rewards and 
 punishes. 2 
 
 The passage in the Convito is to the same effect ; 
 but his remarks on the moral and anagogic meaning 
 may be quoted : 
 
 1 LUera gesta refert, quid credos allegoria 
 Moralis quid agas, quid 8]>eres anagoyia. 
 
 De Wittc's note from Buti. 
 1 Ep. ad Kan Grand. 6, 7.
 
 DANTE 105 
 
 The third sense is called moral ; that it is which readers 
 ought to go on noting carefully in writings, for their own 
 profit and that of their disciples ; as in the Gospel it 
 may be noted when Christ went up to the mountain to 
 be transfigured, that of the twelve Apostles he took with 
 him only three ; in which morally we may understand, 
 that in the most secret things we ought to have but few 
 companions. The fourth sort of meaning is called anagogic, 
 that is, above our sense ; and this is when we spiritually 
 interpret a passage, which even in its literal meaning, by 
 means of the things signified, expresses the heavenly 
 things of everlasting glory ; as may be seen in that song 
 of the Prophet, which says that in the coming out of the 
 people of Israel from Egypt, Judah was made holy and 
 free ; which, although it is manifestly true according to 
 the letter, is not less true as spiritually understood ; that 
 is, that when the soul comes out of sin, it is made holy 
 and free, in its own power. 1 
 
 With this passage before us there can be no doubt 
 of the meaning, however veiled, of those beautiful 
 lines, already referred to, in which Virgil, after having 
 conducted the poet up the steeps of Purgatory where 
 his sins have been one by one cancelled by the 
 ministering angels, finally takes leave of him, and 
 bids him wait for Beatrice, on the skirts of the 
 earthly Paradise : 
 
 Come la scala tut la sottu noi 
 Fu corsa e fummo in su '1 grado superno, 
 
 1 Convito, Tr. 2, c. 1.
 
 106 DANTE 
 
 In me ficc6 Virgilio gli occhi suoi, 
 
 E disse : " II temporal fuoco, e 1' eterno 
 Veduto hai, figlio, e se' venuto in parte 
 Ov' io per me piu oltre non discerno. 
 
 Tratto t' ho qui con ingegno e con arte : 
 Lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce ; 
 Fuor se' dell' erte vie, fuor se' dell' arte. 
 
 Vedi il sole che 'n fronte ti riluce : 
 Vedi 1' erbetta, i fiori, e gli arboscelli 
 Che quella terra sol da se produce. 
 
 Mentre che vegnon lieti gli occhi belli 
 Che lagrimando a te venir mi fenno, 
 Seder ti puoi e puoi andar tra elli. 
 
 Non aspettar inio dir piu nfc mio cenno : 
 Libero, dritto, sano e tuo arbitrio, 
 E fallo fora non fare a suo senno : 
 
 Perch' io te sopra te corono e mi trio." Purg. c. 27. 1 
 
 1 When we had ran 
 
 O'er all the ladder to its topmost round, 
 As there we stood, on me the Mantuan fix'd 
 His eyes, and thus he spake : " Both fires, my son, 
 The temporal and the eternal, thou hast seen : 
 And art arrived, where of itself my ken 
 No further reaches. I with skill and art, 
 Thus far have drawn thee. Now thy pleasure take 
 For guide. Thou hast o'ercome the steeper way, 
 O'ercome the straiten Lo ! the sun, that darts 
 His beam upon thy forehead : Io ! the herb, 
 The arborets and flowers, which of itself 
 This land pours forth profuse. Till those bright eye 
 With gladness come, which, weeping, made me haste
 
 DANTE 107 
 
 The general meaning of the Commedia is clear 
 enough. But it certainly does appear to refuse to be 
 fitted into a connected formal scheme of interpreta- 
 tion. It is not a homogeneous, consistent allegory, 
 like the Pilgrim's Progress and the Fairy Queen. The 
 allegory continually breaks off, shifts its ground, gives 
 place to other elements, or mingles with them like 
 a stream which suddenly sinks into the earth, and 
 after passing under plains and mountains, reappears 
 in a distant point, and in different scenery. We can, 
 indeed, imagine its strange author commenting on it, 
 and finding or marking out its prosaic substratum, 
 with the cold-blooded precision and scholastic dis- 
 tinctions of the Convito. However, he has not done 
 so. And of the many enigmas which present them- 
 selves, either in its structure or separate parts, the 
 key seems hopelessly lost The early commentators 
 are very ingenious, but very unsatisfactory ; they see 
 where we can see, but beyond that they are us full of 
 uncertainty as ourselves. It is in character with that 
 solitary and haughty spirit, while touching universal 
 
 To succour thee, thou mayest or seat thee down, 
 
 Or wander where thou wilt. Expect no more 
 
 Sanction of warning voice or sign from me, 
 
 Free of thine own arbitrament to choose, 
 
 Discreet, judicious. To distrust thy sense 
 
 Were henceforth error. I invest thee then 
 
 With crown and mitre, sovereign o'er thyself."- CART.
 
 108 DANTE 
 
 sympathies, appalling and charming all hearts, to have 
 delighted in his own dark sayings, which had meaning 
 only to himself. It is true that, whether in irony, or 
 from that quaint studious care for the appearance of 
 literal truth, which makes him apologise for the 
 wonders which he relates, and confirm them by an 
 oath, " on the words of his poem," l he provokes and 
 challenges us ; bids us admire " doctrine hidden under 
 strange verses;" 2 bids us strain our eyes, for the veil 
 is thin : 
 
 Aguzza, qui, letter, ben 1' occhi al vero : 
 Che il velo e ora ben tanto sottile, 
 Certo, che il trapassar dentro e leggiero. Purg. c. 8. 8 
 
 1 Sempre a quel ver, ch' ha faccia di menzogna, 
 De' 1' uom chiudcr le labbra, quanto puote, 
 Per6 che senza colpa fa vcrgogna. 
 
 Ma qui tacer nol posso ; c per le note 
 Di questa Commedia, letter, ti giuro 
 S' elle non sien di lunga grazia vote, etc. Inf. 16. 
 
 That truth which bears the semblance of a lie 
 Should never pass the lips, if possible : 
 Though crime be absent, still disgrace is nigh, 
 But here I needs must speak ; and by the rhymes 
 Reader of this my Comedy, I swear, 
 So may they live with fame to future times. WEIGHT. 
 
 * Inf. 9. 
 
 * Reader ! here sharpen to the truth thy sight ; 
 
 For thou with care may'st penetrate the veil, 
 So finely woven, and of texture slight
 
 DANTE 109 
 
 But eyes are still strained in conjecture and 
 doubt. 
 
 Yet the most certain and detailed commentary, 
 one which should assign the exact reason for every 
 image or allegory, and its place and connexion in a 
 general scheme, would add but little to the charm or 
 to the use of the poem. It is not so obscure but that 
 every man's experience who has thought over and 
 felt the mystery of our present life, may supply 
 the commentary the more ample, the wider 
 and more various his experience, the deeper and 
 keener his feeling. Details and links of connexion 
 may be matter of controversy. Whether the three 
 beasts of the forest mean definitely the vices of the 
 time, or of Florence specially, or of the poet himself 
 " the wickedness of his heels, compassing him round 
 about " may still exercise critics and antiquaries ; 
 but that they carry with them distinct and special 
 impressions of evil, and that they are the hindrances 
 of man's salvation, is not doubtful. And our know- 
 ledge of the key of the allegory, where we possess it, 
 contributes but little to the effect. We may infer 
 from the Convito 1 that the eyes of Beatrice stand 
 definitely for the demonstrations, and her smiles for 
 the persuasions of wisdom; but the poetry of the 
 Paradiso is not about demonstrations and persuasions, 
 1 Convito, Tr. 3, c. 15.
 
 1 1 DANTE 
 
 but about looks and smiles; and the ineffable and 
 holy calm "serenitatis et ceternitatis afflatus' 1 which 
 pervades it, comes from its sacred truths, and holy 
 persons, and that deep spirit of high-raised yet com- 
 posed devotion, which it requires no interpreter to 
 show us. 
 
 Figure and symbol, then, are doubtless the law of 
 composition in the Commedia ; but this law discloses 
 itself very variously, and with different degrees of 
 strictness. In its primary and most general form 
 it is palpable, consistent, pervading. There can be 
 no doubt that the poem is meant to be understood 
 figuratively no doubt of what in general it is meant 
 to shadow forth no doubt as to the general meaning 
 of its parts, their connexion with each other. But 
 in its secondary and subordinate applications, the law 
 works to our eye at least irregularly, unequally, 
 and fitfully. There can be no question that Virgil, 
 the poet's guide, represents the purely human element 
 in the training of the soul and of society, as Beatrice 
 does the divine. But neither represent the whole ; he 
 does not sum up all appliances of wisdom in Virgil, 
 nor all teachings and influences of grace in Beatrice ; 
 these have their separate figures. And both represent 
 successively several distinct forms of their general 
 antitypes. They have various degrees of abstractness, 
 and narrow down, according to that order of things
 
 DANTE 1 1 1 
 
 to which they refer and correspond, into the special 
 and the personal. In the general economy of the 
 poem, Virgil stands for human wisdom in its widest 
 sense ; but he also stands for it in its various shapes, 
 in the different parts. He is the type of human 
 philosophy and science. 1 He is, again, more definitely, 
 that spirit of imagination and poetry, which opens 
 men's eyes to the glory of the visible, and the truth 
 of the invisible ; and to Italians, he is a definite 
 embodiment of it, their own great poet, " votes, poeta 
 noster" 2 In the Christian order, he is human wisdom, 
 dimly mindful of its heavenly origin presaging dimly 
 its return to God sheltering in heathen times that 
 "vague and unconnected family of religious truths, 
 originally from God, but sojourning without the 
 sanction of miracle or visible home, as pilgrims up 
 and down the world." 8 In the political order, he is 
 the guide of law-givers, wisdom fashioning the im- 
 pulses and instincts of men into the harmony of 
 society, contriving stability and peace, guarding 
 justice; fit part for the poet to fill, who had sung 
 the origin of Rome, and the justice and peace of 
 Augustus. In the order of individual life, and the 
 progress of the individual soul, he is the human con- 
 
 1 " O tu cb* onori ogni scienza ed arte." Inf. 4. " Quel sario 
 gentil, che tutto seppe." Inf. 7. " II mar di tutto'l senno."- 
 In'. 8. a De Afonurchia. * XewmauV Anant
 
 112 DANTE 
 
 science witnessing to duty, its discipline and its hopes, 
 and with yet more certain and fearful presage, to 
 its vindication; the human conscience seeing and 
 acknowledging the law, but unable to confer power 
 to fulfil it wakened by grace from among the dead, 
 leading the living man up to it, and waiting for its 
 light and strength. But he is more than a figure. 
 To the poet himself, who blends with his high argu- 
 ment his whole life, Virgil had been the utmost that 
 mind can be to mind teacher, quickener and revealer 
 of power, source of thought, exemplar and model, 
 never disappointing, never attained to, observed with 
 "long study and great love i" 1 
 
 Tu duca, tu signer, e tu maestro. Inf. 2. 
 
 And towards this great master, the poet's whole 
 soul is poured forth in reverence and affection. To 
 Dante he is no figure, but a person with feelings 
 and weaknesses overcome by the vexation, kindling 
 into the wrath, carried away by the tenderness, of the 
 moment. He reads his scholar's heart, takes him by 
 the hand in danger, carries him in his arms and in 
 his bosom, "like a son more than a companion," 
 rebukes his unworthy curiosity, kisses him when he 
 shows a noble spirit, asks pardon for his own mis- 
 takes. Never were the kind yet severe ways of a 
 
 1 fy. i.
 
 DANTE 113 
 
 master, or the disciple's diffidence and open-hearted- 
 ness, drawn with greater force, or less effort ; and he 
 seems to have been reflecting on his own affection to 
 Virgil, when he makes Statins forget that they were 
 both but shades : 
 
 Or puoi la quantitate 
 Coraprender dell' amor ch' a te mi scalda, 
 Quando dismento la nostra vanitate 
 Trattando V ombre come cosa salda. Purg. 21. l 
 
 And so with the poet's second guide. The great 
 idea which Beatrice figures, though always present, is 
 seldom rendered artificially prominent, and is often 
 entirely hidden beneath the rush of real recollections, 
 and the creations of dramatic power. Abstractions 
 venture and trust themselves among realities, and for 
 the time are forgotten. A name, a real person, a 
 historic passage, a lament or denunciation, a tragedy 
 of actual life, a legend of classic times, the fortunes of 
 friends the story of Francesca or Ugolino, the fate 
 of Buonconte's corpse, the apology of Pier dello Vigne, 
 the epitaph of Madonna Pia, Ulysses's western voyage, 
 the march of Roman history appear and absorb for 
 themselves all interest : or else it is a philosophical 
 
 1 See now how brightly beaming 
 Towards thce the fire of my affection springs, 
 When I forget our airy essence, deeming 
 Of empty shadows, aa substantial things. WKIOHT 
 
 I
 
 114 DANTE 
 
 speculation, or a theory of morality, or a case of con- 
 science not indeed alien from the main subject, yet 
 independent of the allegory, and not translatable 
 into any new meaning standing on their own ground, 
 worked out each according to its own law ; but they 
 do not disturb the main course of the poet's thought, 
 who grasps and paints each detail of human life in its 
 own peculiarity, while he sees in each a significance 
 and interest beyond itself. He does not stop in each 
 case to tell us so, but he makes it felt. The tale 
 ends, the individual disappears, and the great allegory 
 resumes its course. It is like one of those great 
 musical compositions which alone seem capable of 
 adequately expressing, in a limited time, a course of 
 unfolding and change, in an idea, a career, a life, a 
 society where one great thought predominates, 
 recurs, gives colour and meaning, and forms the unity 
 of the whole, yet passes through many shades and 
 transitions ; is at one time definite, at another sug- 
 gestive and mysterious ; incorjx>rating and giving 
 free place and play to airs and melodies even of an 
 alien cast; striking off abruptly from its expected 
 road, but without ever losing itself, without breaking 
 its true continuity, or failing of its completeness. 
 
 This then seems to us the end and purpose of the 
 Corn-media, ; to produce on the mind a sense of the 
 judgments of God, analogous to that produced by
 
 DANTE 115 
 
 Scripture itself. They are presented to us in the 
 Bible in shapes which address themselves primarily 
 to the heart and conscience, and seek not carefully to 
 explain themselves. They are likened to the " great 
 deep," to the " strong mountains " vast and awful, 
 but abrupt and incomplete, as the huge, broken, 
 rugged piles and chains of mountains. And we see 
 them through cloud and mist, in shapes only approxi- 
 mating to the true ones. Still they impress us deeply 
 and truly, often the more deeply because uncon- 
 sciously. A character, an event, a word, isolated and 
 unexplained, stamps its meaning ineffaceably, though 
 ever a matter of question and wonder; it may be 
 dark to the intellect, yet the conscience understands 
 it, often but too well. In such suggestive ways is 
 the Divine government for the most part put before us 
 in the Bible ways which do not satisfy the under- 
 standing, but which fill us with a sense of reality. 
 And it seems to have been by meditating on them, 
 which he certainly did, much and thoughtfully and 
 on the infinite variety of similar ways in which tho 
 strongest impressions are conveyed to us in ordinary 
 life, by means short of clear and distinct explanation 
 by looks, by images, by sounds, by motions, by 
 remote allusion and broken words, that Dante was led 
 to choose so new and remarkable a mode of con- 
 veying to his countrymen his thoughts and feelings
 
 116 DA.NTE 
 
 and presentiments about the mystery of God's counsel. 
 The Bible teaches us by means of real history, traced 
 so far as is necessary along its real course. The poet 
 expresses his view of the world also in real history, 
 but carried on into figure. 
 
 The poetry with which the Christian Church had 
 been instinct from the beginning, converges and is 
 gathered up in the Commedia. The faith had early 
 shown its poetical aspect. It is superfluous to dwell 
 on this, for it is the charge against ancient teaching 
 that it was too large and imaginative. It soon began 
 to try rude essays in sculpture and mosaic : expressed 
 its feeling of nature in verse and prose, rudely also, 
 but often with originality and force ; and opened a 
 new vein of poetry in the thoughts, hopes, and aspira- 
 tions of regenerate man. Modern poetry must go 
 back, for many of its deepest and most powerful 
 sources, to the writings of the Fathers, and their 
 followers of the School. The Church further had a 
 poetry of its own, besides the poetry of literature ; 
 it had the poetry of devotion the Psalter chanted 
 daily, in a new language and a new meaning; and 
 that wonderful body of hymns, to which age after age 
 had contributed its offering, from the Ambrosian 
 hymns to the Veni, Sancie Spiritus of a king of 
 France, the Pange lingua of Thomas Aquinas, the 
 Dies irce, and Stabat Mater, of the two Franciscan
 
 LAtfTE 117 
 
 brethren, Thomas of Celauo, and Jacopone. 1 The 
 elements and fragments of poetry were everywhere 
 in the Church in her ideas of life, in her rules and 
 institutions for passing through it, in her preparation 
 for death, in her offices, ceremonial, celebrations, 
 usages, her consecration of domestic, literary, com- 
 mercial, civic, military, political life, the meanings and 
 ends she had given them, the religious seriousness 
 with which the forms of each were dignified in her 
 doctrine, and her dogmatic system her dependence 
 on the unseen world her Bible. From each and all 
 of these, and from that public feeling which, if it 
 expressed itself but abruptly and incoherently, was 
 quite alive to the poetry which surrounded it, the 
 poet received due impressions of greatness and 
 beauty, of joy and dread. Then the poetry of 
 Christian religion and Christian temper, hitherto dis- 
 persed, or manifested in act only, found its full and 
 distinct utterance, not unworthy to rank in grandeur, 
 in music, in sustained strength, with the last noble 
 voices from expiring Heathenism. 
 
 But a long interval had passed since then. The 
 Commcdia first disclosed to Christian and modern 
 Europe that it was to have a literature of its own, 
 great and admirable, though in its own language and 
 embodying its own ideas. " It was as if, at some of 
 1 Trench, Sacred Latin Poetry, 1849.
 
 118 DANTE 
 
 the ancient games, a stranger had appeared upon the 
 plain, and thrown his quoit among the marks of 
 former casts, which tradition had ascribed to the 
 demi-gods." 1 We are so accustomed to the excellent 
 and varied literature of modern times, so original, so 
 perfect in form and rich in thought, so expressive of 
 all our sentiments, meeting so completely our wants, 
 fulfilling our ideas, that we can scarcely imagine the 
 time when this condition was new when society was 
 beholden to a foreign language for the exponents of 
 its highest thoughts and feelings. But so it was 
 when Dante wrote. The great poets, historians, philo- 
 sophers of his day, the last great works of intellect, 
 belonged to old Rome and the Latin language. So 
 wonderful and prolonged was the fascination of 
 Rome. Men still lived under its influence ; believed 
 that the Latin language was the perfect and per- 
 manent instrument of thought in its highest forms, 
 the only expression of refinement and civilisation ; 
 and had not conceived the hope that their own 
 dialects could ever rise to such heights of dignity and 
 power. Latin, which had enchased and preserved 
 such precious remains of ancient wisdom, was now 
 shackling the living mind in its efforts. Men 
 imagined that they were still using it naturally on 
 all high themes and solemn business ; but though 
 1 Hallam's Middle Ages, c. ix. vol. iii. p. 563.
 
 DANTE 119 
 
 they used it with facility, it was no longer natural ; 
 it had lost the elasticity of life, and had become in 
 their hands a stiffened and distorted, though still 
 powerful, instrument. The very use of the word 
 latino in the writers of this period, to express what 
 is clear and philosophical in language, 1 while it shows 
 their deep reverence for it, shows how Latin civilisa- 
 tion was no longer their own, how it had insensibly 
 become an external and foreign element But they 
 found it very hard to resign their claim to a share 
 in its glories ; with nothing of their own to match 
 against it, they still delighted to speak of it as 
 "our language," or its writers as "our poets," "our 
 historians." 2 
 
 The spell was indeed beginning to break. Guido 
 Cavalcanti, Dante's strange, stern, speculative friend, 
 who is one of the fathers of the Italian language, is 
 characterised in the Commedia 3 by his scornful dislike 
 of Latin, even in the mouth of Virgil. Yet Dante 
 himself, the great assertor, by argument and example, 
 of the powers of the Vulgar tongue, once dared not 
 to think that the Vulgar tongue could bo other to 
 the Latin, than as a subject to his sovereign. Ho 
 
 1 Parad. 3, 12, 17. Convil. p. 108. " A pifi LatiiiamcnU 
 vcdere la seutenza letterale. " 
 
 2 Vide the De Monarchies. 
 
 8 Inf. 10, and compare the Vit. N. p. 334, ed. Fraticelli.
 
 120 PANTE 
 
 was bolder when ho wrote De Fulgari Eloquio; but in 
 the earlier Conviio, while pleading earnestly for the 
 beauty of the Italian, he yields with reverence the 
 first place to the Latin for nobleness, because the 
 Latin is permanent, and the Vulgar subject to fluctua- 
 tion and corruption ; for power, because the Latin 
 can express conceptions to which the Vulgar is 
 unequal ; for beauty, because the structure of the 
 Latin is a masterly arrangement of scientific art, and 
 the beauty of the Vulgar depends on mere use. 1 The 
 very title of his poem, the Commedia, contains in it a 
 homage to the lofty claims of the Latin. It is called 
 a Comedy, and not Tragedy, he says, after a marvel- 
 lous account of the essence and etymology of the two, 
 first, because it begins sadly, and ends joyfully ; and 
 next, because of its language, that humble speech of 
 ordinary life, "in which even women converse." 2 
 
 1 Convito, L 5. 
 
 9 Ep. ad Kan Grand. 9, a curious specimen of the learning 
 of the time : " Scienduin est, quod Comaedia dicitur a KUfj.ii, villa 
 et woi], quod est cattius, unde Cbmaedia quasi villanus cantus. 
 Et est Comcedia genus quoddam poeticce narrationis, ab omnibus 
 aliis differens. Diflert ergo a Tragoedia in materia per hoc, 
 quod Tragoedia in principio est admirabilis et quieta, in fine 
 fcetida et horribilis ; et dicitur propter hoc a rpayot, i.e. hircus, 
 et uSrj, quasi cantus hircinus, i.e. foetidus ad modum hirci, ut 
 patet per Scnecam in suis tragcediis. Comcedia vero inchoat 
 asperitatem alicujus rei, sed ejus materia prospere terminatur, 
 ut patet per Tereutium in suis Comcediis. . . . Similiter diiFeruiit
 
 DANTE 121 
 
 He honoured the Latin, but his love was for the 
 Italian. He was its champion and indignant defender 
 against the depreciation of ignorance and fashion. 
 Confident of its power and jealous of its beauty, he 
 pours forth his fierce scorn on the blind stupidity, 
 the affectation, the vainglory, the envy, and above 
 all, the cowardice of Italians who held lightly their 
 mother tongue. " Many," he says, after enumerating 
 the other offenders, "from this pusillanimity and 
 cowardice disparage their own language, and exalt 
 that of others ; and of this sort are those hateful 
 
 in modo loquendi ; elate et sublime Tragcedia, Comcedia vero 
 remisse et humiliter sicut vult Horat in Poet ... Et per 
 hoc patet, quod Comcedia diciter pnesens opus. Nam si ad 
 materiam respiciamus, a principio horribilis et foetida est, quia 
 Infernus: in fine prospera, desiderabilis et grata, quia Paradisua. 
 Si ad moduiu loquendi, remissus est modus et bumilis, quia 
 locutio Vulgaris, in qua et mulierculae communicant. Et sic 
 patct quia Comcedia dicitur." Cf. de Vulg. Eloq. 2, 4, Parad. 
 80. He calls the ^Eneid, " f alta Tragedia," Inf. 20, 113. 
 Compare also Boccaccio's explanation of his mother's dream of 
 the peacock. Dante, he says, is like the Peacock, among other 
 reasons, " because the peacock has coarse feet, and a quiet gait ; " 
 and "the vulgar language, on which the Commcdia supports 
 itaelf, is coarse in comparison with the high and masterly 
 literary style which every other poet uses, though it be more 
 beautiful than others, being in conformity with modern minds. 
 The quiet gait signifies the humility of the style, which U 
 necessarily required in Commcdia, as those know who under 
 stand what is meant by Cammed ia."
 
 122 DANTE 
 
 dastards of Italy abbominevoli cattivi d' Italia who 
 think vilely of that precious language ; which, if it is 
 vile in anything, is vile only so far as it sounds in 
 the prostituted mouth of these adulterers." 1 He 
 noted and compared its various dialects ; he asserted 
 its capabilities not only in verse, but in expressive, 
 flexible, and majestic prose. And to the deliberate 
 admiration of the critic and the man, were added the 
 homely but dear associations, which no language can 
 share with that of early days. Italian had been the 
 language of his parents " Questo mio Volgare fu il con- 
 giugnitwe delli mid generanti, che con esso parlavano" 
 and further, it was this modern language, "guesto 
 mio Volgare" which opened to him the way of know- 
 ledge, which had introduced him to Latin, and the 
 sciences which it contained. It was his benefactor 
 and guide he personifies it and his boyish friend- 
 ship had grown stronger and more intimate by mutual 
 good offices. " There has also been between us the 
 goodwill of intercourse ; for from the beginning of my 
 life I have had with it kindness and conversation, and 
 have used it, deliberating, interpreting, and question- 
 ing ; so that, if friendship grows with use, it is evident 
 how it must have grown in me." 2 
 
 From this language he exacted a hard trial, a 
 work which should rank with the ancient works. 
 
 1 Convito, i 11. * Convito, L 13.
 
 DANTE 123 
 
 None such had appeared ; none had even advanced 
 such a pretension. Not that it was a time dead to 
 literature or literary ambition. Poets and historians 
 had written, and were writing in Italian. The same 
 year of jubilee which fixed itself so deeply in Dante's 
 mind, and became the epoch of his vision the same 
 scene of Roman greatness in its decay, which after- 
 wards suggested to Gibbon the Decline and Fall, 
 prompted, in the father of Italian history, the desire 
 to follow in the steps of Sallust and Livy, and prepare 
 the way for Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Davila, 
 and Fra Paolo. 1 Poetry had been cultivated in the 
 
 1 G. Villani was at Rome in the year of jubilee 1300, and 
 describes the great concourse and order of the pilgrims, whom 
 he reckons at 200,000, in the course of the year. "And I," he 
 proceeds, "finding myself in that blessed pilgrimage in the 
 holy city of Rome, seeing the great and ancient things of the 
 same, and reading the histories of the great deeds of the Romans, 
 written by Virgil, and by Sallust, and Lucan, and Titus Livius, 
 and Valerius and Paulus Orosius and other masters of histories, 
 who wrote as well of the smaller matters as of the greater, con- 
 cerning the exploits and deeds of the Romans ; and further, of 
 the strange things of the whole world, for memory and example's 
 sake to those who should come after I, too, took their style 
 and fashion, albeit that, as their scholar, I be not worthy to 
 execute such a work. But, considering that our city of Florence, 
 the daughter and creation of Rome, was in its rising, and on 
 the eve of achieving great things, as Rome was in its decline, 
 it seemed to me convenient to bring into this volume and new 
 chronicle all the deeds and beginnings of the city of Florence,
 
 124 DANTE 
 
 Roman languages of the West in Aquitaine and 
 Provence, especially for more than two centuries; 
 and lately, with spirit and success, in Italian. Names 
 had become popular, reputations had risen and 
 waned, verses circulated and were criticised, and even 
 descended from the high and refined circles to the 
 workshop. A story is told of Dante's indignation, 
 when he heard the canzoni which had charmed the 
 Florentine ladies mangled by the rude enthusiasm of 
 a blacksmith at his forge. 1 Literature was a growing 
 fashion ; but it was humble in its aspirations and 
 efforts. Men wrote like children, surprised and 
 pleased with their success ; yet allowing themselves 
 in mere amusement, because conscious of weakness 
 which they could not cure. 
 
 Dante, by the Divina Commedia, was the restorer 
 of seriousness in literature. He was so by the 
 magnitude and pretensions of his work, and by the 
 earnestness of its spirit. He first broke through the 
 
 so far as I have been able to gather and recover them ; and for 
 the future, to follow at large the doings of the Florentines, and 
 the other notable things of the world briefly, as long as it may 
 be God's pleasure ; under which hope, rather by his grace than 
 by my poor science, I entered on this enterprise : and so, in 
 the year 1300, being returned from Rome, I began to compile 
 this book, in reverence towards God and St John, and com- 
 mendation of our city of Florence." O. VUl. viii. 36. 
 1 Scuxhetti, Nov. 114.
 
 DANTE 125 
 
 prescription which had confined great works to the 
 Latin, and the faithless prejudices which, in the 
 language of society, could see powers fitted for no 
 higher .task than that of expressing, in curiously 
 diversified forms, its most ordinary feelings. But he 
 did much more. Literature was going astray in its 
 tone, while growing in importance ; the Commedia 
 checked it. The Provencal and Italian poetry was, 
 with the exception of some pieces of political satire, 
 almost exclusively amatory, in the most fantastic and 
 affected fashion. In expression, it had not even the 
 merit of being natural ; in purpose it was trifling ; in 
 the spirit which it encouraged, it was something 
 worse. Doubtless it brought a degree of refinement 
 with it, but it was refinement purchased at a high 
 price, by intellectual distortion, and moral insensi- 
 bility. But this was not all. The brilliant age of 
 Frederick II., for such it was, was deeply mined by 
 religious unbelief. However strange this charge first 
 sounds against the thirteenth century, no one can 
 look at all closely into its history, at least in Italy, 
 without seeing that the idea of infidelity not heresy, 
 but infidelity was quite a familiar one ; and that 
 side by side with the theology of Aquinas and Bona- 
 ventura, there was working among those who in- 
 fluenced fashion and opinion, among the great men, 
 and the men to whom learning was a profession, a
 
 126 DANTE 
 
 spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost monstrous 
 for its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's 
 refined and enlightened court. The genius of the 
 great doctors might have kept in safety the Latin 
 Schools, but not the free and home thoughts which 
 found utterance in the language of the people, if the 
 solemn beauty of the Italian Commedia had not 
 seized on all minds. It would have been an evil 
 thing for Italian, perhaps for European literature, if 
 the siren tales of the Decameron had been the first to 
 occupy the ear with the charms of a new language. 
 
 Dante has had hard measure, and from some who 
 are most beholden to him. No one in his day served 
 the Church more highly than he whose faith and 
 genius secured on her side the first great burst of 
 imagination and feeling, the first perfect accents of 
 modern speech. The first-fruits of the new literature 
 were consecrated and offered up. There was no 
 necessity, or even probability in Italy in the four- 
 teenth century that it should be so, as there might 
 perhaps have been earlier. It was the poet's free 
 act free in one, for whom nature and heathen 
 learning had strong temptations that religion was 
 the lesson and influence of the great popular work 
 of the time. That which he held up before men's 
 awakened and captivated minds, was the verity of 
 God's moral government. To rouse them to a sense
 
 DANTE 127 
 
 of the mystery of their state ; to startle their common- 
 place notions of sin into an imagination of its variety, 
 its magnitude, and its infinite shapes and degrees ; to 
 open their eyes to the beauty of the Christian temper, 
 both as suffering and as consummated ; to teach them 
 at once the faithfulness and awful freeness of God's 
 grace ; to help the dull and lagging soul to conceive 
 the possibility, in its own case, of rising step by step 
 in joy without an end of a felicity not unimaginable 
 by man, though of another order from the highest 
 perfection of earth ; this is the poet's end. Nor 
 was it only vague religious feelings which he wished 
 to excite. He brought within the circle of common 
 thought, and translated into the language of the 
 multitude, what the Schools had done to throw light 
 on the deep questions of human existence, which all 
 are fain to muse upon, though none can solve. He 
 who had opened so much of men's hearts to them- 
 selves, opened to them also that secret sympathy 
 which exists between them and the great mysteries of 
 the Christian doctrine. 1 He did the work, in his day, 
 of a great preacher. Yet he has been both claimed 
 and condemned, as a disturber of the Church's faith. 
 He certainly did not spare the Church's rulers 
 He thought they were betraying the most sacred of 
 all trusts ; and if history is at all to be relied on, he 
 1 Vide Ozanam.
 
 128 DANTE 
 
 had some grounds for thinking so. But it is confus- 
 ing the feelings of the Middle Ages with our own, to 
 convert every fierce attack on the Popes into an 
 anticipation of Luther. Strong language of this sort 
 was far too commonplace to be so significant No 
 age is blind to practical abuses, or silent on them ; 
 and when the Middle Ages complained, they did so 
 with a full-voiced and clamorous rhetoric, which 
 greedily seized on every topic of vilification within its 
 reach. It was far less singular, and far less bold, to 
 criticise ecclesiastical authorities, than is often sup- 
 posed ; but it by no means implied unsettled faith, or 
 a revolutionary design. In Dante's case, if words 
 have any meaning not words of deliberate qualifica- 
 tion, but his unpremeditated and incidental expres- 
 sions his faith in the Divine mission and spiritual 
 powers of the Popes was as strong as his abhorrence 
 of their degeneracy, and desire to see it corrected by 
 a power which they would respect that of the 
 temporal sword. It would be to mistake altogether 
 his character, to imagine of him, either as a fault or 
 as an excellence, that he was a doubter. It might as 
 well be supposed of Aquinas. 
 
 No one ever acknowledged with greater serious- 
 ness, as a fact in his position in the world, the agree- 
 ment in faith among those with whom he was born. 
 No one ever inclined with more simplicity and
 
 DANTE 129 
 
 reverence before that long communion and consent 
 in feeling and purpose, the "publicus sensus" of the 
 Christian Church. He did feel difficulties ; but the 
 excitement of lingering on them was not among his 
 enjoyments. That was the lot of the heathen ; Virgil, 
 made wise by death, counsels him not to desire it : 
 
 " Matte & chi spera, che nostra ragione 
 Possa trascorrer la 'nfinita via 
 Che tiene una sustanzia in tre Persone. 
 
 State contenti, umana gente, al quia ; 
 Che se potuto aveste veder tutto, 
 Meatier non era partorir Maria : 
 
 E disiar vedeste senza frutto 
 
 Tai, che sarebbe lor disio quetato, 
 Ch' eternamente e dato lor per lutto ; 
 
 I* dico d' Aristotile e di Plato, 
 
 E di molti altri :" e qui chin6 la fronte, 
 
 E piu non disse, e rinia.se turbato. Purg. c. 3. 1 
 
 1 "Insensate he, who thinks with mortal ken 
 To pierce Infinitude, which doth enfold 
 Three Persons in one Substance. Seek not then, 
 
 O mortal race, for reasons but believe, 
 And be contented ; for had all been seen, 
 No need there was for Mary to conceive. 
 
 Men have ye known, who thus desired in vain ; 
 Ami whose desires, that might at rest have been, 
 Now constitute a source of endless pain ; 
 
 Plato, the Stagirite ; and many more, 
 
 I here allude to ;" then his head he bent, 
 Was silent, and a troubled aspect wore. WRIGHT. 
 
 K
 
 130 DANTE 
 
 The Christian poet felt that it was greater to 
 believe and to act. In the darkness of the world 
 one bright light appeared, and he followed it Pro- 
 vidence had assigned him his portion of truth, his 
 portion of daily bread ; if to us it appears blended 
 with human elements, it is perfectly clear that he was 
 in no position to sift them. To choose was no trial 
 of his. To examine and seek, where it was impos- 
 sible to find, would have been folly. The authority 
 from which he started had not yet been seriously 
 questioned ; there were no palpable signs of doubt- 
 fulness on the system which was to him the repre- 
 sentative of God's will j and he sought for none. 
 It came to him claiming his allegiance by custom, 
 by universality, by its completeness as a whole, and 
 satisfying his intellect and his sympathies in detail. 
 And he gave his allegiance reasonably, because 
 there was nothing to hope for in doubting 
 wisely, because he gave it loyally and from his 
 heart. 
 
 And he had his reward the reward of him who 
 throws himself with frankness and earnestness into a 
 system ; who is not afraid or suspicious of it ; who is 
 not unfaithful to it. He gained not merely power 
 he gained that freedom and largeness of mind which 
 the suspicious or the unfaithful miss. His loyalty to 
 the Church was no cramping or blinding service ; it
 
 DANTE 131 
 
 left to its full play that fresh and original mind, left 
 it to range at will in all history and all nature for the 
 traces of Eternal wisdom, left it to please itself with 
 all beauty, and pay its homage to all excellence. 
 For upon all wisdom, beauty, and excellence, the 
 Church had taught him to see, in various and duly 
 distinguished degrees, the seal of the one Creator. 
 She imparts to the poem, to its form and progressive 
 development, her own solemnity, her awe, her calm, 
 her serenity and joy ; it follows her sacred seasons 
 and hours ; repeats her appointed words of benedic- 
 tion and praise ; moulds itself on her belief, her ex- 
 pectations, and forecastings. 1 Her intimations, more 
 or less distinct, dogma or tradition or vague hint, 
 guide the p'bet's imagination through the land where 
 all eyes are open. The journey begins under the 
 Easter moon of the year of jubilee, on the evening of 
 Good Friday ; the days of her mourning he spends in 
 the regions of woe, where none dares to pronounce 
 the name of the Redeemer, and he issues forth to 
 " behold again the stars," to learn how to die to sin 
 and rise to righteousness, very early in the morning, 
 as it begins to dawn, on the day of the Resurrection. 
 The whole arrangement of the Purgatorio is drawn 
 from Church usages. It is a picture of men suffering 
 in calm and holy hope the sharp discipline of repent- 
 1 See an article in the Brit. Critic, No. 65, p. 120.
 
 132 DANTE 
 
 ance, amid the prayers, the melodies, the consoling 
 images and thoughts, the orderly ritual, the hours of 
 devotion, the sacraments of the Church militant. 
 When he ascends in his hardiest flight, and imagines 
 the joys of the perfect and the vision of God, his 
 abundant fancy confines itself strictly to the limits 
 sanctioned by her famous teachers ventures into no 
 new sphere, hazards no anticipations in which they 
 have not preceded it, and is content with adding to 
 the poetry which it elicits from their ideas, a beauty 
 which it is able to conceive apart altogether from 
 bodily form the beauty, infinite in its variety, of the 
 expression of the human eye and smile the beauty 
 of light, of sound, of motion. And when his song 
 mounts to its last strain of triumph, and the poet's 
 thought, imagination, and feeling of beauty, tasked to 
 the utmost, nor failing under the weight of glory 
 which they have to express, breathe themselves forth 
 in words, higher than which no poetry has ever risen, 
 and represent, in images transcending sense, and 
 baffling it, yet missing not one of those deep and 
 transporting sympathies which they were to touch, 
 the sight, eye to eye, of the Creator by the creature 
 he beholds the gathering together, in the presence 
 of God, of " all that from our earth has to the skies 
 returned," and of the countless orders of their thrones 
 mirrored in His light
 
 DANTE 1 33 
 
 Mira 
 Quanto e '1 convento delle bianche stole l 
 
 under a figure already taken into the ceremonial of 
 the Church the mystic Rose, whose expanding 
 leaves image forth the joy of the heavenly Jerusalem, 
 both triumphant and militant. 2 
 
 1 Behold 
 How great the gathering of the white-stoled throng. 
 
 3 See the form of benediction of the " Rosa d'oro." Rituum 
 Ecdesice Rom. Libri Tres. fol. xxxv. Venct 1516. Form of 
 giving : " Accipe rosam de manibus nostris. . . . per quam 
 designatur gaudium utriusque Hierusalem triumphantis scilicet 
 et militantis ecclesice, per quam omnibus Christi fidelibus inani- 
 festatur flos ipse pretiosissimus qui est gaudium et corona 
 sanctorum omnium." He alludes to it in the Convito, iv. 29. 
 isplendor di Dio, per cu' io vidi 
 L' alto trionfo del regno verace, 
 Dammi virtu a dir com' io lo vidu 
 Lume e lassu, che visibile face 
 Lo creature a quella creature, 
 Che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace 
 E si distende in circular figura 
 In tanto, che la sua circonferenza 
 Sarebbe al Sol troppo larga cintura. 
 
 E come clivo in acqua di suo imo 
 Si specchia quasi per vedersi adorno. 
 Quanto e nel verde e no' noretti opimo ; 
 
 81 soprastando al lume intorno intorno 
 Vidi specchiarsi in piu di mille soglie, 
 Quauto di noi lassu fatto ha ritorno.
 
 1 34 DANTE 
 
 But this universal reference to the religious ideas 
 of the Church is so natural, so unaffected, that it 
 leaves him at full liberty in other orders of thought. 
 He can afford not to be conventional he can afford 
 
 se 1' infimo grado in se raccoglie 
 81 grande lume, quant' e la larghezza 
 Di questa rosa nell' estreme foglie ? 
 
 Nel giallo della rosa sempiteraa, 
 
 Che si dilata, rigrada, e rcdole 
 
 Odor di lode al Sol, che sempre verna, 
 Qual' e colui, che tace e dicer vuole, 
 
 Mi trasse Beatrice, e disse ; mira 
 Quanto e '1 convento delle bianche stole ! 
 
 Vedi nostra Citta quanto ella gira ! 
 
 Vedi li nostri scanni si ripieni, 
 
 Che poca gente omai ci si disira. 
 
 In forma dunque di Candida rosa 
 Mi si mostrava la milizia sauta, 
 Chenel sao sangue Cristo fecc sposa. Parad.30, 31. 
 
 splendour of the Godhead, by whose aid 
 I saw the triumph of that kingdom true, 
 Give me the power to tell what I surveyed. 
 
 A light there is above, which plainly shows 
 The Great Creator to the creature, who 
 In seeing Him alone can find repose. 
 
 And in a circle spreads to such degree, 
 That for the sun would its circumference 
 A girdle of too great dimensions be :
 
 DANTE 1 35 
 
 to be comprehensive and genuine. It has been re- 
 marked how, in a poem where there would seem to 
 be a fitting place for them, the ecclesiastical legends 
 of the Middle Ages are almost entirely absent. The 
 sainted spirits of the Paradiso are not exclusively or 
 chiefly the Saints of popular devotion. After the 
 Saints of the Bible, the holy women, the three great 
 
 And as a cliff looks down upon the bed 
 
 Of some clear stream, to see how richly crowned 
 
 , With flowers and foliage is its lofty head ; 
 
 So, all from earth who hither e'er returned, 
 Seated on more than thousand thrones around, 
 Within the Eternal Light themselves discerned. 
 
 And if the very lowest step receives 
 
 A light so great, how wonderful must be 
 The Rose expanded in its utmost leaves ? 
 
 Within the yellow of the Rose eternal 
 
 Which spreads its leaves, all redolent of praise, 
 Unto the sun whoso beams are ever vernal, 
 
 Like one who her desire to speak suppresses, 
 Me Beatrice drew with her ; as she cried, 
 
 " See the vast number of these snow-white dresses 
 
 See how extensive is our city ; see 
 Our benches are so nearly occupied, 
 That few new comers may admitted be." 
 
 In semblance like unto the whitest rose 
 That sacred band I saw enthroned above, 
 Which for His Spouse in death our Saviour chose. 
 
 WBIOIIT.
 
 136 DANTE 
 
 Apostles, the Virgin mother, they are either names 
 personally dear to the poet himself, friends whom he 
 had loved, and teachers to whom he owed wisdom 
 or great men of masculine energy in thought or 
 action, in their various lines "compensations and 
 antagonists of the world's evils" Justinian and 
 Constantine, and Charlemagne the founders of the 
 Orders, Augustine, Benedict, and Bernard, Francis 
 and Dominic the great doctors of the Schools, 
 Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura, whom the Church 
 had not yet canonised. And with them are joined 
 and that with a full consciousness of the line which 
 theology draws between the dispensations of nature 
 and grace some rare types of virtue among the 
 heathen. Cato is admitted to the outskirts of 
 Purgatory ; Trajan, and the righteous king of Virgil's 
 poem, to the heaven of the just. 1 
 
 1 Chi crederebbe giu nel mondo errante, 
 Che Rifeo Trojano ' in questo tondo 
 Fosse la quinta delle luci sante ? 
 Ora conosce assai di quel, che '1 mondo 
 Veder non pu6 della divina grazia ; 
 Benchfe sua vista non discerna il fondo. Parad. c. 20. 
 
 Who, in this erring world of man below, 
 Would think the Trojan Riphcus e'er could be 
 The fifth effulgence of this holy bow I 
 
 1 Khipeus justissimus uuus 
 Qui fuit in Teucris, et servantissimus aequi. ;En. ii
 
 DANTE 137 
 
 Without confusion or disturbance to thd religious 
 character of his train of thought, he is able freely to 
 subordinate to it the lessons and the great recollec- 
 tions of the Gentile times. He contemplates them 
 with the veil drawn off from them as now known to 
 form but one whole with the history of the Bible and 
 the Church, in the design of Providence. He pre 
 sents them in their own colours, as drawn by their 
 own writers he only adds what Christianity seems 
 to show to be their event Under the conviction, 
 that the light of the Heathen was a real guide from 
 above, calling for vengeance in proportion to unfaith 
 fulness, or outrage done to it " He that nurtureth 
 the heathen, it is He that teacheth man knowledge 
 shall not He punish?" the great criminals of 
 profane history are mingled with sinners against 
 God's revealed will and that, with equal dramatic 
 power, with equal feeling of the greatness of their 
 loss. The story of the voyage of Ulysses is told with 
 as much vivid power and pathetic interest as the 
 tales of the day. 1 He honours unfeignedly the old 
 heathen's brave disdain of ease ; that spirit, even to 
 old age, eager, fresh, adventurous, and inquisitive. 
 
 Full well discerns he now the heavenly Grace, 
 Which mortals, blindly groping, cannot see, 
 Although unable all its depth to trace. WRIGHT. 
 1 Inf. c. 26.
 
 138 DANTE 
 
 His faith allowed him to admire all that was beauti- 
 ful and excellent among the heathen, without forget- 
 ting that it fell short of what the new gift of the 
 Gospel can alone impart. He saw in it proof that 
 God had never left His will and law without their 
 witness among men. Virtue was virtue still, though 
 imperfect, and unconsecrated generosity, largeness 
 of soul, truth, condescension, justice, were never 
 unworthy of the reverence of Christians. Hence he 
 uses without fear or scruple the classic element. 
 The examples which recall to the minds of the peni- 
 tents, by sounds and sights, in the different terraces 
 of Purgatory, their sin and the grace they have to 
 attain to, come indiscriminately from poetry and 
 Scripture. The sculptured pavement, to which the 
 proud are obliged ever to bow down their eyes, shows 
 at once the humility of St. Mary and of the Psalmist, 
 and the condescension of Trajan ; and elsewhere the 
 pride of Nimrod and Sennacherib, of Niobe, and 
 Cyrus. The envious hear the passing voices of 
 courtesy from saints and heroes, and the bursting 
 cry, like crashing thunder, of repentant jealousy from 
 Cain and Aglaurus ; the avaricious, to keep up the 
 memory of their fault, celebrate by day the poverty 
 of Fabricius and the liberality of St. Nicolas, and 
 execrate by night the greediness of Pygmalion and 
 Midas, of Achan, Heliodorus, and Crassus.
 
 DANTE 139 
 
 Dante's all-surveying, all-embracing mind, was 
 worthy to open the grand procession of modern 
 poets. He had chosen his subject in a region remote 
 from popular thought too awful for it, too abstruse. 
 He had accepted frankly the dogmatic limits of the 
 Church, and thrown himself with even enthusiastic 
 faith into her reasonings, at once so bold and so 
 undoubting her spirit of certainty, and her deep 
 contemplations on the unseen and infinite. And in 
 literature, he had taken as guides and models, above 
 all criticism and all appeal, the classical writers. But 
 with his mind full of the deep and intricate questions 
 of metaphysics and theology, and his poetical taste 
 always owning allegiance to Virgil, Ovid, and Statius 
 keen and subtle as a Schoolman as much an 
 idolater of old heathen art and grandeur as the men of 
 the Renaissance his eye is yet as open to the delicacies 
 of character, to the variety of external nature, to the 
 wonders of the physical world his interest in them 
 as diversified and fresh, his impressions as sharp 
 and distinct, his rendering of them as free and true 
 and forcible, as little weakened or confused by imita- 
 tion or by conventional words, his language as elastic, 
 and as completely under his command, his choice ot 
 poetic materials as unrestricted and original, as if he 
 had been born in days which claim as their own such 
 freedom, and such keen discriminative sense of what
 
 140 DANTE 
 
 is real, in feeling and image ; as if he had never felt 
 the attractions of a crabbed problem of scholastic 
 logic, or bowed before the mellow grace of the Latins. 
 It may be said, indeed, that the time was not yet 
 come when the classics could be really understood 
 and appreciated ; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. 
 But admiring them with a kind of devotion, and 
 showing not seldom that he had caught their spirit, 
 he never attempts to copy them. His poetry in form 
 and material is all his own. He asserted the poet's 
 claim to borrow from all science, and from every 
 phase of nature, the associations and images which he 
 wants ; and he showed that those images and associa- 
 tions did not lose their poetry by being expressed 
 with the most literal reality. 
 
 But let no reader of fastidious taste disturb his 
 temper by the study of Dante. Dante certainly 
 opened that path of freedom and poetic conquest, in 
 which the greatest efforts of modern poetry have 
 followed him opened it with a magnificence and 
 power which have never been surpassed. But the 
 greatest are but pioneers ; they must be content to 
 leave to a posterity, which knows more, if it cannot 
 do as much, a keen and even growing sense of their 
 defecta The Commedia is open to all the attacks 
 that can be made on grotesqueness and extravagance. 
 This is partly owing, doubtless, to the time, in itself
 
 DANTE 141 
 
 quaint, quainter to us, by being remote and ill-under- 
 stood ; but even then, weaker and less daring writers 
 than Dante do not equally offend or astonish us. So 
 that an image or an expression will render forcibly a 
 thought, there is no strangeness which checks him. 
 Barbarous words are introduced, to express the cries 
 of the demons or the confusion of Babel even to 
 represent the incomprehensible song of the blessed ; * 
 inarticulate syllables, to convey the impression of 
 some natural sound the cry of sorrowful surprise : 
 
 Alto sospir, che duolo strinse in hui ; Purg. 16. 2 
 or the noise of the cracking ice : 
 
 Se Tabernicch 
 
 Vi fosse su caduto, o Pietra-pana 
 
 Non avria pur del orlo fatto crtccA ; //. 32.* 
 
 oven separate letters to express an image, to spell 
 a name, or as used in some popular proverb. 4 He 
 
 1 Parad. 7, 1-3. 
 
 1 A sigh profound he drew, by brief intense. 
 Forced into "Oh!" 
 
 1 For Tambernicchi falling down below, 
 Or Pietra-paua hurled in ruin there, 
 Had now e'en cracked its margin with the blow. 
 
 4 To describe the pinched face of famine ; 
 Parean 1' occhiaje annella senza gemme. 
 Chi uel viso degli uomini legge OMO 
 Ben avria quivi conosciuto 1' emme (M). Purg. 23.
 
 142 DANTE 
 
 employs without scruple and ofton with marvellous 
 force of description, any recollection that occurs to 
 him, however homely, of everyday life ; the old 
 tailor threading his needle with trouble (Inf. 1 5) ; 
 the cook's assistant watching over the boiling broth 
 (Inf. 21) ; the hurried or impatient horse-groom 
 using his curry-comb (Inf. 29) ; or the common 
 sights of the street or the chamber the wet wood 
 sputtering on the hearth : 
 
 Come <T un stizzo verde chc arso sia 
 Dall' un de' capi, che dall' altro geme 
 E cigola per vento che va via ; Inf. 1 3. 1 
 
 The sockets seemed like rings without the gems ; 
 Who readeth "OMO " on man's visage, he 
 Had then fall plainly recognised the Ms. 
 
 Again, 
 
 Quella reverenza che s' indonna 
 
 Di tutto me, pur per B e per ICE. Parad. 7. 
 
 But with that reverential awe imbued, 
 Which all the letters of her name inspire. 
 
 Ne si tosto inai, ne I si scrisse, 
 Com' ei s' accese ed arse. Inf. 24. 
 So quickly ne'er was written 0, or I, 
 As he took fire and burnt. WEIGHT. 
 
 1 Like to a sapling, lighted at one end, 
 
 Which at the other hisses with the wind, 
 And drops of sap doth from the outlet send : 
 So from the broken twig, both words and blood flow'd forth. 
 
 Ibid.
 
 DANTE 143 
 
 the paper changing colour when about to catch fire : 
 
 Come precede innanzi dalT ardore 
 Per lo papiro suso un color bruno 
 Che non e nero ancora, e '1 bianco muore : Inf. 25. 1 
 
 the steaming of the hand when bathed, in winter : 
 Fuman come man bagnata il verno : 
 
 on the ways and appearances of animals ants meeting 
 on their path : 
 
 Li veggio d' ogni parte farsi presta 
 
 Ciascun' ombra, e baciarsi una con una 
 Senza restar, contente a breve festa : 
 
 Cosl per entro loro schiera bruna 
 S* ammusa F una con V ultra formica, 
 Forse a spiar lor via e lor fortuna ; Purg. 26.* 
 
 the snail drawing in its horns (Inf. 25) ; the hog 
 shut out of its sty, and trying to gore with its tusks 
 (Inf. 30) ; the dogs' misery in summer (Inf. 1 7) ; 
 the frogs jumping on to the bank before the water- 
 
 1 Like burning paper, when there glides before 
 The advancing flame a brown and dingy shade, 
 Which is not black, and yet is white no more. WRIGHT. 
 
 * On either hand I saw them haste their meeting, 
 And kiss each one the other pausing not 
 Contented to enjoy so short a greeting. 
 Thus do the ants among their dingy band, 
 Face one another each their neighbour's lot 
 Haply to scan, and how their fortunes stand. Ibid.
 
 1 44 DANTE 
 
 snake (Inf. 9) ; or showing their heads above 
 water : 
 
 Come al orlo dell' acqua d' un fosso 
 Stan gli ranocchi pur col muso fuori, 
 Si che celano i piedi, e 1' altro grosso. Inf. 22. l 
 
 It must be said, that most of these images, though 
 by no means all, occur in the Inferno / and that the 
 poet means to paint sin not merely in the greatness 
 of its ruin and misery, but in characters which all 
 understand, of strangeness, of vileness, of despicable- 
 ness, blended with diversified and monstrous horror. 
 Even he seems to despair of his power at times : 
 
 S' io avessi le rime e aspre, e chiocce, 
 
 Come si converrebbe al tristo buco, 
 
 Sovra '1 qual pontan tutte 1' altre rocce ; 
 Io premerrei di mio concetto il suco 
 
 Piii pienamente ; ma perch' io non 1' abbo, 
 
 Non son /a terna a dicer mi conduce : 
 Che non e 'mpresa da pigliare a gabbo 
 
 1 As in a trench, frogs at the water side 
 
 Sit squatting, with their noses raised on high, 
 The while their feet, and all their bulk they hide 
 
 Thus upon either hand the sinners stood. 
 But Barbariccia now approaching nigh, 
 
 Quick they withdrew beneath the boiling flood. 
 
 I saw and still my heart is thrill'd with fear- 
 One spirit linger ; as beside a ditch, 
 One frog remains, the others disappear. WRIGHT.
 
 DANTE 145 
 
 Descriver fondo a tutto 1' universe, 
 
 Nfe da lingua, cbe chiami mamma, o babbo. Inf. 32. 1 
 
 Feeling the difference between sins, in their ele- 
 ments and, as far as we see them, their baseness, he 
 treats them variously. His ridicule is apportioned 
 with a purpose. He passes on from the doom of the 
 sins of incontinence the storm, the frost and hail, 
 the crushing weights from the flaming minarets of 
 the city of Dis, of the Furies and Proserpine, " Donna 
 dell' eterno pianto," where the unbelievers lie, each in 
 his burning tomb from the river of boiling blood 
 the wood with the Harpies the waste of barren sand 
 with fiery snow, where the violent are punished to 
 the Malebolge, the manifold circles of Falsehood. 
 And here scorn and ridicule in various degrees, 
 according to the vileness of the fraud, begin to pre- 
 dominate, till they culminate in that grim comedy, 
 with its dramatis persona and battle of devils, 
 
 1 Had I a rhyme so rugged, rough, and hoarse 
 As would become the sorrowful abyss, 
 O'er which the rocky circles wind their course, 
 Then with a more appropriate form I might 
 Endow my vast conceptions ; wanting this, 
 Not without fear I bring myself to write. 
 For no light enterprise it is, I deem, 
 To represent the lowest depth of all ; 
 Nor should a childish tongue attempt the theme. 
 
 W&IOHT. 
 L
 
 1 46 DANTE 
 
 Draghignazzo, and Graffiacane, and Malacoda, where 
 the peculators and sellers of justice are fished up by 
 the demons from the boiling pitch, but even there 
 overreach and cheat their tormentors, and make them 
 turn their fangs on each other. The diversified 
 forms of falsehood seem to tempt the poet's imagina- 
 tion to cope with its changefulness and inventions, 
 as well as its audacity. The transformations of the 
 wildest dream do not daunt him. His power over 
 language is nowhere more forcibly displayed than in 
 those cantos, which describe the punishments of theft 
 men passing gradually into serpents, and serpents 
 into men : 
 
 Due e nessun 1' imagine perversa 
 Parea. Inf. 25. 1 
 
 And when the traitor, who murdered his own kins- 
 man, was still alive, and seemed safe from the infamy 
 which it was the poet's rule to bestow only on the 
 dead, Dante found a way to inflict his vengeance 
 without an anachronism: Branca D'Oria's body, 
 though on earth, is only animated by a fiend, and his 
 spirit has long since fled to the icy prison. 2 
 
 1 All vestige of the former shape was gone ; 
 
 Nor one, nor two the unsightly frame expressed. 
 
 WBIOHT. 
 
 2 Ed egli a me : Come '1 mio corpo stea 
 Nel mondo su, nulla scienzia porto.
 
 DANTE 147 
 
 These are strange experiments in poetry ; their 
 strangeness is exaggerated as detached passages ; but 
 they are strange enough when they meet us in their 
 
 Cotal vantaggio ha questa Tolommea, 
 
 Che spesse volte 1' aniina ci cade 
 
 Innanzi, ch' Atrop6s mossa le dea. 
 E perche tn piu volontier mi rade 
 
 Le 'nvetriate lagrime dal volto, 
 
 Sappi, che tosto che 1' aniina trade, 
 Come fee' io, il corpo suo 1' e tolto 
 
 Da un Dinionio, che poscia il governa, 
 
 Mentre che '1 tempo suo tutto sia volto. 
 Ella ruina in si fatta cisterna ; 
 
 E forse pare an cor lo corpo suso 
 
 Dell' ombra, che di qua dietro mi verna. 
 Tu '1 del saper, se tu vien pur mo giuso : 
 
 Egli e ser Branca d' Oria, e son piu anni 
 
 Poscia passati, ch' ei fu si racchiuso. 
 Io credo, (Iks' io lui, che tu in' inganni, 
 
 Che Branca d' Oria non mori unquauche. 
 
 E mangia, e bee, e dorme, e vestc panni. 
 Nel fosso su, diss' ei, di Malebranche, 
 
 La dove bollo la tenace pece, 
 
 Non era giunto ancora Michel Zanche ; 
 Che qnesti lascid '1 diavolo in sua vece 
 
 Nel corpo suo, e d' un suo prossimano, 
 
 Che '1 tradimento insieme con lui fece. Inf. 33. 
 11 How on the earth above, my body fares 
 
 That knowledge I possess not," he replied ; 
 For souls oft hither come, by vengeance drivcu, 
 
 (Such privilege this Ptolomea shares), 
 
 Ere Atropos the fatal stroke hath given ;
 
 148 DANTE 
 
 place in the context, as parts of a scene, where the 
 mind is strung and overawed by the sustained power, 
 with which dreariness, horror, hideous absence of 
 every form of good, is kept before the imagination 
 and feelings, in the fearful picture of human sin. 
 But they belong to the poet's system of direct and 
 forcible representation. What his inward eye sees, 
 what he feels, that he means us to see and feel as he 
 does ; to make us see and feel is his art Afterwards 
 
 And that more gladly thou mayest wipe away 
 The crystal tears congealed upon my face, 
 Know soon as doth the soul, like mine, betray, 
 
 Its body by a demon is possessed, 
 By whom 'tis governed, till it fill the space 
 On earth allotted to its course nnblest ; 
 
 The soul descends to such a cistern here ; 
 And still perhaps on earth the body 's seen 
 Of the sad shade which winters in my rear. 
 
 If lately thou cam'st hither, thou must know, 
 He is Ser Branca D'Oria whom I mean ; 
 For many years hath he been here below. 
 
 Then I ; "Thou fain would'st dupe me, as I guess, 
 For Branca D'Oria surely is not dead, 
 But eats and drinks and sleeps and dons his dress. '' 
 " Ere to the trench above of Malebranche, 
 
 Where always boils the adhesive pitch," he said, 
 ' ' Had yet arrived the hapless Michel Zanche, 
 
 This D'Oria's form the devil did assume ; 
 
 His kinsman too leagued in the treacherous plot, 
 Shared also in his miserable doom." WIUOHT.
 
 DANTE 149 
 
 we may reflect and meditate ? but first we must see 
 must see what he saw. Evil and deformity are in 
 the world, as well as good and beauty; the eye 
 cannot escape them, they are about our path, in our 
 heart and memory. He has faced them without 
 shrinking or dissembling, and extorted from them a 
 voice of warning. In all poetry that is written for 
 mere delight, in all poetry which regards but a part 
 or an aspect of nature, they have no place they 
 disturb and mar j but he had conceived a poetry of 
 the whole, which would be weak or false without 
 them. Yet they stand in his poem as they stand in 
 nature subordinate and relieved. If the grotesque 
 is allowed to intrude itself if the horrible and the 
 foul, undisguised and unsoftened, make us shudder 
 and shrink, they are kept in strong check and in due 
 subjection by other poetical influences ; and the same 
 power which exhibits them in their naked strength, 
 renders its full grace and glory to beauty its full 
 force and delicacy to the most evanescent feeling. 
 
 Dante's eye was free and open to external nature 
 in a degree new among poets ; certainly in a far 
 greater degree than among the Latins, even including 
 Lucretius, whom he probably had never read. We 
 have already spoken of his minute notice of the 
 appearance of living creatures ; but hia eye was 
 caught by the beautiful as well as by the grotesque.
 
 150 DANTE 
 
 Take the following beautiful picture of the bird 
 looking out for dawn : 
 
 Come 1'augello intra I'amate fronde, 
 Posato al nido de" suoi dolci nati, 
 La notte, che le cose ci nasconde, 
 
 die per veder gli aspetti desiati, 
 E per trovar lo cibo, onde li pasca, 
 In che i gravi labor gli souo aggrati, 
 
 Previene 1 tempo in su 1' aperta frasca, 
 E con ardente affetto il sole aspetta, 
 Fiso guardando, pur che 1'alba nasca. Parad. 23. 1 
 
 Nothing indeed can be more true and original than 
 his images of birds ; they are varied and very 
 numerous. We have the water-birds rising in 
 clamorous and changing flocks : 
 Come augelli eurti di riviera 
 
 Quasi congratulando a lor pasture, 
 
 Fanno di BIJ or tonda or lunga schiera ; Parad. 1 8. s 
 
 1 E'en as the bird that resting in the nest 
 
 Of her sweet brood, the shelt'ring boughs among 
 While all things are enwrapt in night's dark vest 
 Now eager to behold the looks she loves, 
 And to find food for her impatient young 
 (Whence labour grateful to a mother proves), 
 Forestalls the time, high perch'd upon the spray, 
 And with impassion'd zeal the sun expecting, 
 
 Anxiously waiteth the first break of day. WRIGIIT. 
 
 8 And as birds rising from a stream, whence they 
 
 Their pastures view, as though their joy confessing. 
 Now form a round, and now a long array. Ibid.
 
 DANTE 151 
 
 the rooks, beginning to move about at daybreak : 
 
 E come per lo natural costume, 
 
 Le pole iusieme, al cominciar del giorno 
 Si muovono a scaldar le freclde plume, 
 
 Poi altre vanno via senza ritorno, 
 Altre rivolgon se onde son mosse 
 Ed altre roteando fan soggiorno ; Parad. 21. * 
 
 the morning sounds of the swallow : 
 
 Nell' ora che comincia i tristi lai 
 La rondinella presso alia mattina, 
 Forse a memoria de' suoi prinii guai ; Purg. 9. s 
 
 the joy and delight of the nightingale's song (Purg, 
 17); the lark, silent at last, filled with its own 
 sweetness : 
 
 Qual lodoletta, che 'n acre si spazia, 
 Prinia cautando, e poi tact contenta 
 Dell' ultima dolcezza che la sazia ; Parad. 20.* 
 
 1 And as with one accord, at break of day, 
 
 The rooks bestir themselves, by nature taught 
 To chase the dew-drops from their wings away ; 
 Some flying off, to reapjwar no more 
 Others repairing to their nests again 
 Some whirling round then settling as before. WRIOUT. 
 
 3 What time the swallow pours her plaintive strain, 
 Saluting the approach of morning gray, 
 Thus haply mindful of her former pain. Ibid. 
 
 * E'en as the lark high soaring pours its throat 
 Awhile, then rests in silence, as though still 
 It dwelt enamour'd of its last sweet note. Ibid.
 
 152 DANTE 
 
 the flight of the starlings and storks (Inf. 5, Purg. 
 24); the mournful cry and long line of the cranes 
 (Inf. 5, Purg. 26) ; the young birds trying to escape 
 from the nest (Purg. 25) ; the eagle hanging in the 
 sky: 
 
 Con 1' ale aperte, e a calare intesa ; 
 
 the dove, standing close to its mate, or wheeling 
 round it : 
 
 SI come quando 1 Colombo si pone 
 
 Presso al compagno, 1' uno e 1' altro pande 
 Girando e mormorando V affezione ; Parad. 25. 1 
 
 or the flock of pigeons, feeding : 
 
 Adunati alia pastura, 
 Queti, senna mostrar F usato orgoglio. Purg. 2. a 
 
 Hawking supplies its images : the falcon coming 
 for its food : 
 
 II falcon che prima a pie si inira, 
 
 1 As when unto his partner's side, the dove 
 
 Approaches near both fondly circling round, 
 And cooing, show the fervour of their love ; 
 So these great heirs of immortality 
 
 Receive each other ; while they joyful sound 
 
 The praises of the food they share on high. WEIGH r 
 
 1 United quietly to feel 
 Awhile their custoin'd haughtiness allayed." Hid
 
 DANTE 153 
 
 Indi si volge al grido, e si protende, 
 
 Per lo disio del paste, che la il tira ; Purg. 1 9. 1 
 
 or just unhooded, pluming itself for its flight : 
 
 Quale falcon, ch' esce del cappello, 
 
 Muove la testa, e con 1' ale s* applaude, 
 
 Voglia mostrando, e facendosi bello ; Parad. 19.* 
 
 or returning without success, sullen and loath : 
 
 Come 1 falcon ch' & stato assai su 1' ali, 
 Che senza veder logoro, o uccello, 
 Fa dire al falconiere : Oime tu cali ! 
 
 Discende lasso onde si muove snello 
 Per cento mote, e da lungi si pone 
 Dal suo maestro, ditdegnoto e fello. Inf. 1 7. s 
 
 It is curious to observe him taking Virgil's similes, 
 and altering them. When Virgil describes the throng 
 
 1 And, as a falcon, which first scans its feet, 
 Then turns him to the call, and forward flies, 
 In eagerness to catch the tempting meat. W EIGHT. 
 
 * Lo, as a falcon, from the hood released, 
 
 Uplifts his head, and joyous flaps his wings, 
 His beauty and his eagerness increased. Ibid. 
 
 9 E'en as a falcon, long upheld in air, 
 Not seeing lure or bird upon the wing, 
 So that the falconer utters in despair 
 
 " Alas, thou stoop'st !" fatigued descends from high : 
 And whirling quickly round in many a ring, 
 Far from his master sits disdainfully. Ibid.
 
 154 DANTE 
 
 of souls, he compares them to falling leaves, or 
 gathering birds in autumn : 
 
 Quani multa in silvis auctumni frigore primo 
 Lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terrain gurgite ab alto 
 Quam multae glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus 
 Trans pontum fugat, et terris immittit apricis 
 
 Dante uses the same images, but without copying'. 
 
 Come d' Autunno si levan le foglie, 
 
 L* una appresso dell' altra, infin che 1 ramo 
 Rende alia terra tutte le sue spoglie ; 
 
 Similemente il mal seme d' Adamo : 
 Gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una 
 Per cenni, com' augel per suo richiamo. 
 
 Cosl sen vanno su per 1' onda bruna, 
 Ed avanti che sien di li discese, 
 Anche di qua nuova schiera s' aduna. Inf. 3. 1 
 
 Again compared with one of Virgil's most highly- 
 finished and perfect pictures, the flight of the pigeon, 
 disturbed at first, and then becoming swift and 
 smooth : 
 
 Qualis spelunca subito commota coluniba, 
 Cui domus et dulces latebroso in pumice nidi, 
 
 1 As leaves in autumn, borne before the wind, 
 Drop one by one, until tbe branch laid bare, 
 Sees all its honours to the earth consign M : 
 So cast them downward at his summons all 
 The guilty race of Adam from that strand 
 Each as a falcon answering to the call. WRIGHT.
 
 DANTE 155 
 
 Fertur in arva volans, plausuinque exterrita pennis 
 
 Dat tecto ingentem, mox aere lapsa quieto 
 
 Radit iter liquidum, celeres neque commovet alaa 
 
 the Italian's simplicity and strength may balance the 
 " ornata parola " of Virgil : 
 
 Quali colombe dal disio chiamate, 
 Con F ali aperte e feme al dolce nido 
 Volan per 1' aer dal voler portate. Inf. 5. 1 
 
 Take, again, the times of the day, with what is 
 characteristic of them appearances, lights, feelings 
 
 1 As doves, by strong affection urged, repair 
 
 With firm expanded wings to their sweet nest, 
 
 Borne by the impulse of their will through air. WRIGHT. 
 
 It is impossible not to be reminded at every step, in spite of 
 the knowledge and taste which Mr. Cary and Mr. Wright have 
 brought to their most difficult task, of the truth which Dante 
 has expressed with his ordinary j>ositiveness. 
 
 He is saying that he does not wish his Can/oui tu be explained 
 in Latin to those who could not read them in Italian : " Che 
 sarebbe sposta la loro sentcnzia cola dove elle non la potusono 
 colla loro bcllezza portarc. E ]>eru sappia ciascuno cho nulla 
 cosa per legame musaico (i.e. poetico) armonizzata, si pu6 della 
 sua loquela in ultra trasmutare sen/a rompere tutta la sua 
 dolcezxa e armonia. E questa e la ragiono per cho Omero non 
 si inuti) mai dl Greco in latino, comu 1' altru scritture cho avemo 
 da loro. Convito, i. c. 8, p. 49. 
 
 Dr. Carlyle has given up the idea of attempting to represent 
 Dante's verse by English verse, and has confined himself to 
 assisting Englishmen to read him in his own language. His 
 prose translation is accurate and forcible. [18f>0.]
 
 156 DANTE 
 
 seldom dwelt on at length, but carried at once to the 
 mind, and stamped upon it sometimes by a single 
 word. The sense of morning, its inspiring and cheer- 
 ing strength, softens the opening of the Inferno; 
 breathes its refreshing calm, in the interval of repose 
 after the last horrors of hell, in the first canto of 
 the Purgatorio ; and prepares for the entrance into 
 the earthly Paradise at its close. In the waning light 
 of evening, and its chilling sense of loneliness, he 
 prepared himself for his dread pilgrimage : 
 
 Lo giorno se n' andava, e 1' aer bruno 
 Toglieva gli animai che sono 'n terra 
 Dalle fatiche loro ; ed io sol uno 
 
 M' apparechiava a sostener la guerra 
 
 SI del cammino, e si della pietate. Inf. 2. 1 
 
 Indeed there is scarcely an hour of day or night 
 which has not left its own recollection with him ; of 
 which we cannot find some memorial in his poem. 
 Evening and night have many. Evening, with its 
 softness and melancholy its exhaustion and languor, 
 
 1 The day was closing, and the dusky air 
 On all the creatures of the earth bestowed 
 Rest from their labours ; I alone prepare 
 To struggle against pity, and to dare 
 A conflict with the horrors of the road, 
 Which an unerring memory shall declare. 
 
 WRIGHT.
 
 DANTE 157 
 
 after the work, perhaps unfulfilled, of day its regrets 
 and yearnings its sounds and doubtful lights, the 
 distant bell, the closing chants of Compline, the Salve 
 Eegina, the Te lucis ante terminum with its insecurity, 
 and its sense of protection from above broods over 
 the poet's first resting-place on his heavenly road 
 that still, solemn, dreamy scene the Valley of 
 Flowers in the mountain side, where those who have 
 been negligent about their salvation, but not alto- 
 gether faithless and fruitless, the assembled shades of 
 great kings and of poets, wait, looking upwards, 
 "pale and humble," for the hour when they may 
 begin in earnest their penance. (Purg. 7 and 8.) 
 The level, blinding evening beams (Purg. 15); the 
 contrast of gathering darkness in the valley or on the 
 shore with the lingering lights on the mountain (Purg. 
 17); the rapid sinking of the sun, and approach of 
 night in the south (Purg. 27); the flaming sunset 
 clouds of August ; the sheet-lightning of summer 
 (Purg. 5) have left pictures in his mind, which an 
 incidental touch reawakens, and a few strong words 
 are sufficient to express. Other appearances he 
 describes with more fulness. The stars coming out 
 one by one, baffling at first the eye : 
 
 Ed ecco intorno di cbiarezza pan 
 
 Nascer un lustro sopra quel che v' era, 
 A guisa l' orizzonte, che rischiari.
 
 158 DANTE 
 
 E si come al salir di prima sera 
 
 Comincian per lo del nuove parvenze, 
 
 Si che la cosa pare e iwn par vera ; Parad. \ 4. 1 
 
 or else, bursting out suddenly over the heavens : 
 
 Quando colui che tutto il mondo allume, 
 
 Del' emisperio nostro si discende, 
 
 E '1 giorno d' ogni parte si consuma ; 
 Lo ciel che sol di lui prima s' accende, 
 
 Suhitamente si rifa parvente 
 
 Per molte luci in che una risplende ; Parad, 20. 2 
 
 or the effect of shooting-stars : 
 
 Quale per li seren tranquilli e puri 
 Discorre ad ora ad or subito fuoco 
 Movendo gli occhi che stavan sicuri, 
 
 E pare stella che tramuti loco. 
 
 1 And lo, on high, and lucid as the one 
 Now there, encircling it, a light arose, 
 Like heaven when rc-illnmined by the sun : 
 And as at the first lighting up of eve 
 The sky doth new appearances disclose, 
 That now seem real, now the sight deceive. WBIOHT. 
 
 1 When he, who with his universal ray 
 
 The world illumines, quits our hemisphere, 
 And, from each quarter, daylight wears away ; 
 The heaven, erst kindled by his beam alone, 
 Sudden its lost effulgence doth repair 
 By many lights illumined but by one. Ibid.
 
 DANTE 159 
 
 Se non che dalla parte onde s" accende 
 
 Nulla sen perde, ed esso dura poco ; Parad. 15. 1 
 
 or, again, that characteristic sight of the Italian 
 summer night the fire-flies : 
 
 Quantc il villan che al poggio si riposa, 
 
 Nel tempo che colui che '1 mondo schiara 
 
 La faccia sua a noi tien men ascosa, 
 Come la mosca cede alia zenzara, 
 
 Vede lucciole giii per la vallea 
 
 Forse.coli dove vendeuimia ed ara. Inf. 26. 2 
 
 Noon, too, does not want its characteristic touches 
 the lightning-like glancing of the lizard's rapid 
 motion : 
 
 Come il ramarro sotto la gran fersa 
 
 1 As oft along the pure and tranquil sky 
 A sudden fire by night is seen to dart, 
 Attracting forcibly the heedless eye ; 
 And seems to be a star that changes place, 
 Save that no star is lost from out the part 
 It quits, and that it lasts a moment's space. WRIGHT 
 
 * As in that season when the sun least veils 
 His face that lightens all, what time the fly 
 Gives place to the shrill gnat, the peasant then, 
 Upon some cliff reclined, beneath him sees 
 Fire-flies innumerous spangling o'er the rale, 
 Vineyard or tilth, where his day-labour lies. CABT.
 
 160 DANTE 
 
 Ne' di canicular cangiando siepe 
 
 Folgore par, se la via attraversa ; Inf. 25. 1 
 
 the motes in the sunbeam at noontide (Parad. 14) ; its 
 clear, diffused, insupportable brightness, filling all 
 things : 
 
 E tutti eran gia pieni 
 
 Dell' alto dl i giron del sacro nionte. Purg. 19. 2 
 
 and veiling the sun in his own light : 
 
 lo veggio ben si come tu t' annidi 
 Nel proprio fame. 
 
 SI come '1 sol che si cela egli stessi 
 
 Per troppa luce, quando '1 caldo ha rose 
 
 Le temperanze de' vapori spessi. Parad. 5. 8 
 
 But the sights and feelings of morning are what 
 
 1 As underneath the dog-star's scorching ray 
 The lizard, darting swift from fence to fence, 
 Appears like lightning, if he cross the way. 
 
 WKIOHT. 
 
 * Now throughout all the sacred mountain were 
 The circles filled with light ; and as we went, 
 The youthful sun was shining in our rear. 
 
 8 I see full well how in the light divine 
 Thou dwellest (lit " makest thy nest "). 
 
 And as the sun conceals himself from view, 
 Amid the splendour of the new-born day, 
 When he hath chased away the early dew. Ibid.
 
 DANTE 161 
 
 he touches on most frequently ; and he does so with 
 the precision of one who had watched them with 
 often-repeated delight : the scented freshness of the 
 breeze that stirs before daybreak : 
 
 E quale annunziatrice degli albori 
 Aura di maggio muovesi ed olezza 
 Tutta impregnata dull' erba e da' fiori ; 
 
 Tal mi senti' un vento dar per mezza 
 La fronte ; Purg. 24. 1 
 
 the chill of early morning (Purg. 19); the dawn 
 stealing on, and the stars, one by one, fading " infino 
 alia piu bella" (Parad. 30); the brightness of the 
 " trembling morning star "- 
 
 Par treniolando mattutina Stella ; 
 
 the serenity of the dawn, the blue gradually gathering 
 in the east, spreading over the brightening sky 
 (Parad. 1); then succeeded by the orange tints 
 and Mars setting red, through the mist over the sea : 
 
 Ed ecco, qual sol presso del mattino 
 Per 11 gross! vapor Marte rosseggia 
 
 1 As when, announcing the approach of day, 
 
 Impregnated with herbs and flowers of Spring, 
 Breathes fresh and redolent the air of May 
 Such was the breeze that gently fann'd my head ; 
 And I perceived the waving of a wing 
 Which all around ambrosial odours shed. WRIGHT. 
 
 M
 
 162 DANTE 
 
 Giu nel ponente, sopra '1 suol marine, 
 Cotal m* apparve, s' io ancor lo veggia, 
 Un lume per lo mar venir ei ratto 
 Che '1 muover suo nessun volar pareggia ; Purg. 2. 1 
 
 the distant sea-beach quivering in the early light : 
 
 L* alba vinceva 1' ora mattutina 
 
 Che fuggia innanzi, si che di lontano 
 Conobbi il tremolar ddla marina; Purg. I. 2 
 
 the contrast of east and west at the moment of sun 
 rise, and the sun appearing, clothed in mist : 
 
 Io vidi gia nel cominciar del giorno 
 La parte oriental tutta rosata 
 E 1' altro ciel di bel sereno adorno ; 
 
 E la faccia del sol nascere ombrata 
 SI che per temperanza di vapori 
 L* occhio lo sostenea lungo fiato; Purg. 3. s 
 
 1 When lo ! like Mars, in aspect fiery red 
 
 Seen through the vapour, when the morn is nigh 
 Far in the west above the briny bed, 
 So (might I once more see it) o'er the sea 
 A light approach'd with such rapidity, 
 Flies not the bird that might its equal be. WRIGHT. 
 
 * Now 'gan the vanquish'd matin hour to flee ; 
 And seen from far, as onward came the day, 
 I recognised the trembling of the sea. Ibid. 
 
 1 Ercwhile the eastern regions have I seen 
 
 At daybreak glow with roseate colours, and 
 The expanse beside all beauteous and serene :
 
 DANTE 163 
 
 or breaking through it, and shooting his bqams over 
 the sky : 
 
 Di tutte parti saettava il giorno 
 Lo sol ch' avea con le saette conte 
 Di mezzo '1 ciel cacciato 1 Capricorno. Purg. 2. 1 
 
 But light in general is his special and chosen 
 source of poetic beauty. No poet that we know has 
 shown such singular sensibility to its varied appear- 
 ances has shown that he felt it in itself the cause of 
 a distinct and peculiar pleasure, delighting the eye 
 apart from form, as music delights the ear apart from 
 words, and capable, like music, of definite character, 
 of endless variety, and infinite meanings. He must 
 have studied and dwelt upon it like music. His mind 
 is charged with its effects and combinations, and they 
 are rendered with a force, a brevity, a precision, a 
 heedlessness and unconsciousness of ornament, an 
 indifference to circumstance and detail ; they flash 
 out with a spontaneous readiness, a suitableness and 
 felicity, which show the familiarity and grasp given 
 only by daily observation, daily thought, daily 
 
 And the sun's face so shrouded at its rise, 
 And temper'd by the mists which overhung, 
 That I could gaze on it with stcdfast eyes. WKIOHT. 
 1 On every side the sun shot forth the day, 
 And had already with his arrows bright 
 From the mid-heaven chased Capricorn away. Ibid,
 
 164 DANTE 
 
 pleasure. Light everywhere in the sky and earth 
 and sea in the star, the flame, the lamp, the gem 
 broken in the water, reflected from the mirror, trans- 
 mitted pure through the glass, or coloured through 
 the edge of the fractured emerald dimmed in the 
 mist, the halo, the deep water streaming through 
 the rent cloud, glowing in the coal, quivering in the 
 lightning, flashing in the topaz and the ruby, veiled 
 behind the pure alabaster, mellowed and clouding 
 itself in the pearl light contrasted with shadow 
 shading off and copying itself in the double rainbow, 
 like voice and echo light seen within light, as voice 
 discerned within voice, " guando una b ferrw, t V altra 
 va e riede" the brighter "nestling" itself in the 
 fainter the purer set off on the less clear, "come 
 perla in bianca fronte " light in the human eye *nd 
 face, displaying, figuring, and confounded with its 
 expressions light blended with joy in the eye : 
 
 luce 
 Come letizia in pupilla viva ; 
 
 and in the smile : 
 
 Vincendo me col lume <T un Borriso ; 
 
 joy lending its expression to light : 
 
 Quivi la donna mia vidi si lieta 
 Che piu lucente se ne ft il pianeta.
 
 DANTE 165 
 
 E se la Stella si cambio, e rite, 
 Qual mi fee' io ; Parad. O. 1 
 
 light from every source, and in all its shapes, illu- 
 minates, irradiates, gives its glory to the Commedia. 
 The remembrance of our "serene life" beneath the 
 " fair stars " keeps up continually the gloom of the 
 Inferno. Light, such as we see it and recognise it, 
 the light of morning and evening growing and fading, 
 takes off from the unearthliness of the Purgatorio; 
 peopled, as it is, by the undying, who, though suffer- 
 ing for sin, can sin no more, it is thus made like our 
 familiar world, made to touch our sympathies as an 
 image of our own purification in the flesh. And 
 when he rises beyond the regions of earthly day, 
 light, simple, unalloyed, unshadowed, eternal, lifts the 
 creations of his thought above all affinity to time and 
 matter; light never fails him, as the expression of 
 the gradations of bliss ; never reappears the same, 
 never refuses the new shapes of his invention, never 
 becomes confused or dim, though it is seldom thrown 
 into distinct figure, and still more seldom coloured. 
 
 1 Entered within the precincts of the light, 
 I saw my guide's fair countenance possest 
 With joy so great, the planet glow'd more bright 
 And if the very star a smile displayed, 
 Well might I smile to change by nature prone, 
 And varying still with each impression aide. WKIOIIT.
 
 166 DANTE 
 
 Only once, that we remember, is the thought of colour 
 forced on us ; when the bright joy of heaven suffers 
 change and eclipse, and deepens into red at the 
 sacrilege of men. 1 
 
 Yet his eye is everywhere, not confined to the 
 beauty or character of the sky and its lights. His 
 range of observation and largeness of interest prevent 
 that line of imagery, which is his peculiar instrument 
 and predilection, from becoming, in spite of its 
 brightness and variety, dreamy and monotonous; 
 prevent it from arming against itself sympathies 
 which it does not touch. He has watched with 
 equal attention, and draws with not less power, the 
 occurrences and sights of Italian country life; the 
 summer whirlwind sweeping over the plain " dinanzi 
 polveroso va superbo " (Inf. 9) ; the rain-storm of the 
 Apennines (Purg. 5); the peasant's alternations of 
 feeling in spring : 
 
 In quella parte del giovinetto anno 
 
 Che 1 sole i crin sotto 1' Aquario tempra, 
 E gii le notti al mezzo dl sen vanno ; 
 
 Quando la brina in su la terra assempra 
 L' imagine di sua sorella bianca, 
 Ma poco dura alia sua penna tempra, 
 
 Lo villanello a cui la roba manca 
 
 Si leva e guarda, e vede la campagna 
 Biancheggiar tutta ; ond 'ei si batte 1' anca ; 
 
 1 Parad. 27.
 
 DANTE 167 
 
 Ritorna a casa, e qua e la si lagna 
 
 Come 1 tapin che non sa che si faccia : 
 Poi riede e la speranza ringavagna 
 
 Veggendo 1 mondo aver cangiata faccia 
 In poco d' ora, e prende il suo vincastro 
 fuor le pecorelle a pascer caccia : Inf. 24. 1 
 
 the manner in which sheep come out from the fold : 
 
 Come le pecorelle escon del chiuso 
 A una a due a tre, e V altre stanno, 
 Timidftte atterrando F occhio e' I mutn ; 
 
 E rid che fa la prima, e V altre /anno, 
 Addottandon a lei t' ella i arretta 
 Semplici e quete, e lo 'mperchb non sanno : 
 
 Si vid' io muover a venir la testa 
 Di quella mandria fortunata allotta, 
 
 1 In the new year, when Sol his tresses gay 
 Dips in Aquarius, and the tardy night 
 Divides her empire with the lengthening day 
 When o'er the earth the hoar-frost pure and bright 
 Assumes the image of her sister white, 
 Then quickly melts before the genial light 
 The rustic, now exhausted his supply, 
 
 Rises betimes looks out and sees the land 
 All white around, whereat he strikes his thigh- 
 Turns back and grieving wanders here and there, 
 Like one disconsolate and at a stand ; 
 Then issues forth, forgetting his despair, 
 For lo 1 the face of nature he beholds 
 Changed on a sudden takes his crook again, 
 And drives his flock to pasture from the folds. WRIGHT.
 
 168 DANTE 
 
 Pudica in faccia e nelP andare onesta. 
 Come color dinanzi vider rotta 
 
 La luce .... 
 
 Ristaro, e trasser se indietro alquanto, 
 
 E tutti gli altri che veniano appresso, 
 
 Non sappiendo il perche,fero altrettanto. Purg. 3. 1 
 
 So with the beautiful picture of the goats upon 
 the mountain, chewing the cud in the noontide heat 
 and stillness, and the goatherd, resting on his staff 
 and watching them a picture which no traveller 
 among the mountains of Italy or Greece can have 
 missed, or have forgotten : 
 
 Quali si fanno ruminando manse 
 Le capre, state rapide e proterve 
 Sopra le rime avanti cbe sien pranse, 
 
 1 And e'en as sheep forth issue from the fold, 
 By one, by two, by three while all the rest 
 Stand timid, and to earth their noses hold ; 
 
 And what the leader doth, they also do, 
 If chance she stop, behind her closely prest 
 Simple and still not knowing why : e'en so 
 
 I saw the leaders of this favoured race 
 Now move, now pause, as their advance they made, 
 Modest in look, and dignified in pace. 
 
 When intercepted on my right they found 
 The solar rays . 
 
 They paused and somewhat back their steps withdrew ; 
 And all the others who behind them came, 
 Not knowing why, fell back some paces too. WEIGHT.
 
 DANTE 169 
 
 Tacite al ombra mentre che 'I tol ferve, 
 Guardate dal pastor che 'n su la verga 
 Poggiato a' e, e lor poggiato serve. Pun/. 27. 1 
 
 So again, with his recollections of cities : the crowd, 
 running together to hear news (Purg. 2), or pressing 
 after the winner of the game (Purg. 6); the blind 
 men at the church doors, or following their guide 
 through the throng (Purg. 13, 16); the friars walk- 
 ing along in silence, one behind another : 
 
 Taciti, soli, e senza compagnia 
 
 N' andavam, V tm dinanzi, e F altro dopo 
 Come ifrati minor vanno per via, Inf. 23. 8 
 
 He turns to account in his poem, the pomp and 
 clamour of the host taking the field (Inf. 22) ; the 
 devices of heraldry ; the answering chimes of morning 
 bells over the city ; 8 the inventions and appliances 
 
 1 Like goats that having over the crags pursued 
 Their wanton sports, now, quiet pass the time 
 In ruminating sated with their food, 
 Beneath the shade, while glows the sun on high 
 Watched by the goatherd with unceasing can, 
 As on his staff he leans, with watchful eye. WRIGHT. 
 
 1 Silent, apart, companionless we went, 
 The one before, the other close behind, 
 Like friars minor on their journey bent Ibid. 
 
 3 Indi come orologio che ne chiatni 
 Nell" ora che la sposa di Dio surge 
 A mattinar lo sposo perche 1' ami,
 
 170 DANTE 
 
 of art, the wheels within wheels of clocks (Parad. 24), 
 the many-coloured carpets of the East (Inf. 17); 
 music and dancing the organ and voice in church : 
 
 Voce mista al dolce suono 
 
 Che or d or no s' intendon le parole, Purg. 9. 1 
 
 the lute and voice in the chamber (Parad. 20) ; the 
 
 Che 1' ana parte e 1' altra tira ed urge 
 Tin tin sonando con si dolce nota 
 Che '1 ben disposto spirto d' amor turge ; 
 
 Cosi vid' io la gloriosa ruota 
 Muoversi e render voce a voce, in tempra 
 Ed in dolcezza ch' esser non pu6 nota 
 
 Se non cola dove '1 gioir a' insempra. Parad. 10. 
 
 Then, like a clock that summons us away, 
 What time the spouse of God at matin hour 
 Hastes to her husband, for his love to pray, 
 
 And one part urges on the other, sounding 
 Tin Tin in notes so sweet, that by its power 
 The soul is thrilled, with pious love abounding ; 
 
 So I beheld the glorious circle move ; 
 And with such sweet accord and harmony 
 Take up the song of praise, as none may prove, 
 
 Save where is joy through all eternity. 
 
 1 As when the organ on some holy day 
 
 Blends with the voices of the sacred choir, 
 
 Which now swell loud, now melting die away. WEIGHT 
 
 [More correctly rendered by Dean Plumptre : 
 Such impress as it oft is wont to take, 
 When men their singing with the organ share, 
 For now were heard, now not, the wordt they spake.]
 
 DANTE 171 
 
 dancers preparing to begin, 1 or waiting to catch a 
 new strain. 2 Or, again, the images of domestic life, 
 the mother's ways to her child, reserved and reprov- 
 ing " che al figlio par superba " or cheering him 
 with her voice, or watching him compassionately in 
 the wandering of fever : 
 
 Ond' ella, appresso d' un pio sospiro 
 
 Qli occhi drizz6 ver me, con quel sembiante 
 Che inadre fa sopra figliuol deliro. Parad, 1.' 
 
 Nor is he less observant of the more delicate pheno- 
 mena of mind, in its inward workings, and its con- 
 nection with the body. The play of features, the 
 involuntary gestures and attitudes of the passions, 
 
 1 E come surge, e va, ed entra in ballo 
 Vergine lieta, sol per fame onore 
 Alia novizia, e non per alcun fallo. Parad. 25. 
 And as a virgin, rising joyously, 
 Enters the dance, bent only on improving 
 The nuptial welcome not through vanity. 
 
 * Donne mi parver, non da ballo sciolte, 
 Ma At s' arrestin tacite ascoltando 
 Fin che le nuove note hanno ricnlte.Ibid. 10. 
 Ladies they teemed, not from the dance set free, 
 But pausing for new notes, with fond desire, 
 Until they catch them, listening silently. WBIOBT. 
 
 1 With pitying sigh her eyes on me were thrown ; 
 And hers was like a mother's gaze, intent 
 Upon the face of her delirious son.
 
 172 , DANTE 
 
 the power of eye over eye, of hand upon hand, the 
 charm of voice and expression, of musical sounds 
 even when not understood feelings, sensations, and 
 states of mind which have a name, and others, equally 
 numerous and equally common, which have none 
 these, often so fugitive, so shifting, so baffling and 
 intangible, are expressed with a directness, a sim- 
 plicity, a sense of truth at once broad and refined, 
 which seized at once on the congenial mind of his 
 countrymen, and pointed out to them the road which 
 they have followed in art, unapproached as yet by 
 any competitors. 1 
 
 1 For instance : thoughts upon thoughts, ending in sleep and 
 dreams : 
 
 Nuovo pensier dentro de me si mise, 
 Dal qual piu altri nacqucro e divcrsi : 
 
 E tanto d 1 uno in altro vaneggiai 
 
 Che gli occhi per vaghezza ricopersi, 
 E 'I pensamento in sogno trasmutai. Purg. 18. 
 
 New thought was sadden waked within my breast, 
 Whence other thoughts of different kind arose : 
 
 And I so wandered on from theme to theme, 
 
 Mine eyes at last in rapture lost I close, 
 And change my meditation for a dream. WIUGHT. 
 
 sleep stealing off when broken by light : 
 
 Come si frange il son no, ore di butto 
 Nuova luce percuote '1 viso cliiuso, 
 ChefraUo guizzapria che muoja lutlo. Purg. 17. 
 
 As when a sudden and o'erpowering light,
 
 DANTE 173 
 
 And he has anticipated the latest schools of 
 modern poetry, by making not merely nature, but 
 
 Strikes oar closed eyes, and breaks upon our sleep, 
 Quivering a moment ere it takes its Sight. 
 
 the shock of sudden awakening : 
 
 Come al lume acuto si disonna, 
 
 lo sveglialo cii> che vede abborre, 
 81 nescia e la subita rigilia, 
 Finche la stimativa nol soccorre. Farad. 28. 
 
 And as through fervour of the piercing light 
 
 Is broken through the slumber of the night, 
 And the awakened one hates what he sees 
 (So lost to sense of all around he is, 
 Till judgment re-illume his faculties). 
 
 uneaty feelings produced by siyht or representation of something 
 
 unnatural : 
 
 Come per sostentar solajo o tetto 
 Per mensola talvolta una figura 
 Si vede giunger le ginocchia al petto, 
 La qualfa del non ver vera rancura 
 Nascer a chi la vede; cosl fatti 
 Vid 1 io color. Purg. 10. 
 
 As to support a roof or ceiling, oft 
 A figure doth a bracket's place supply, 
 The knees up-gathered to the breast aloft 
 
 The unreal pain excites compassion true 
 In him who sees it ; such when I explore 
 These forms minutely, they appear to view.
 
 174 DANTE 
 
 science tributary to a poetry with whose general aim 
 and spirit it has little in common tributary in its 
 
 blushing in innocent sympathy for others : 
 
 E come donna onesta che pcnnanc 
 Di se sicura, e per V altnd fallenza 
 Pure ascoltando timida si fane: 
 
 Cosl Beatrice trasmut6 sembianza. Parad. 27. 
 
 And like a modest damsel, who not fearing 
 In her own self, yet wears a timid mien, 
 The story of another's shame but hearing ; 
 
 Such change the look of Beatrice displayed. 
 asking and answering by looks only : 
 
 Volsi gli ocelli agli occhi al signor mio ; 
 Ond' flli in' assentl con lieto cenno 
 Ci6 che chiedea la vista del disio. Ibid. 19. 
 
 I bent my eyes on those of my dear lord, 
 Who to the strong desire that mine expressed 
 Rendered with joyful look a kind accord. 
 
 ^catching the effect of words : 
 
 Posto avea fine al suo ragionamento 
 L' alto dottore, ad attento guardava 
 Nella mia vista s' io parea con ten to. 
 
 Ed io, cui nuova sole ancor frugava, 
 Di fuor taceva e dentro dicea : forse 
 Lo troppo dimandar ch' io fo, li grava. 
 
 Ma quel padre verace, che s' accorse 
 Del timido voler che non s' apriva, 
 Parlando, di parlare ardir mi porse. Purg. 18 
 
 His reasoning ended, my exalted guide 
 Attentively surveyed my countenance 
 To see if I were fully satisfied.
 
 DANTE 175 
 
 exact forms, even in its technicalities. He speaks of 
 the Mediterranean Sea, not merely as a historian, or 
 
 And I, by further cravings now possest, 
 Spake not aloud, but said within : " Perchance 
 He by my constant questions is oppressed." 
 
 But that true father, who at once perceived 
 The timid wish I had not dared to tell, 
 Soon by his speech my fear to speak relieved. 
 
 Dante betraying Virgits presence to Statins, by his involuntary 
 
 tmiU: 
 Volser Virgil io a me queste parole 
 
 Con viso che tacendo dicea : "taci ;" 
 
 Ma non pu6 tutto la virtu che vuole ; 
 Che riso e pianto son tanto seguaci 
 
 Alia passion da cho ciascun si spicca, 
 
 Che men seguon voler ne' piit veraci. 
 lopur sorriti, come f uom ch' ammicca: 
 
 Perche V ombra si tacque, riguardommi 
 
 Negli occhi ove 'I sembiante piit rificca. 
 E se tanto lavoro in bene assommi, 
 
 Disse, perche la faccia tua testeso 
 
 Un lampeggiar a' un riao dimostrommi T Purg. 21. 
 
 These words made Virgil torn to where I stood, 
 With look that silent said : " B silent thou ;" 
 But Virtue cannot all that Virtue would ; 
 
 For in the wake of passion, smile and tear 
 So closely follow, that they least allow 
 The will to govern is the most sincere. 
 
 I smiled as one who winks : whereat the shade 
 Refrained from words, and fastened on mine eye, 
 In which more clearly is the soul pourtrayed.
 
 176 DANTE 
 
 an observer of its storms or its smiles, but as a 
 geologist; 1 of light, not merely in its beautiful 
 
 Success, he said, reward thy good intent, 
 As these inform me, from thy features why 
 The lightning of a smile was lately sent. W BIGHT. 
 smiles and words together : 
 
 Per le sorrise parolette brevi. Farad. 1. 
 Those brief words accompanied with smiles. CAKY. 
 
 eye meeting eye : 
 
 Gli occhi ritorsi avanti 
 Dritti nel lume della dolce guida 
 Che sorridendo ardea negli occhi santL farad. 3. 
 
 Called back mine eyes anon 
 Full on the orbs of my loved guide directed, 
 Which, as she smiled, with holy lustre shone, WBIG in. 
 Come si vcde qui alcuna volta 
 
 L' affetto nella vista, a' ello e tanto 
 
 Che da lui sia tutta 1' anima tolta : 
 Cosl nel fiammeggiar del fulgor santo 
 
 A cui mi volsi, couobbi la voglia 
 
 In lui di ragionarmi ancore alquanto. Parad. 18. 
 And as sometimes, in this our mortal state, 
 
 We see affection pictured in the eyes, 
 
 Of power the soul entire to captivate. 
 So, in the effulgence of that holy Same 
 
 To which I turned, an ardent wish I saw 
 
 With me a further intercourse to claim. WRIGHT. 
 
 gentleness of voice : 
 
 E cominciommi a dir soave e piana 
 
 Con angelica voce in sua favella. Inf. 2. 
 
 1 7xi mayyior valle, in che 1' acqua si spandi. Parad. 9.
 
 DANTE 177 
 
 appearances, but in its natural laws. 1 There is a 
 charm, an imaginative charm to him, not merely in 
 
 And on mine ear in her own accents fell 
 Tones soft and sweet of angel harmony. WRIGHT. 
 
 E come agli occhi miei si fe* piu bella, 
 
 Cos! con voce piu dolce e soave, 
 
 Ma non con questa moderns favella, 
 Dissemi ; farad. 16. 
 
 And brighter as it grew before mine eyes, 
 So with a voice more soft and sweetly faint 
 (But not with that now used of modern guise) 
 
 It answered Ibid. 
 
 chanting : 
 
 Te lucis ante si divotamente 
 Le usci di bocca e con si dolce note, 
 Che fece me a me uscir di mente. 
 E 1' altre poi dolcemcntc e divote 
 Seguitar lei per tutto 1' inno intero, 
 Avendo gli occhi alle superne ruote. Purg. 8. 
 
 Te lucis anU with such deep devotion 
 Forth issued from her lips in notes so soft, 
 My soul was ravished with intense emotion. 
 Meanwhile the others, sweetly and devout, 
 Keeping their eyes upon the wheels aloft 
 Accompanied her voice the hymn throughout 
 
 WRIGHT. 
 
 chanting blended with th sound of the organ : Purg. 9. Vid 
 supra, p. 151. 
 
 1 E.g. Purg. 15.
 
 1 78 DANTE 
 
 the sensible magnificence of the heavens, "in their 
 silence, and light, and watchfulness," but in the system 
 
 voices in concert : 
 
 E come in voce voce si discerne 
 
 Quando una eferma, e 'I altra va e riede. Parad. 8. 
 
 And as distinctly voice from voice we hear, 
 When, one sustained, the other comes and goes. 
 
 WRIGHT. 
 
 attitudes and gestures: e.g. Beatrice addressing him : 
 Con atto e voce di spedito duce. Parad. 30. 
 With gesture and with look commanding, she 
 
 Began WRIGHT. 
 
 Sordello eyeing the travellers : 
 
 Venimmo a lei : o anima Lombards, 
 Come ti stavi altera e disdcgnosa, 
 E nel muover degli occhi onesta e tarda. 
 Ella non ci diceva alcuna cosa, 
 Ma lasciavane gir, solo guardando, 
 A guisa di leon quando si posa. Purg. 6. 
 
 To him advanced we. What disdain and pride, 
 O Lombard soul, thy countenance bespoke ! 
 Thine eyes, how moved they, slow and dignified 
 
 To us the spirit not a word addressed, 
 
 Letting us pass, and deigning but a look 
 Like to a lion, when he lies at rest. WRIGHT. 
 
 the angel moving "dry-shod" over the Stygian pool: 
 Dal volto rimovea quell' aer grasso 
 Menando la sinistra innanzi spesso, 
 E sol di quell' angoscia parea lasso. 
 Ben m' accorsi ch' egli era del ciel messo, 
 E volsimi al maestro ; e quei fe' segno
 
 DANTE 179 
 
 of Ptolemy and the theories of astrology; and he 
 delights to interweave the poetry of feeling and of 
 the outward sense with the grandeur so far as he 
 knew it of order, proportion, measured magnitudes, 
 the relations of abstract forces, displayed on such a 
 scene as the material universe, as if he wished to show 
 that imagination in its boldest flight was not afraid of 
 the company of the clear and subtle intellect 
 
 Indeed the real never daunts him. It is his 
 leading principle of poetic composition, to draw out 
 of things the poetry which is latent in them, either 
 
 Ch' io stcssi cheto ed inchinassi ed esso. 
 Ahi quanto mi parea pien di disdegno. 
 
 Poi si rivolse per la strada lorda, 
 
 E non fe' motto a noi, ma fe, sembiante 
 D* uomo cui altra cura strings e morde 
 Che quella di colui che gli e davante. lit/. 9. 
 
 The heavy air he from his visage cleared, 
 Waving the left hand oft his face before, 
 And weary with that single toil appeared. 
 
 Heaven's messenger he was, I plainly saw, 
 And to the master turned : whereat he straight 
 Made sign that I should bend in silent awe. 
 
 Ah I what disdain, me thought, his looks disclosed. 
 
 Then back he turned along the filthy shore, 
 Nor spoke a word ; but seemed like one tormented 
 By other care and other trouble more 
 
 Than by the thought of him within his view. WRIGHT.
 
 180 DANTE 
 
 essentially, or as they are portions, images, or reflexes 
 of something greater not to invest them with a 
 poetical semblance, by means of words which bring 
 with them poetical associations, and have received a 
 general poetical stamp. Dante has few of those 
 indirect charms which flow from the subtle structure 
 and refined graces of language none of that ex- 
 quisitely-fitted and self-sustained mechanism of choice 
 words of the Greeks none of that tempered and 
 majestic amplitude of diction, which clothes, like the 
 folds of a royal robe, the thoughts of the Latins none 
 of that abundant play of fancy and sentiment, soft or 
 grand, in which the later Italian poets delighted. 
 Words with him are used sparingly, never in play 
 never because they carry with them poetical recollec- 
 tions never for their own sake ; but because they 
 are instruments which will give the deepest, clearest^ 
 sharpest stamp of that image which the poet's mind, 
 piercing to the very heart of his subject, or seizing 
 the characteristic feature which to other men's eyes 
 is confused and lost among others accidental and 
 common, draws forth in severe and living truth. 
 Words will not always bend themselves to his 
 demands on them; they make him often uncouth, 
 abrupt, obscure. But he is too much in earnest to 
 heed uncouthness ; and his power over language is 
 too great to allow uncertainty as to what he means.
 
 DANTE 181 
 
 to be other than occasional. Nor is he a stranger to 
 the utmost sweetness and melody of language. But 
 it appears, unsought for and unlaboured, the spon- 
 taneous and inevitable obedience of the tongue and 
 pen to the impressions of the mind ; as grace and 
 beauty, of themselves, " command and guide the eye " 
 of the painter, who thinks not of his hand but of 
 them. All is in character with the absorbed and 
 serious earnestness which pervades the poem ; there 
 is no toying, no ornament, that a man in earnest 
 might not throw into his words ; whether in single 
 images, or in pictures, like that of the Meadow of the 
 Heroes (Inf. 4), or the angel appearing in hell to 
 guide the poet through the burning city (Inf. 9) or 
 in histories, like those of Count Ugolino, or the life 
 of St Francis (Parad. 11) or in the dramatic scenes 
 like the meeting of the poets Sordello and Virgil 
 (Purg. 6), or that one, unequalled in beauty, where 
 Dante himself, after years of forgetfulness and sin, 
 sees Beatrice in glory, and hears his name, never but 
 once pronounced during the vision, from her lips. 1 
 
 1 Io vidi gUt nel cominciar del giorno 
 
 La parte oriental tutta rosata, 
 
 E 1* altro ciel di bel sereno adorno, 
 E la faccia del sol nasccre ombrata, 
 
 81 cbe per temperanza di vapori 
 
 L* occhio lo sostenea lunga fiata ; 
 Coal dentro una nuvola di fiori,
 
 182 DANTE 
 
 But this, or any other array of scenes and images, 
 might be matched from poets of a far lower order 
 
 Che dalle mani angeliche saliva, 
 
 E ricadeva giu dentro e di fuori, 
 Sovra candido vel cinta d* oliva 
 
 Donna m' apparve sotto verde manto 
 
 Vestita di color di fiamraa viva. 
 E lo spirito mio, che gia cotanto 
 
 Tempo era stato che alia sua presenza 
 
 Non era di stupor, tremando, affranto. 
 Senza degli occhi aver piu conoscenza, 
 
 Per occulta virtu, che da lei mossc, 
 
 D' antico amor senti' la gran potenza. 
 
 Yolsimi alia sinistra col rispitto, 
 Col quale il fantolin corre alia mamma, 
 Qnando ha paura, o quando egli e afflitto, 
 
 Per dicere a Virgil io : Men che dramma 
 Di sangue m' e rimasa, che non tremi : 
 Conosco i segni dell' antica fiamma. 
 
 Ma Virgilio 11' avea lasciati scemi 
 Di se, Virgilio dolcissimo padre, 
 Virgilio, a cui per mia salute diemi : 
 
 Dante, perchfc Virgilio se ne vada, 
 Non piangcre anche, non piangere ancora 
 Che pianger ti convien per altra spada. 
 
 Regalmente nell' atto ancor proterva 
 Continu6, come colui che dice, 
 E il piii caldo parlar diretro serva, 
 
 Guardami beu : ben son, ben son Beatrice :
 
 DANTE 183 
 
 than Dante : and to specimens which might be 
 brought together of his audacity and extravagance, 
 
 Come degnasti <T accedere al montc ? 
 
 Non sapei tu, che qui e 1' uom felice ? Purg. 30. 
 But extracts can give but an imperfect notion of this grand 
 and touching canto. 
 
 Erewhile the eastern regions hare I seen 
 At day-break glow with roseate colours, and 
 The expanse beside all beauteous and serene ; 
 
 And the sun's face so shrouded at its rise, 
 And temper'd by the mists which overhung, 
 That I could gaze on it with steadfast eyes ; 
 
 E'en so, encompass'd in a cloud of flowers, 
 Which upward by angelic hands were flung, 
 And all about the chariot fell in showers 
 
 In veil of white, with olive chaplet bound, 
 A Maid appear'd, beneath a mantle green, 
 With hue of living flame enrobed around. 
 
 And now my spirit (which for many a day, 
 Unused to feel her presence, had not been 
 O'ennaster'd by sensations of dismay) 
 
 Felt, though she was not fully manifest, 
 (Such secret virtue from her person flow'd) 
 How strong the love that erst my soul possess'd. 
 
 Soon as mine eye perceived that glorious ray, 
 With which in former times my bosom glow'd 
 Ere boyhood yet had wholly pass'd away, 
 
 I turn'd unto the left, e'en like a child, 
 That to its mother runs with panting breast. 
 When hurt, or into dangerous paths beguiled 
 
 To say to Virgil : " Flows not through my frame 
 One drop of blood that trembles not ; confest
 
 184 DANTE 
 
 no parallel could be found except among the lowest. 
 We cannot, honestly, plead the barbarism of the time 
 as his excuse. That, doubtless, contributed largely 
 to them ; but they were the faults of the man. In 
 
 Are all the traces of my ancient flame. " 
 
 But Virgil now had vanish'd from my side 
 Virgil my father, most revered, most dear 
 Virgil on whom for safety I relied. 
 
 Nor could the sight of all in evil hour 
 Lost by our primal mother, check the tear, 
 Which o'er my cheeks now flow'd in ample shower. 
 
 11 Dante, weep not that Virgil leaves thee here 
 Weep not as yet ; for know, another sword 
 Of sharper edge shall cause thee many a tear." 
 
 E'en as an Admiral with searching ken 
 Inspects his vessels when he comes aboard, 
 And by his look encourages his men ; 
 
 So on the left of the celestial car 
 (When at the sound of mine own name I turn'd, 
 Which here I am compell'd to register) 
 
 The Lady, whom beneath a drapery 
 Of flowers angelical I late discern'd, 
 Cast from beyond the stream her eyes on me ; 
 
 Although the veil, that from her brow descended, 
 Girt by Minerva's leaf around her head, 
 From clearer view her beauteous form defended. 
 
 With regal air and look, wherein disdain 
 Was pictured still, proceeding thus, she said 
 (Like one who doth her bitterest taunt retain) 
 
 " Yes, I am Beatrice ; regard me well : 
 And hast thou deign'd at last to ascend the mount, 
 Where joys unspeakable for ever dwell ?" WEIGHT.
 
 DANTE 185 
 
 another age, their form might have been different; 
 yet we cannot believe so much of time, that it would 
 have tamed Dante. Nor can we wish it. It might 
 have made him less great : and his greatness can well 
 bear its own blemishes, and will not less meet its 
 honour among men, because they can detect its due 
 kindred to themselves. 
 
 The greatness of his work is not in its details to 
 be made or marred by them. It is the greatness of a 
 comprehensive and vast conception, sustaining with- 
 out failure the trial of its long and hazardous 
 execution, and fulfilling at its close the hope and 
 promise of its beginning ; like the greatness which 
 we watch in its course with anxious suspense, and look 
 back upon when it is secured by death, with deep 
 admiration of a perfect life. Many a surprise, many 
 a difficulty, many a disappointment, many a strange 
 reverse and alternation of feelings, attend the progress 
 of the most patient and admiring reader of the Corn- 
 media ; as many as attend on one who follows the 
 unfolding of a strong character in life. We are often 
 shocked when we were prepared to admire repelled, 
 when we came with sympathy ; the accustomed key 
 fails at a critical moment depths are revealed which 
 we cannot sound, mysteries which baffle and confound 
 us. But the check is for a time the gap and chasm 
 does not dissever. Haste is even an evidence of life
 
 186 DANTE 
 
 the brief word, the obscure hint, the unexplained, 
 the unfinished, or even the unachieved, are the marks 
 of human feebleness, but are also among those of 
 human truth. The unity of the whole is unimpaired. 
 The strength which is working it out, though it may 
 have at times disappointed us, shows no hollowness 
 or exhaustion. The surprise of disappointment is 
 balanced there is the surprise of unimagined ex- 
 cellence. Powers do more than they promised ; and 
 that spontaneous and living energy, without which 
 neither man nor poet can be trusted, and which 
 showed its strength even in its failures, shows it more 
 abundantly in the novelties of success by touching 
 sympathies which have never been touched before, by 
 the unconstrained freshness with which it meets the 
 proverbial and familiar, by the freedom with which 
 it adjusts itself to a new position or an altered task 
 by the completeness, unstudied and instinctive, with 
 which it holds together dissimilar and uncongenial 
 materials, and forces the most intractable, the most 
 unaccustomed to submission, to receive the colour of 
 the whole by its orderly and unmistakable onward 
 march, and its progress, as in height, so in what 
 corresponds to height. It was one and the same 
 man, who rose from the despair, the agony, the vivid 
 and vulgar horrors of the Inferno, to the sense and 
 imagination of certainty, sinlessness, and joy ineffable
 
 DANTE 187 
 
 the same man whose power and whose sympathies 
 failed him not, whether discriminating and enumer- 
 ating, as if he had gone through them all, the various 
 forms of human suffering, from the dull, gnawing 
 sense of the loss of happiness, to the infinite woes 
 of the wrecked and ruined spirit, and the coarser 
 pangs of the material flesh ; or dwelling on the 
 changeful lights and shades of earnest repentance, 
 in its hard, hut not unaided or ungladdened struggle, 
 and on that restoration to liberty and peace which 
 can change even this life into paradise, and reverse 
 the doom which made sorrow our condition, and 
 laughter and joy unnatural and dangerous the 
 penalty of that first fault, which 
 
 In pianto ed in affanno 
 Cambi6 onesto riso e dolce giuoco : Purg. 28. 1 
 
 or rising finally above mortal experience, to imagine 
 the freedom of the saints and the peace of eternity. 
 In this consists the greatness of his power. It 
 is not necessary to read through the Commtdia to 
 see it open it where we please, we see that he 
 is on his way, and whither he is going; episode 
 and digression share in the solemnity of the general 
 order. 
 
 1 Chosing s life of sorrow and disgrace 
 Instead of virtuous smiles and gladsome sport. -W RIGHT.
 
 188 DANTE 
 
 And his greatness was more than that of power. 
 That reach and play of sympathy ministered to a 
 noble wisdom, which used it thoughtfully and con- 
 sciously for a purpose to which great poetry had 
 never yet been applied, except in the mouth of 
 prophets. Dante was a stern man, and more than 
 stern, among his fellows. But he has left to those 
 who never saw his face an inheritance the most 
 precious ; he has left them that which, reflecting and 
 interpreting their minds, does so, not to amuse, not 
 to bewilder, not to warp, not to turn them in upon 
 themselves in distress or gloom or selfishness; not 
 merely to hold up a mirror to nature ; but to make 
 them true and make them hopeful. Dark as are his 
 words of individuals, his thoughts are not dark or 
 one-sided about mankind ; his is no cherished and 
 perverse severity his faith is too large, too real, for 
 such a fault. He did not write only the Inferno. 
 And the Purgatorio and the Paradiso are not an 
 afterthought, a feebler appendix and compensation, 
 conceived when too late, to a finished whole, which 
 has taken up into itself the poet's real mind. No- 
 where else in poetry of equal power is there the same 
 balanced view of what man is, and may be ; nowhere 
 so wide a grasp shown of his various capacities, so 
 strong a desire to find a due place and function for 
 all his various dispositions. Where he stands con-
 
 DANTE 189 
 
 trasted in his idea of human life with other poets, 
 who have been more powerful exponents of its 
 separate sides, is in his large and truthful compre- 
 hensiveness. Fresh from the thought of man's 
 condition as a whole, fresh from the thought of his 
 goodness, his greatness, his power, as well as of his 
 evil, his mind is equally in tune when rejoicing 
 over his restoration, as when contemplating the ruins 
 of his fall. He never lets go the recollection that 
 human life, if it grovels at one end in corruption 
 and sin, and has to pass through the sweat and dust 
 and disfigurement of earthly toil, has throughout, 
 compensations, remedies, functions, spheres innumer- 
 able of profitable activity, sources inexhaustible of 
 delight and consolation and at the other end a 
 perfection which cannot bo named. No one ever 
 measured the greatness of man in all its forms with 
 so true and yet with so admiring an eye, and with 
 such glowing hope, as he who has also portrayed so 
 awfully man's littleness and vilencss. And he went 
 farther no one who could understand and do homage 
 to greatness in man, ever drew the line so strongly 
 between greatness and goodness, and so unhesitatingly 
 placed the hero of this world only placed him in all 
 his magnificence, honoured with no timid or dis- 
 sembling reverence at the distance of worlds, below 
 the place of the lowest saint.
 
 190 DANTE 
 
 Those who know the Divina Commedia best, will 
 best know how hard it is to be the interpreter of 
 such a mind ; but they will sympathise with the 
 wish to call attention to it. They know, and would 
 wish others also to know, not by hearsay, but by 
 experience, the power of that wonderful poem. They 
 know its austere, yet subduing beauty; they know 
 what force there is, in its free and earnest and solemn 
 verse, to strengthen, to tranquillise, to console. It 
 is a small thing that it has the secret of Nature and 
 Man ; that a few keen words have opened their eyes 
 to new sights in earth, and sea, and sky ; have taught 
 them new mysteries of sound ; have made them recog- 
 nise, in distinct image or thought, fugitive feelings, 
 or their unheeded expression, by look, or gesture, or 
 motion ; that it has enriched the public and collective 
 memory of society with new instances, never to be 
 lost, of human feeling and fortune ; has charmed 
 ear and mind by the music of its stately march, and 
 the variety and completeness of its plan. But, besides 
 this, they know how often its seriousness has put to 
 shame their trifling, its magnanimity their faint- 
 heartedness, its living energy their indolence, its 
 stern and sad grandeur rebuked low thoughts, its 
 thrilling tenderness overcome sullenness and assuaged 
 distress, its strong faith quelled despair and soothed 
 perplexity, its vast grasp imparted the sense of har-
 
 DANTE 191 
 
 mony to the view of clashing truths. They know 
 how often they have found, in times of trouble, if 
 not light, at least that Jeep sense of reality, per- 
 manent, though unseen, which is more than light can 
 always give in the view which it has suggested to 
 them of the judgments and the love of God. 1 
 
 1 It is necessary to state, that these remarks were written 
 before we had seen the chapter on Dante in Italy, Past and 
 Present, by L. Mariotti. Had we become acquainted with it 
 earlier, we should have had to refer to it often, in the way of 
 acknowledgment, and as often in the way of strong protest. 
 
 [I860.]
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 [WiLUAM WORDSWORTH was born April 7, 1770, at Cocker- 
 mouth, a town on the edge of the Cumberland highlands. His 
 father was agent to Lord Lowther, and came of an old north- 
 country stock. Both father and mother died in his boyhood ; 
 his mother first, his father when he was fourteen. He went to 
 school in the neighbourhood, at Hawkshrad, and his school 
 days were days of much liberty, both in playing and reading. 
 In October 1787 he went to St. John's College, Cambridge. 
 Rut he made no mark at the university, and in January 1791 
 he took his degree and left Cambridge. Like many of his 
 generation he was filled with enthusiasm for the French 
 Revolution, and after taking his degree he resided for more 
 than a year in France. The Reign of Terror drove him home 
 again ; he came to London, unsettled in his plans ; he was 
 in Dorsetshire (1796), then at Alfoxdeu in the Somenetahiru 
 Quantocks, where he saw much of S. T. Coleridge. In 1793 he 
 published a volume of poems, and in 1798 ap]>earcd, at Bristol, 
 the first volume of the Lyrical Ballada, intended to be a 
 joint work of Coleridge and Wordsworth, but to which Coleridge 
 only contributed The Ancient Mariner, and two or three other 
 pieces. The two friends went to Germany at the end of 1798, 
 and Wordsworth, with his sister, spent the winter at Goslar. 
 When he returned to England, he also returned for good to hi* 
 
 O
 
 194 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 own northern mountains and lakes. He settled, with his sister, 
 near Grasmere, meaning to give himself to poetical composition 
 as the business of his life, and in 1SOO published the second 
 volume of the Lyrical Ballads. In 1802 he married Mary 
 Hutchinson, and finally fixed his home in the lakes, though 
 it was not till several years afterwards (1813) that he took up 
 his abode in the place henceforth connected with his name, 
 Rydal Mount. During all the early part of the century he was 
 very busy. Besides shorter pieces, suggested by the incidents 
 or feelings of the day, he was at work from 1799 to 1805 on a 
 poem, The Prelude, describing the history and growth of his 
 own mind, and intended to be an introduction to the greater 
 philosophical poem which he was already meditating, The 
 Recluse in part, and only in part, realised in The Excursion, 
 The Excursion was published in 1814. Composition took many 
 shapes in the various collections published by Wordsworth, 
 from the Lyrical Ballads in 1800 down to his death. But 
 especially his poetical efforts took the shape of the sonnet 
 Large collections of sonnets marked the working of his thoughts 
 and feelings on certain groups of subjects, or were the memorials 
 of scenes which had interested him. He once, and early in 
 his career, attempted the drama (The Borderers, 1795-96), but 
 with little success. From the first he took a keen interest in 
 all political and social questions, and he was an impassioned and 
 forcible prose writer. His life was a long one, of steady work 
 and much happiness. He died April 23, 1850, at Rydal Mount.] 
 
 WORDSWORTH was, first and foremost, a philosophical 
 thinker ; a man whose intention and purpose of life 
 it was to think out for himself, faithfully and seri- 
 ously, the questions concerning "Man and Nature 
 and Human Life." He tried to animate and invest
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 195 
 
 with imaginative light the convictions of religious, 
 practical, homely but high-hearted England, as Goethe 
 thought out in his poetry the speculations and 
 sceptical moods of inquisitive and critical Germany. 
 He was a poet, because the poetical gift and faculty 
 had been so bestowed on him that he could not fail in 
 one way or another to exercise it : but in deliberate 
 purpose and plan he was a poet, because poetry 
 offered him the richest, the most varied, and the 
 completest method of reaching truth in the matters 
 which interested him, and of expressing and recom- 
 mending its lessons, of "making them dwellers in 
 the hearts of men." "Every great poet," he said, 
 " is a teacher ; I wish either to be considered as a 
 teacher or as nothing." Not like poets writing 
 simply to please ; not like Lucretius or Pope, casting 
 other men's thought into ingenious or highly-coloured 
 or epigrammatic verse; not like Homer or Shakspere 
 or Milton, standing in impersonal distance from their 
 wonderful creations ; not like Shelley, full of philo- 
 sophic ideas, but incapable, from his wild nature, 
 of philosophic steadiness of thought ; not even like 
 poets who write to give an outlet to their sense of 
 the beauty, the strangeness, the pathetic mystery of 
 the world, to unburden their misgivings, to invite 
 sympathy with their sorrows or hopes, Wordsworth, 
 with all his imagination, and in his moments of
 
 196 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 highest rapture, has a practical sense of a charge 
 committed to him. He is as much in earnest as a 
 prophet, and he holds himself as responsible for 
 obedience to his call and for its fulfilmeift, as a 
 prophet " To console the afflicted ; to add sunshine 
 to daylight by making the happy happier ; to teach the 
 young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, 
 and feel, and therefore to become more actively and 
 securely virtuous," this is his own account of the 
 purpose of his poetry. (Letter to Lady Beaumont, 
 May 1807.) He has given the same account in the 
 Preface to The Excursion. 
 
 Not Chaos, not 
 
 The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, 
 Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out 
 By help of dreams can breed such fear and awe 
 As fall upon us often when we look 
 Into our minds, into the mind of man 
 My haunt, and the main region of my song. 
 Beauty a living presence of the earth, 
 Surpassing the most fair ideal forma 
 \Vhich craft of delicate spirits hath composed 
 From earth's materials waits upon my steps ; 
 Pitches her tents before me as I move, 
 An hourly neighbour. Paradise, and groves 
 Elysiau, Fortunate Fields like those of old 
 Sought in the Atlantic main why should they b 
 A history only of departed tilings, 
 Or a mere fiction of what never was ?
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 197 
 
 For the discerning intellect of man, 
 
 When wedded to this goodly universe 
 
 In love and holy passion, shall find these 
 
 A simple produce of the common day. 
 
 I, long before the blissful hour arrives, 
 
 Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse 
 
 Of this great consummation : and, by words 
 
 Which speak of nothing more than what we are, 
 
 Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep 
 
 Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain 
 
 To noble raptures ; while my voice proclaims 
 
 How exquisitely the individual mind 
 
 (And the progressive powers perhaps no 16M 
 
 Of the whole species) to the external world 
 
 Is fitted : and how exquisitely, too 
 
 Theme this but little heard of among men 
 
 The external world is fitted to the mind ; 
 
 And the creation (by no lower name 
 
 Can it be called) which they with blended might 
 
 Accomplish : this is our high argument. 
 
 Wordsworth's poetry and his idea of the office of 
 poetry must be traced, like many other remarkable 
 things, to the French Revolution. He very early, 
 even in his boyhood, became aware of that sympathy 
 with external nature, and of that power of discrimi- 
 nating insight into the characteristic varieties of its 
 beauty and awfulness, which afterwards so strongly 
 marked his writings. " I recollect distinctly," he says 
 of a description in one of his early poems, " the very
 
 198 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 spot where this struck ma The moment was im- 
 portant in my poetical history ; for I date from it 
 my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural 
 appearances which have been unnoticed by the poets 
 of any age or country, and I made a resolution to 
 supply in some measure the deficiency." We have 
 abundant evidence how he kept his purpose. 
 
 While Wordsworth was at Cambridge, the French 
 Revolution was beginning. The contagion of the 
 great ideas which it proclaimed caught him as it also 
 laid hold on so many among the nobler spirits of the 
 young generation. To him at that time, as he tells 
 
 us himself, 
 
 The whole earth 
 
 The beauty wore of promise ; that which sets 
 The budding rose above the rose full blown. 
 
 The wonder, the sympathy, the enthusiasm which 
 swept him and them away like a torrent, though in 
 his case the torrent's course was but a short one, left 
 ineffaceable marks on his character and his writings. 
 He was not at first so easily shocked as others were 
 at the excesses of the revolution. His stern North- 
 country nature could bear and approve much terrible 
 retribution for the old wrongs of the poor and the weak 
 at the hands of nobles and kings. In his Apology for 
 the French Revolution, 1793, he sneered at Bishop 
 Watson for the importance which the Bishop attached
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 199 
 
 to " the personal sufferings of the late royal martyr," 
 and for joining in the " idle cry of modish lamentation 
 which has resounded from the court to the cottage"; 
 and he boldly accepted the doctrine that in a time 
 of revolution, which cannot be a time of liberty, 
 "political virtues are developed at the expense of 
 moral ones." But though the guillotine and the 
 revolutionary tribunal had not daunted him, he 
 recoiled from the military despotism and the fever of 
 conquest in which they ended. The changes in his 
 fundamental principles, in his thoughts of man and 
 his duties, were not great : the change in his appli- 
 cation of them and in his judgment of the men, the 
 parties, the institutions, the measures, by which they 
 were to be guarded and carried out, was great indeed. 
 The hopes and affections which revolutionary France 
 had so deeply disappointed were transferred to what 
 was most ancient, most historic, most strongly rooted 
 by custom and usage, in traditional and unreformed 
 England. With characteristic courage he never cared 
 to apologise for a political change which was M 
 complete and striking as a change to a new religion. 
 He scarcely attempted directly to explain it. He 
 left it to tell its own story in his poetical creations, 
 and in the elaborate pictures of character, bis own 
 and others,' inserted into his longer works, Th 
 Prelude and The Excursion. But he was not a man
 
 200 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 to change with half a heart. He left behind him 
 for ever all the beliefs and anticipations and illusions 
 which, like spells, had bound him to Jacobin France. 
 He turned away from it in permanent and strong 
 disgust, and settled down into the sturdy English 
 Tory patriot of the beginning of the century. 
 
 But this unreserved and absorbing interest in the 
 wonderful ideas and events of the French Revolution, 
 transient as it was, had the effect upon him which 
 great interruptions of the common course of things 
 and life have on powerful natures. They were a call 
 and a strain on his intellect and will, first in taking 
 them in, then in judging, sifting, accepting or refusing 
 them, which drew forth to the full all that he had of 
 strength and individual character. But for that, he 
 might have been, and doubtless would have been, the 
 poet of nature, a follower, but with richer gifts, of 
 Thomson, Akenside, perhaps Cowper. But it was the 
 trial and the struggle which he went through, amid 
 the hopes and overthrows of the French Revolution, 
 which annealed his mind to its highest temper, which 
 gave largeness to his sympathies and reality and 
 power to his ideas. 
 
 Every one knows that Wordsworth's early poetry 
 was received with a shout of derision, such as, except 
 in the case of Keats, has never attended the first 
 appearance of a great poet. Every one knows, too,
 
 WILLIAM WOKDSWORTH 201 
 
 that in a quarter of a century it was succeeded by 
 a growth of profound and enthusiastic admiration, 
 which, though it has been limited by the rise of new 
 forms of deep and powerful poetry, is still far from 
 being spent or even reduced, though it is expressed 
 with more discrimination than of old, in all who have 
 a right to judge of English poetry. 
 
 This was the inevitable result of the characteristic 
 qualities of Wordsworth's genius, though for a time 
 the quarrel between the poet and his critics was ag- 
 gravated by accidental and temporary circumstances. 
 Wordsworth is destined, if any poet is, to be im- 
 mortal ; but immortality does not necessarily mean 
 popularity. That in Wordsworth which made one 
 class of readers find in him beauty, grandeur, and 
 truth, which they had never found before, will 
 certainly tell on the same class in future yean: 
 
 What he has loved, 
 Others will love, and he will teach them how. 
 
 But mankind is deeply divided in its sympathies and 
 tastes ; and for a large portion of it, not merely of 
 those who read, but of those who create and govern 
 opinion, that which Wordsworth loved and aimed at 
 and sought to represent will always be the object, 
 not only of indifference but of genuine dislike. Add 
 to this that Wordsworth's genius, though great, and
 
 202 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 noble, and lofty, was in a marked way limited, and 
 that in his own exposition and defence of his view of 
 poetry he was curiously and unfortunately one-sided 
 and inadequate, and provokingly stiff and dogmatic. 
 This, of course, only affected an extinct controversy. 
 But the controversy marked at once the power and 
 the bold novelty of Wordsworth's attempt to purify 
 and exalt English poetry. Wordsworth was, and felt 
 himself to be, a discoverer, and like other great dis- 
 coverers, his victory was in seeing by faith things 
 which were not yet seen, but which were obvious, or 
 soon became so, when once shown. He opened a new 
 world of thought and enjoyment to Englishmen ; hia 
 work formed an epoch in the intellectual and moral 
 history of the race. But for that very reason he had, 
 as Coleridge said, like all great artists, to create the 
 taste by which he was to be relished, to teach the art 
 by which he was to be seen and judged. And people 
 were so little prepared for the thorough and systematic 
 way in which he searched out what is deepest or high- 
 est or subtlest in human feeling under the homeliest 
 realities, that not being able to understand him they 
 laughed at him. Nor was he altogether without 
 fault in the misconceptions which occasioned so much 
 ridicule and scorn. 
 
 How did he win this deep and lasting admiration 1 
 What was it in him which exposed him not merely
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 203 
 
 to the mocks of the scorner but to the dislike of the 
 really able men who condemned him t 
 
 That Wordsworth possessed poetical power of the 
 very highest order could be doubted by no one who 
 had read the poem which concluded the first volume of 
 the fiercely attacked Lyrical Ballads the Lines written 
 above Tintern Abbey. That which places a man high 
 among poets, force and originality of thought, vivid- 
 ness and richness of imagination, command over the 
 instrument of language, in its purity, its beauty, and 
 its majesty, could not be, and was never, denied. 
 But this alone does not explain what is distinctive and 
 characteristic in what called forth so much enthusiasm, 
 and such an outcry of disapprobation. 
 
 What was special in Wordsworth was the pene- 
 trating power of his perceptions of poetical elements, 
 and his fearless reliance on the simple forces of 
 expression, in contrast to the more ornate ones. He 
 had an eye to see these elements, where I will not 
 say no one had seen or felt them, but where no one 
 appears to have recognised that they had seen or felt 
 them. He saw that the familiar scene of human life, 
 nature, as affecting human life and feeling, and man 
 as the fellow-creature of nature, but also separate and 
 beyond it in faculties and destiny had not yet 
 rendered up even to the mightiest of former poets all 
 that they had in them to touch the human heart
 
 204 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 And he accepted it as his mission to open the eyes 
 and widen the thoughts of his countrymen, and to 
 teach them to discern in the humblest and most 
 unexpected forms the presence of what was kindred 
 to what they had long recognised as the highest and 
 greatest. 
 
 Wordsworth's poetry was not only a powerful but 
 a conscious and systematic appeal to that craving for 
 deep truth and reality which had been gathering 
 way ever since the French Revolution so terribly 
 tore asunder the old veils of conventionality and 
 custom. Truth is a necessary element in all good 
 poetry, and there had been good poetry in the century 
 before Wordsworth. But in Wordsworth the moral 
 judgment and purpose of the man were joined to 
 the poet's instinct and art ; and he did, as the most 
 sacred and natural of duties, what he would anyhow 
 have done from taste and for his pleasure. When 
 that inflexible loyalty to truth which was the prime 
 condition of all his writings not mere literal truth, 
 but the truth which could only be reached by thought 
 and imagination, when this had been taken in, it 
 was soon seen what an amazing view it opened of the 
 new riches and wonders of the world, a scene of dis- 
 covery which Wordsworth was far from exhausting. 
 It was a contrast, startling all and baffling many, 
 to the way in which, since Shakspere and Milton,
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 205 
 
 poetry had been content to skim the surface of the 
 vast awful tracts of life and nature, dealing with their 
 certainties and riddles, with their beauty and their 
 terror, under the guidance of sentiments put on for 
 the most part like a stage dress, and in language 
 which seemed not to belong to the world which we 
 know. Thomson, Gray, and Burns, Wordsworth's 
 immediate predecessors, had discovered, but only 
 partially, the extent and significance of the faith 
 which Wordsworth accepted and proclaimed in its 
 length and breadth and height and depth, that Truth, 
 in its infinite but ever self-consistent forms, is the 
 first law of poetry. From his time, the eyes of 
 readers, and the eyes of writers, have been opened ; 
 and whatever judgment they may pass on his own 
 poetry or his theories, they have followed both as 
 critics and as composers, in the path which he opened. 
 Hence his selection of subjects. He began with 
 nature, as in the Evening Walk and the Descriptive 
 Sketches. He had early and well learned his lesson 
 of nature learned to watch and note in her that, 
 to which other eyes were blind, of expression and 
 novelty in common sights. A habit was formed of 
 indefatigable observation, like that which was the 
 basis of Turner's power. And to a mind thus trained 
 the scenes through which he passed, and among 
 which his life was spent, furnished never-cloying food.
 
 206 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 His continental journeys left deep impressions upon 
 him; these impressions were answered by those of 
 his home. The "power of hills was on him"; the 
 music of waters was in his ears ; light and darkness 
 wove their spells for him. Looking to the same end 
 as Turner, and working in the same spirit, he, with 
 Turner, was a discoverer in the open face of nature : 
 working apart from one another, these two mighty 
 " Lords of the eye," seized and grasped what had 
 always been visible yet never seen, and gave their 
 countrymen capacities of perception and delight 
 hardly yet granted to others. But as his mind grew, 
 Nature, great as was her power, "fell back into a 
 second place," and became important to him chiefly 
 as the stage of man's action, and allied with his ideas, 
 his passions and affections. And Man was interest- 
 ing to him only in his essential nature, only as man. 
 History had little value for him, except as it revealed 
 character : and character had no interest unless, be- 
 sides power or splendour, it had in it what appealed 
 to human sympathies or human indulgence. For a 
 Napoleon, with all his magnificence, he had nothing 
 but loathing. Where he found truth, noble and 
 affecting, not bare literal fact, but reality informed 
 and aglow with the ideas and forms of the imagina- 
 tion, and so raised by it to the power of an object 
 of our spiritual nature, he recognised no differences
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 207 
 
 of high and low. In the same way as he saw great- 
 ness in the ideal histories of Venice and Switzerland, 
 and in the legends of Rome, even if they were fictions, 
 so he saw greatness, the greatness of human affections 
 and of the primary elements of human character, in 
 the fortunes and the sufferings of Michael and the 
 Leech gatherer. He was very bold for his time, and 
 took all consequences, which were severe enough, 
 when he insisted that the whole range of the beauti- 
 ful, the pathetic, the tragic, the heroic, were to be 
 found in common lowly life, as truly as in the epic 
 and the drama, or in the grand legends of national 
 history ; when he proclaimed that 
 
 Verse may build a princely throne 
 On humble truth. 
 
 He claimed for Lucy Gray, for the " miserable mother 
 by the Thorn," for the desolate maniac nursing her 
 infant, the same pity which we give to Lear and Cor- 
 delia or to " the dark sorrows of the line of Thebes." 
 Not in play but in deepest earnest he dwelt on the 
 awfulness, the wonder, the sacredness of childhood : 
 it furnished in his hands the subject, not only of 
 touching ballads, but of one of the most magnificent 
 lyrical poems the ode on Immortality. He was con- 
 vinced that if people would but think and be fair 
 with themselves, they would not merely be moved by
 
 208 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 humble tragedies, like Michael and the Brothers, but 
 would feel that there was as much worthy of a poet's 
 serious art in the agonies of the mother of the Idiot 
 Boy, and the terrors of Peter Bell, as in the " majestic 
 pains " of Laodamia and Dion. He has summed up 
 his poetical doctrine with all his earnest solemnity in 
 the thirteenth book of the Prelude : 
 
 Here might I pause, and bend in reverence 
 
 To Nature, and the power of human minds, 
 
 To men as they are men within themselves. 
 
 How oft high service is performed within, 
 
 When all the external man is rude in show, 
 
 Not like a temple rich with pomp and gold, 
 
 But a mere mountain chapel, that protects 
 
 Its simple worshippers from sun and shower. 
 
 Of these, said I, shall be my song ; of these, 
 
 If future years mature me for the task, 
 
 Will I record the praises, making verse 
 
 Deal boldly with substantial things ; in truth 
 
 And sanctity of passion speak of these, 
 
 That justice may be done, obeisance paid 
 
 Where it is due : thus haply shall I teach, 
 
 Inspire, through unadulterated ears 
 
 Pour rapture, tenderness, and hope my theme 
 
 No other than the very heart of man, 
 
 As found among the best of those who live, 
 
 Not unexalted by religious faith, 
 
 Nor uninformed by books, good books, though few, 
 
 In Nature's presence : thence may I select 
 
 Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight ;
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 209 
 
 And miserable love, that is not pain 
 To hear of, for the glory that redoundt 
 Therefrom to human kind, and what we are. 
 
 Nature for all conditions wants not power 
 
 To consecrate, if we have eyes to see, 
 
 The outside of her creatures, and to breathe 
 
 Grandeur upon the very humblest face 
 
 Of human life. I felt that the array 
 
 Of act and circumstance, and visible form, 
 
 Is mainly to the pleasure of the mind 
 
 What passion makes them ; that meanwhile the forms, 
 
 Of Nature have a passion in themselves, 
 
 That intermingles with those works of man 
 
 To which she summons him ; although the works 
 
 Be mean, have nothing lofty of their own ; 
 
 And that the genius of the Poet hence 
 
 May boldly take his way among mankind 
 
 Wherever Nature leads ; that he hath stood 
 
 By Nature's side among the men of old, 
 
 And so shall stand for ever. 
 
 All this doctrine was strange to his ago ; it has 
 ceased to be so to ours. In various ways and with 
 varying merit, Thackeray and Dickens and George 
 Eliot, and a crowd of writers, poets and novelists, 
 have searched out the motifs of the highest poetry in 
 the humblest lives, and have taught the lesson that 
 the real greatness and littleness of human life are not 
 to be measured by the standards of fashion and pride. 
 What made Wordsworth different from other popular 
 
 P
 
 210 WILLIAM WORDSWOBTH 
 
 poets, and made him great, was a puzzle and a para- 
 dox at first in his own time ; it is but a commonplace 
 in ours. " It was the union of deep feeling with pro- 
 found thought : the fine balance of truth in observing, 
 with the imaginative faculty in modifying, the objects 
 observed ; and, above all, the original gift of spread- 
 ing the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth 
 and height of the ideal world, around forms, inci- 
 dents, and situations, of which, for the common view, 
 custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up 
 the sparkle and the dewdrops. To find no contradic- 
 tion in the union of old and new ; to contemplate 
 the Ancient of Days and all His works with feelings 
 as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first 
 creative fiat ; characterises the mind that feels the 
 riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To 
 carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of 
 manhood ; to combine the child's sense of wonder 
 and novelty with the appearances which every day 
 for perhaps forty years have made familiar : 
 
 With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, 
 And man and woman 
 
 this is the character and privilege of genius." (Cole- 
 ridge, Biographia Liter aria, c. iv.) 
 
 Thus his range of materials was very large ; his 
 extensive scale of interests gave him great variety j
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 211 
 
 like his own skylark, he soars to the heavens, and 
 drops into a lowly nest ; and as the wing sometimes 
 flags, and the eye is wearied, his work was unequal, 
 and there was sometimes want of proportion in his 
 subject and his treatment of it But his principles of 
 treatment, though he was not altogether happy in 
 his exposition of them, were in accordance with his 
 general idea of poetry. "I have at all times," he 
 says, "endeavoured to look steadily at my subject." 
 Where he succeeded and no man can always in 
 thought and imagination see what he wants to see 
 there was the fire and energy and life of truth, 
 stamping all his words, governing his music and his 
 movement, his flow or his rush. There is always the 
 aim, the scrupulous, fastidious aim at direct expression 
 at beautiful, suggestive, forcible, original expres- 
 sion : but first of all at direct expression. This he 
 called, somewhat oddly, restricting himself to the 
 language of common life, in opposition to so-styled 
 " poetic diction." Happily he was inconsistent with 
 his own theory. He showed with Burns how far 
 deep down the pathetic and the tender go in common 
 life, and how its language can be made by cunning 
 artists to minister to their expression : but there are 
 regions in poetry of glory and nobleness and splendour 
 where Burns never came, and there Wordsworth 
 showed that he was master of a richer and subtler
 
 212 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 wealth of words than common life supplies. But in 
 his most fiery moments of inspiration and enthusiasm 
 he never allowed himself to relax his hold on reality 
 and truth : as he would scorn to express in poetry 
 any word or feeling which was not genuine and 
 natural, any sentiment or impulse short of or beyond 
 the actual impression which caused them, so with the 
 most jealous strictness he measured his words. He 
 gave them their full swing if they answered to force 
 and passion ; but he watched them all the same, with 
 tender but manly severity. Hence with his power 
 and richness of imagination, and his full command 
 over all the resources of voice and ear, an austere 
 purity and plainness and nobleness marked all that 
 he wrote, and formed a combination as distinct as it 
 was uncommon. To purity, purity of feeling, pure 
 truthfulness of expression, he is never untrue. In 
 the wild excitement, or the lawless exaggeration, as 
 in the self-indulgence and foulness of passion, he will 
 recognise no subject of true poetic art. Keenly alive 
 to beauty, and deeply reverencing it, he puts purity 
 and the severity of truth above beauty. With his 
 eager instincts of joy, it is only the joy of the pure- 
 hearted that he acknowledges. f 
 
 Wordsworth's great poetical design was carried 
 out, first in collections of short pieces, such as those 
 of his earlier volumes, the Lyrical Ballads, and the
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 213 
 
 Poems of 1 807 ; then in a great mass of Sonnets, 
 varying from some of the grandest in the language 
 to some very commonplace; but as a whole, con- 
 sidering their number, there are between four and 
 five hundred of them, a collection of great nobleness 
 and wonderful finish : and finally in the long poem 
 of The Excursion, itself a fragment of a greater pro- 
 jected whole, The Recluse. The Excursion was published 
 in 1814, and it gave the key to all his poetical work. 
 From that time to 1845 he published repeatedly new 
 things and old : sonnets on all kinds of subjects, such 
 as those on the River Duddon, the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 
 and those on the Punishment of Death ; Memorials of 
 his Tours in Scotland and on the Continent ; classical 
 compositions like Laodamid and Dion; tales in the 
 romantic fashion, like The While Doe of Rylstone, or 
 in the manner of the Lyrical Ballads, like Peter Bell, 
 written in his earliest time, but not published till 
 1819. The reception of Peter Bell marks the change 
 that had come over public opinion. "It was," says 
 the biographer, "more in request than any of the 
 author's previous publications " : it was published in 
 April, and a new edition was wanted in May. 
 Wordsworth had waited, and the world had begun 
 to come round to him. Ridicule and dislike had not 
 ceased. But in minds which loved nature, which 
 loved nobleness, which loved reality, which loved
 
 214 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 purity and truth, he had awakened a response of 
 deep and serious sympathy, which placed him, in the 
 judgment of increasing numbers, far above the great 
 poetical rivals round him. It was in vain that The 
 Edinburgh Review received The Excursion with its 
 insolent, " This will never do " ; it only showed that 
 the Review had mistaken the set of the tide, and had 
 failed to measure the thoughts and demands of the 
 coming time. Wordsworth's reception at Oxford in 
 1839 was an outward mark of the change, and of 
 the way in which he had spoken to the hearts of 
 men, and had been at length understood. The 
 enthusiasm which gathered round him was most 
 genuine, and it was wholesome and elevating ; it was 
 one of the best influences of our time. But it became 
 undiscriminating. It, not unnaturally, blinded men 
 to defects, and even made them proud of defying the 
 criticism which defects produced. 
 
 And there were defects. In his earlier days, at 
 the high tide of his genius and strength, amid works 
 matchless for their power and simplicity and noble 
 beauty, Wordsworth's composition was sometimes 
 fairly open to the criticism, whether meant for him 
 I know not, conveyed in the following lines by one 
 who fully measured his greatness : 
 
 'Tis a speech 
 That by a language of familiar lowness
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 215 
 
 Enhances what of more heroic vein 
 
 Is next to follow. But one fault it hath ; 
 
 It fits too close to life's realities. 
 
 In truth to Nature missing truth to Art ; 
 
 For Art commends not counterparts and copies, 
 
 But from our life a nobler life would shape, 
 
 Bodies celestial from terrestrial raise, 
 
 And teach us not jejunely what we are, 
 
 And what we may be, when the Parian block 
 
 Yields to the hand of Phidias. 
 
 (.4 Sicilian Summer, by Henry Taylor.) 
 
 As life went on, he wrote a great deal, and with 
 unequal power and felicity. It may be doubted 
 whether he had the singularly rare capacity for 
 undertaking, what was the chief aim of his life, a 
 long poem especially a philosophical poem. Strong 
 as he was, he wanted that astonishing strength which 
 carried Milton without flagging through his tremend- 
 ous task. Wordsworth's power was in burst* ; and 
 he wanted to go against the grain of his real aptitudes, 
 and prolong into a continuous strain inspiration 
 which was meant for occasions. In The Excursion 
 and The Prelude there are passages aa magnificent as 
 perhaps poet ever wrote ; but they are not specimens 
 of the context in which they are embedded, and 
 which in spite of them, does not carry along with it 
 the reader's honest enjoyment. We read on because 
 we must In his more ambitious works, such as The
 
 216 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 Excursion, Wordsworth seldom wants strength, finish, 
 depth, insight. He not seldom wants the spring, the 
 vividness, of his earlier works. There is always 
 dignity, and often majesty; but there is sometimes 
 pompousness. His solid weight and massiveness of 
 thought interest us when we are in the humour for 
 serious work ; but it is too easy to find them oppres- 
 sive, and to complain of him as heavy and wearisome : 
 nay, what is in him less excusable, obscure. And so 
 with his various series of sonnets like those full of 
 beauty as they are on the River Duddon: he took 
 in too much in his scheme of the series, and there 
 was not always material enough in comparison of the 
 usually fine and careful workmanship. Further, 
 Wordsworth, like other men, had his limitations. 
 That large tracts of human experience and feeling 
 were unvisited by him and were beyond his horizon, 
 is not to be complained of : he deliberately and with 
 high purpose chose to forego all that under the 
 fascination of art might mislead or tempt. But of 
 all poets who ever wrote, Wordsworth made himself 
 most avowedly the subject of his own thinking. In 
 one way this gives special interest and value to his 
 work. But the habit of perpetual self-study, though 
 it may conduce to wisdom, does not always conduce 
 to life or freedom of movement. It spreads a tone 
 of individuality and apparent egotism, which, though
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 217 
 
 very subtle and undefinable, is yet felt, even in some 
 of his most beautiful compositions. We miss the 
 spirit of "aloofness" and self-forgetfulness which, 
 whether spontaneous or the result of the highest art, 
 marks the highest types of poetry. Perhaps it is 
 from this that he so rarely abandoned himself to that 
 spirit of playfulness of which he has given us an 
 example in the Kitten and falling leaves. The ideal 
 man with Wordsworth is the hard-headed, frugal, 
 unambitious dalesman of his own hills, with his 
 strong affections, his simple tastes, and his quiet 
 and beautiful home : and this dalesman, built up 
 by communion with nature and by meditation into 
 the poet - philosopher, with his serious faith and 
 his never - failing spring of enjoyment, is himself. 
 But nature has many sides, and lies under many 
 lights ; and its measure reaches beyond the measure 
 even of the great seer, with his true and piercing eye, 
 his mighty imagination, and his large and noble heart. 
 Wordsworth had not, though he thought he had, 
 the power of interpreting his own principles of poetic 
 composition. This had to be done for him by a more 
 philosophical critic, his friend Coleridge. Words- 
 worth, in his onslaught on the falsehood and unreality 
 of what passed for poetic diction, overstated and 
 mistook. He overstated the poetic possibilities of 
 the speech of common life and of the poor. He
 
 218 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 mistook the fripperies of poetic diction for poetic 
 diction itself. Some effects of these exaggerations 
 and mistakes are visible in his composition itself, 
 though they offend less when the lines which tempt 
 to severe criticism are read in their own place and 
 context; but he would have done more wisely to 
 have left them to find their own apology than to 
 have given reasons which seemed paradoxes. In the 
 hot controversy which followed, both disputants 
 made false moves : the Edinburgh reviewers were 
 false in their thrusts, Wordsworth was false in his 
 parry. He was right in protesting against the doctrine 
 that a thing is not poetical because it is not expressed 
 in a certain conventional mintage ; he was wrong in 
 denying that there is a mintage of words fit for poetry 
 and unsuitable for ordinary prose. They were 
 utterly wrong in thinking that he was not a most 
 careful and fastidious artist in language; but they 
 had some reason for their objections, and some 
 excuse for their ridicule, when it was laid down 
 without distinguishing or qualifying that there was 
 no difference between the language of prose and 
 poetry, and that the language of poetry was false 
 and bad unless it was what might be spoken in the 
 intercourse of common life. Wordsworth, confident 
 of his side of truth, and stung by the flippancy and 
 ignorant narrowness of his censors, was not the
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 219 
 
 person to clear up the dispute. Coleridge, under- 
 standing and sympathising with what he really 
 meant, never undertook a worthier task than when 
 he brought his singular powers of criticism to bear 
 on it, and helped men to take a mure serious and 
 just measure of his friend's greatness. He pointed 
 out firmly and clearly what was untenable in Words- 
 worth's positions, his ambiguities, his overstatements. 
 He put into more reasonable and comprehensive 
 terms what he knew to be Wordsworth's meaning. 
 He did not shrink from admitting defects, " character- 
 istic defects," in his poetry; inequality of style, 
 over-care for minute painting of details ; dispropor- 
 tion and incongruity between language and feeling, 
 between matter and decoration ; " thoughts and 
 images too great for the subject." But then he 
 showed at what a height, in spite of all, he really 
 stood : his austere purity and perfection of language, 
 the wideness of his range, the freshness of his 
 thought, the unfailing certainty of his eye; his 
 unswerving truth, and, above all, his magnificent 
 gift of imagination, " nearest of all modern writers 
 to Shakspere and Milton, yet in a kind perfectly un- 
 borrowed and his own." No more discriminating and 
 no more elevated judgment of Wordsworth's genius 
 is to be found than that which Coleridge inserted 
 in the volume which he called his Biographia Littraria.
 
 'SORDELLO' 
 
 READERS, and even students, of Mr. Browning, shy 
 at Sordello. Mr. Hutton gives it up. Mr. Roden 
 Noel expressly puts it aside, for he cannot make out 
 its constructions. Mrs. Orr, in her handbook, does 
 her best, but plainly feels it an ungrateful task to 
 spend time upon it. And no wonder. Mr. Browning 
 himself calls his poem a "Quixotic attempt" Per- 
 plexity, bewilderment, is not the word to express the 
 state of feeling which comes over the mind of the 
 reader when he first opens the book, expecting that 
 language will guide him along the threads of thought 
 to an upshot, more or less distinct, of meaning. His 
 first reading leaves him aghast. Where is he, and 
 what is he among 1 He is to hear a story told : the 
 story begins, stops for a parenthesis, stops for an 
 address to Shelley, proceeds, breaks off, goes back 
 at a jump thirty years, and we are transported, or 
 rather have to find our way to an entirely different 
 scene and different associations, and so, by hints, and
 
 222 'BORDELLO' 
 
 pictures, and enigmas, to yet another set of circum- 
 stances, which follow like slides in a magic lantern. 
 But what is the story all about ? We find at last a 
 running commentary at the top of the page; but 
 that is probably not an early discovery, and we go 
 on hoping to find the clue, not outside, but in the 
 poem itself. And yet it is not a thing to put down. 
 We feel that we are in strong hands, and with eyes 
 that have really seen seen, with keenness, with 
 trouble, with thought only their owner is not dis- 
 posed to save us any trouble in making us see what 
 he has seen. It all has the oddness and unexpected- 
 ness of a dream, where the things which happen, 
 though they never surprise us, do not happen the 
 least in the common order, and are not connected 
 with the usual associations, familiar in waking life. 
 Yet there come in flashes of sympathy, which illumi- 
 nate dark depths of the heart, which we thought 
 no one knew or imagined but ourselves. There 
 come tracts of pictured landscape, like the back- 
 ground of some great Umbrian or Venetian painter 
 background only, with perhaps an unintelligible 
 foreground and action. 
 
 That autumn eve was stilled : 
 A last remains of sunset dimly burned 
 O'er the far forests, like a torch-flame turned 
 By the wind back upon its bearer's hand
 
 ' SORDELLO ' 223 
 
 In one long flare of crimson ; as a brand 
 The woods beneath lay black. A single eye 
 From all Verona cared for the soft sky. 
 
 Like Turner's pictures in his later manner when he 
 is clear, he is very clear : when he is obscure, he is 
 very obscure. And then the language : it is like 
 unpointed Hebrew words, where you have the con- 
 sonants, and, according as you know the language, 
 put in the vowels. Ellipsis reigns supreme : preposi- 
 tions and relatives are dispensed with : nominatives 
 and accusatives play hide and seek round verbs : we 
 get lost in the maze of transpositions, and stumble 
 over irritating and obscure parentheses. And then 
 the illustrations and allusions ! Sismondi and Milman 
 will give us the history of the time, not quite the 
 same as Mr. Browning's, but something like: the 
 only thing that does not seem arbitrary is the 
 geography. But Mr. Browning is a wide reader, and 
 draws his illustrative materials from sources locked 
 and sealed to us outsiders. How many of us we 
 feel ourselves in asking tne question, to be the 
 " Naddo," the typical critic, on whom Mr. Browning 
 pours such persistent and varied scorn, but still, 
 how many of us know "Pontapolin of the naked 
 arm?" 1 Why is Cunizza's sphere the "Swooning 
 
 1 I leave this as it stands. But I must confess that Mr. 
 Browuing might have expected hU readers to know their Don
 
 224 ' SORDELLO ' 
 
 sphere?" Why is Cunizza called Palma? Who is 
 Dularete, and what is ' Saponian strength ?" Why 
 is Fomalhaut chosen out of all the stars to be, in 
 the language of a twelfth century lady, the type of 
 a luminous orb ? What is the interpretation of the 
 
 following passages ? 
 
 Nature's strict embrace, 
 Putting aside the past, shall soon efface' 
 Its print as well 
 
 And turn him pure as some forgotten vest, 
 Woven of painted byssus, silkiest 
 Tufting the Tyrrhene whelk's pearl-sheeted lip, 
 Left welter where a trireme let it slip 
 I' the sea, and vexed a satrap ; so the stain 
 O' the world forsakes Sordello, with its pain, 
 Its pleasure : how the tinct loosening escapes, 
 Cloud after cloud ! 
 
 Again : 
 
 Heart and brain 
 
 Swelled ; he expanded to himself again, 
 As some thin seedling spice-tree starved and frail, 
 Pushing between cat's head and ibis' tail. 
 Crusted into the porphyry pavement smooth, 
 Suffered remain just as it sprung, to soothe 
 The Soldan's pining daughter, never yet 
 Well in her chilly green-glazed minaret, 
 When rooted up, the sunny day she died, 
 And flung into the common court beside 
 Its parent tree. 
 
 Quixote (i. 11), or at least their Antiquary (ii. c. 30) and St. 
 Konan'i Well, c. 30 [June 1887].
 
 ' BORDELLO * 225 
 
 And if dictionaries help us to names, the names have 
 to serve in a novel history. Alcamo and Nina are 
 names connected with early Italian poetry in Sicily ; 
 but Nina the poetess, in Crescimbeni and Sismondi, 
 becomes Nina the poet in Mr. Browning. Ovid will 
 tell us something of Cydippe, but her old lover 
 Acontius is changed into Agathon. And then the 
 words: " ginglingly," and "writhled," and "bloom- 
 flinders," and " fastuous," and " mollitious," and many 
 more, some no doubt picked out of local usage, but 
 still to outsiders needing a glossary. Is it astonishing 
 if, after wandering blindfold through what seems at 
 first a hopeless labyrinth, some impatient reader 
 should treat Bordello as the Italian in Giordano 
 Bruno's story treated his "enigmatic prophet "- 
 " Fratdlo, tu rum vuoi esser inteso : io non ti voglio 
 intendere vai con cento diavoli " and kicked it, with 
 an indignant malediction, into the dustrheap. 
 
 What is there to save Sordello from the fate 
 justly due to a o-Korctvop rony/m, like Lycophron's 
 Cassandra 1 It is quite certain that nothing can be 
 done with it, nothing can be made of it, without 
 great attention and some trouble more trouble than 
 we usually expect to be called upon to give to any 
 book but one of high mathematics. Is it worth while 
 to take this trouble f 
 
 That depends. If we want the pleasant and per- 
 
 q
 
 226 ' BORDELLO ' 
 
 t'ectly legitimate excitement of a dramatic story, 
 with clearly-drawn characters and the interest of a 
 well -developed plan, we had better keep our time 
 for books where its employment will be more fully 
 rewarded. If there is amusement to be found in 
 Sordello it is the amusement of finding out puzzles. 
 But if we are people of a tolerant disposition if we 
 have realised how we all have our own ways of doing 
 things, and then go on to reflect that a strong and 
 deep and eager mind is very likely to have fits of 
 self-will, and the quaint and perhaps unjustifiable 
 habit of taking its own line in the teeth of what is 
 accepted and usual, we may be tempted, by the 
 obvious signs of the poet's being in earnest, and 
 thinking that he has something worth telling to tell 
 us, into a more patient and inquiring frame of mind. 
 And if we begin to inquire, it is possible that we 
 may find find something worth our trouble. The 
 reading of Sordello is likely to be accompanied, 
 even to the end, by a plentiful running commentary 
 of notes of interrogation, and marks and sounds of 
 even more energetic feeling. But it will be surpris- 
 ing if we do not find a meaning, and a meaning 
 worth writing an elaborate poem for. 
 
 Who was Sordello, and what makes Mr. Browning 
 choose him for a subject 1 Sordello's name would be 
 a forgotten one, with those of other troubadours of
 
 ' SORDELLO ' 227 
 
 the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but that Danto 
 has chosen that he shall never be forgotten. He was 
 plainly a distinguished person in his time, a cunning 
 craftsman in the choice and use of language ; but, if 
 this was all, his name would only rank with a number 
 of others, famous in their time, lost under the cloud 
 of greater successors. He may have been something 
 more than a writer or speaker : he may have been a 
 ruler, though that is doubtful. But we know him, 
 because in the antechamber of Purgatory he was so 
 much to Dante. Through three cantos he is the 
 companion and guide of the two great pilgrims. He 
 is shown to us, as it were, in picture his solitariness, 
 his lofty port, his melancholy majesty 
 
 L'ombra tutu in ee romita. . . . 
 
 Ella non ci diceva alcuna coea, 
 Ma lasciuvane gir, solo guardando, 
 A guisa di loon quando si poea. 
 
 His presence calls forth some of Dante's deepest and 
 most memorable laments over the miseries of Italy, 
 ami the responsibilities of her indolent and incapable 
 rulers. He leads his companions to the secret and 
 guarded valley where kings and princes of the earth, 
 who have meant to do their duty, but in the end 
 have not fulfilled their trust, must wait outside of
 
 228 ' BORDELLO ' 
 
 Purgatory the hour of mercy ; where Dante sees their 
 still sadness, and learns their names, and hears their 
 evening hymns. And here we learn Dante's judgment 
 on Sordello himself : he is placed by himself, more 
 self-centred and in guise haughtier than even the 
 rulers and judges in whose company he waits to begin 
 his cleansing ; and he is placed among those who had 
 great opportunities and great thoughts the men of 
 great chances and great failures. 
 
 The filling up the story of Sordello is plainly 
 suggested by the fact we do not say the history, or 
 the character, but the fact and existence of such a 
 creation of human experience and human purpose as 
 Dante's poem. Dante, the singer, the artist, who 
 :ould see in the world about him what none other 
 saw, but wielded the spell to make others see what 
 he saw, seemed naturally to belong to that vast and 
 often magnificent company, from Orpheus and Homer 
 downwards, whose business in life seemed art and 
 the perfection of art. Let the world go as it would, 
 let men quarrel and change and suffer as they might, 
 the artist was outside it all : he worked apart, using, 
 it may be, the materials given him by active life ; 
 but imagining, inventing, composing, painting, carving, 
 building, singing, because that was his end and calling 
 in life. He told on actual life according to his power, 
 but he did not seek to tell on it. Virgil sang of
 
 ' BORDELLO ' 229 
 
 Rome indeed, but it was the ideal Koine which he 
 imagined. But Dante, with his artist's eye and 
 artist's strength, was from the beginning, and con- 
 tinued to the end, in the closest contact with the 
 most absorbing interests of human life. His course 
 was shaped by two master influences : for himself, 
 passionate and enduring love : for society, the 
 enthusiasm for righteous government. And these, 
 in a way never known in the world before, were 
 taken up into the poet's nature, combined and fused 
 with it and with each other in indestructible union, 
 and moulded into a character in which we almost 
 forget the poet, and such a poet, in the man. The 
 poet-lover of course was no new thing. The poet- 
 prophet, speaking of truth and sin and doom, had 
 made his voice heard in the cities of Israel, had 
 spoken in solemn tones in the choruses of Greek 
 tragedy. In Dante a youth dreamed through in 
 the sweetest of Italian homos : a manhood spent in 
 effort, in struggle, in defeat, with keen and fierce and 
 unsparing rivals, in the most stirring and revolu- 
 tionary of Italian commonwealths : an old age 
 dragged through in wandering and hopeless exile, 
 learning nil the shapes and secrets of weakness, of 
 wickedness, of pain to be found in that wild scene 
 which Christendom then presented in Dante, all 
 this made up the man who saw, and who wrote, the
 
 230 ' BORDELLO ' 
 
 Divina Commedia. It was no mere magnificent literary 
 production of imaginative genius. It was as real as 
 the man. His life-blood was in it, and with it all 
 that he had seen and felt of the awful and mysterious 
 lot of men : the splendid achievement, the irretriev- 
 able fall, the unspeakable prize : the pangs of Fran- 
 cesca and Ugolino, the solemn scene of preparation 
 and self- discipline, the everlasting chant of the 
 Mystic Rose. 
 
 The influences which acted on Dante are, in the 
 story, represented as acting on Sordello. Sordello is 
 the child of the same time the time of awakening 
 perception and longing for the beautiful : the time of 
 awakening power in language and imaginative com- 
 position : the time of moral and social anarchy in the 
 cities of Italy anarchy which neither the Pope nor 
 the Emperor, the supreme representatives of religion 
 and law, could restrain, which they and their factions 
 helped to make more hopeless and more cruel. The 
 idea of a common good, a common government, was 
 still recognised in the municipal order of the cities of 
 Lombardy. The framework and outward form of 
 their institutions were still popular; but from the 
 closer intermeddling of the German Emperor with 
 their affairs, the " tyrant " made his appearance earlier 
 in them than in the Tuscan cities. No such catas- 
 trophe had overtaken the cities of the Arno and the
 
 ' BORDELLO ' 231 
 
 Tiber as the destruction of Milan by Barbarossa. 
 No such incredible and fiendish cruelty had tormented 
 the southern cities as Padua and the cities of the 
 March endured from Ecelin da Romano. This is the 
 world in which Bordello's lot is cast, as Dante's was 
 at Florence: a world more terrible in crime, more 
 terrible in suffering than the worst times then at 
 Florence : a world without the nobler instincts, tradi- 
 tions, aspirations which at Florence were interwoven 
 with the selfishness and bitterness of factious strife, 
 and kept up the ideal and the hope of free citizen- 
 ship, true justice, and generous patriotism in the 
 famous Tuscan republic. The story, Mr. Browning 
 informs us, is to set before us, with historical scenery 
 more or less accurate, but not necessary to its unfold- 
 ing, the " development of a soul," in its ideal growth, 
 choice, and fate. As Florence to Dante, so Mantua 
 to Sordello, but only in vague analogy. Sordello 
 went through changes, temptations, sufferings : his 
 aim in life altered, enlarged, absorbed him. But the 
 progress from love and from art, to great public 
 thoughts and wonderful achievements for mankind, 
 which Dante accomplished, Sordello failed in. This, 
 in its various movements and scenes, is the story. 
 Sordello is meant to interest if not attract us. There 
 is beauty, there is nobleness, there is truthfulness, 
 there is resistance to temptation. But so it was : he
 
 232 ' SORDELLO ' 
 
 mistook the road, tried after it in earnest but missed 
 it, and died. 
 
 Mr. Browning has his own way of setting all this 
 before us abrupt, dislocated, interrupted, incomplete, 
 allusive, broken into by long monologues or medita- 
 tions. Further, he tells the story, if we may say so, 
 in his shirt-sleeves with the most pronounced and 
 avowed contempt for mere proprieties as well as for 
 solemnities and pomps : without pretending to help 
 us if we are too slow to catch his humour, or his 
 deep, shy conviction, or his outbursts of amusement : 
 without mercy for us, if we are shocked at the near 
 neighbourhood of the grotesque and the pathetic, the 
 loftiest with the most repulsive and even broad. Is 
 it too much to say that there is sometimes a spirit 
 of mischief in him, and he seems not unwilling to 
 throw us off the trail, or to tempt us into dark places 
 without outlet, leaving us to make out our where- 
 abouts 1 Lastly, he takes real men and women, who 
 are known to have lived and acted at a certain time 
 Sordello, and Ecelin the Monk and his ferocious 
 sons, the younger Ecelin and Alberic, and Cunizza 
 his famous daughter only Mr. Browning chooses 
 that her name is her sister's, Palma 1 and Ecelin's 
 terrible soldier, Taurello Salinguerra, and Ecelin's 
 
 1 See a list of the family in Rolandinus, ii. 171 (Muratori 
 Pol. Till)
 
 ' SORDELLO ' 233 
 
 weird wife Adelaide, who reads the stars, and Azzo 
 of Este, and Richard, Count of Saint Boniface all 
 only too really actors in a dark and miserable time, of 
 whose doings we may read authentic records in Italian 
 chronicles and annals ; but, having taken them and 
 their deeds, he transports them all to his own stage 
 of imagination, and sees them only then as he chooses 
 to think of them and to make them think and speak 
 and do. He does what was a common practice at a 
 certain period of classical literature, and to which our 
 critical days have given, often very unjustly, the 
 name of intentional forgery : the practice of taking 
 up famous or well-known names into the sphere of 
 imagination, and making them speak as it is thought 
 they ought to speak making them speak what is 
 believed to be true in the spirit though feigned in the 
 letter, like the speeches of generals and statesmen 
 in Thucydides or Livy. Mr. Browning takes great 
 liberties : much greater than our historical drama- 
 tists and novelists, when they present a Richard the 
 Second or a Savonarola, perhaps no more than Dante 
 has taken with some of his great names, perhaps with 
 his Sordello and his Cunizza. Sordello, like Hamlet, 
 comes from the poet's " inner consciousness " ; the 
 scraps that we do possess about him Dante's mag- 
 nificent picture in Purgatory, the scant notices col- 
 lected in Troubadour histories, or the fuller but more
 
 234 ' BORDELLO ' 
 
 mythical accounts, like Platina's, Mr. Browning 
 haughtily passes by. He has a Sordello of his own, 
 utterly unlike anything written of him elsewhere, 
 and of him he knows the innermost secret and 
 struggles of his soul ; and it is his story, from his 
 birth to his grave, with all its individual features and 
 critical incidents, with his aspirations, and vicissitudes, 
 that he will tell us if we have patience to listen. 
 
 But for Dante so we are to understand the 
 Sordello of Mr. Browning's imagination would have 
 lived through the ages. Dante is the first of the 
 great poets of the world who wrote with an idea and 
 an end beyond his art itself, equal in its greatness to 
 the compass of man's whole nature; for Lucretius 
 wrote but for a philosophy, Lucan for a political 
 regret. But such an effort was, sooner or later, in 
 the necessity of things, as time, and time marked by 
 the appearance of Christianity, went on. So Mr. 
 Browning imagines that first effort coming before it 
 was adequately fulfilled : it came in the imaginary 
 Sordello, who represents a tendency, who is Dante's 
 forerunner and herald star, because such an attempt 
 must have been stirring in nobler souls, over and 
 above the mere love and craft of poetry, as shown in 
 the imaginary Eglamor, the representative of the 
 Cinos and Guidos of Dante's time, the predecessors 
 of Petrarch. Sordello is supposed to be much more
 
 ' SORDELLO ' 235 
 
 than the Troubadour known to history. His was the 
 history of a great purpose, though a defeated one. 
 "Gate-vein" of the "heart's blood" of truth and 
 love and mercy u to Lombardy," he was " thy fore- 
 runner, Florentine." But Dante absorbed him, "a 
 herald star," 
 
 Relentless into thy consummate orb 
 That scared it from its right to roll along 
 A sempiternal path with dance and song. 
 Fulfilling its allotted period, 
 Serenest of the progeny of God. 
 
 But its brightness is not quenched or lost: it is 
 " blent " for ever with Dante's splendours ; but, 
 
 Still, what if I approach the august sphere 
 Named now with only one name, disentwine 
 That undercurrent soft and argentine 
 From its fierce mate in the majestic mass, 
 Leavened as the sea whose fire was mixed with glass 
 In John's transcendent vision, 
 
 and tell the story of Sordello, exhibit the " lustre " 
 of his star by itself 1 ? 
 
 So it pleases the poet to say, for only he knows 
 it But why for he does not tell is this star 
 called, "Serenest of the progeny of God?" Why, 
 "His darling?" We ask, because not even in that 
 realm where the poet disposes all things can we find 
 the reason ; unless it be, that Sordello, like Francis,
 
 236 ' BORDELLO ' 
 
 opened his heart to the cries of the poor crowds. 
 Here is an instance of what Mr. Browning asks from 
 us. Is it part of our trial and discipline as his 
 scholars, that we should read, and not know why 1 
 Or else, are we mere blind and common-place critics, 
 such as the personage who plays a prominent part in 
 the poem, the Jongleur, Nad do ? 
 
 The first portion of the story describes the develop- 
 ment of a rich and ambitious poetic nature, its 
 triumphs and failures, its struggles to make its art 
 minister to its pride and selfishness, its profound 
 disappointment and despair, its opening into new life 
 under the inspiration of love a love fuller and 
 nobler than his own boyish fancy for Palma Palma's 
 love for him, kindled by her belief in the depth and 
 greatness of his soul, and her longing to live under 
 its power and to behold achievements worthy of it in 
 the world of men and of effort What shall those 
 achievements be ? Then comes a long interlude on 
 the poet's own account It is an apology a dis- 
 closure for himself an apology in the guise of banter 
 and skit for letting his own life and soul and purpose 
 appear under the fractures and shortcoming of his 
 poem : a disclosure, a shy, a half recalled disclosure, 
 of what in his secret heart he has learned is the only 
 object man ought to live for, the one supreme queen 
 ind mistress, eclipsing all other charms and tempta-
 
 ' BORDELLO ' 237 
 
 tions, to whom all passion and all homage by right 
 are due mankind, in all its mixed glory, in its 
 misery and degradation and pathetic silence and 
 patience, in its poorness and meanness and hopeless 
 suffering, in its endless, immense eternal appeal for 
 pity. The poor, blind, dumb multitudes of mankind 
 whom no man can number, unknown, unheeded, 
 helpless, and without hope, " Earth's immense and 
 trampled multitude," whose troubles, whose sins are 
 beyond all reach the " sheep having no shepherd " 
 to Divine love, the "many-headed beast" to human 
 scorn take a poetic shape, battered, worn, with traces 
 of happier possibilities appeal infinitely to justice, 
 compassion, sympathy, chivalrous manliness and 
 patience, become an object for devotion and passion- 
 ate enthusiasm : 
 
 Cure-bit, erased, 
 
 Broken up beauties ever took iny taste 
 Supremely ; and I love you more, far more, 
 Than her I looked should foot Jafe's temple-floor. 
 Years ago, leagues at distance, when and where 
 A whisper came, " Let others seek ! thy care 
 Is found, thy life's provision : if thy race 
 Should l)e thy mistress, and into one face 
 The many faces crowd." 
 
 This mistress his heart goes out to, as Francis 
 longs for and espouses poverty. This great interest 
 ia alone worth a strong man's strength and love.
 
 238 ' BORDELLO ' 
 
 " It is pleasant to be young," to watch the bright 
 girls in the fruit-boats and under the bridges at 
 Venice ; but there rises at his side the vision of the 
 human race " sad, dishevelled ghost " and it lays 
 a commanding claim on his devotion, paramount to 
 all other. It is for her under the stress of that 
 high truth, that on the greatest of men, thinker, 
 maker, actor, comes all the greater the imperious de- 
 mand for his self-dedication to his race, in the ignor- 
 ance, the wretchedness, the evil, in which it needs 
 his help that the story of Sordello is continued. 
 What is it but the great truth, that every great life 
 is the echo, strong or faint, of the One great Life of 
 Love, that came to seek and to save that which was 
 lostt 
 
 The second portion of the story tells the opening 
 of new thoughts and a new life to Sordello, under 
 the influence of Palma. She has taught him that 
 life needs a worthy object. He opens his eyes and 
 sees, in palpable, individual proof, the miseries of 
 his fellows. But how to remedy it 1 The great spell 
 of the Middle Ages, the name of Rome, acts upon 
 him. He learns its emptiness. Great factions divide 
 society all round him, with great pretensions, and 
 with great and equal and monstrous crimes. He 
 learns who he is the long-lost son of the mighty 
 warrior who seems to hold the fate of Italy for a
 
 ' SORDELLO ' 239 
 
 moment in his hands. Salinguerra would gladly 
 make him head of a power which should crush all 
 the petty tyrannies, and be able to defy Pope and 
 Emperor. But that would be only to continue the 
 reign of force, of wrong, of blood, which has made 
 the earth so miserable for the crowds to whom his 
 life is due. Sordello will have none of that. What 
 is there to do? Mr. Browning does not tell us. 
 Perhaps he might have used Salinguerra's offer, and 
 used it in a new way : perhaps, have been a leader 
 of mankind. Should he, or Ecelin, grasp the place 
 and power of the House of Romano, and be supreme 
 in North Italy ? But Sordello dies, and no work is 
 done : nothing is left behind him but a mythical 
 name. The power of Romano passes into the hands 
 of the merciless Ecelin; and Salinguerra who, we 
 may say in passing, is the one clearly and strongly 
 painted character in the poem; the powerful, un- 
 scrupulous, but not unkindly soldier; magnanimous, 
 touchingly honest in his loyalty and content with the 
 second place, smiling, or " immeasurably yawning " 
 at Sordello's transcendental doctrines and long har- 
 angues Salinguerra ends his career, as Italian 
 warriors often did, in the prisons of the jealous police 
 of order-keeping Venice. It was left to a greater 
 soul to find the way which Sordello had failed in, to 
 benefit his fellows, to do something for mankind.
 
 240 ' BORDELLO ' 
 
 But the teller of his story asks our kind thoughts 
 for him, for the sake of what he died in striving 
 after. 
 
 The working out of the first part is comparatively 
 without difficulty. The picture of Sordello's solitary 
 boyhood, passed in a lonely castle and its surround- 
 ing woods, near Mantua, an orphan page to an evil 
 and mysterious mistress, with no one to play with 
 and no one to love, left to himself, with nature and 
 what there was in his weird home of art, self-centred, 
 self-pleasing, gradually unfolding his strong, imagina- 
 tive nature like a tree gradually bursting out in 
 spring suggests a contrast with the city life of the 
 boy described in the Vita Nuova. In spite of all 
 perplexities of allusion or construction it is a charm- 
 ing picture ; but it is as the richness and strangeness 
 of Giorgione to the pure simplicity of line and tint in 
 
 the Umbrians. 
 
 You can believe 
 
 Sordello foremost in the regal class 
 Nature has broadly severed from her mass 
 Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames 
 Some happy lands, that have luxurious names, 
 For loose fertility ; a footfall there 
 Suffices to upturn to the warm air 
 Half-germinating spices ; mere decay 
 Produces richer life ; and day by day 
 New pollen on the lily -petal grows, 
 And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.
 
 ' SOUDELLO ' 241 
 
 The unfathomable doctrine of election is stamped 
 upon all nature ; and Sordello is one of the elect. 
 The lonely child works its imaginative will on its 
 companions of nature, tree, and flower, and bird, and 
 insect : creates its own wonderful world and its con- 
 ditions, alters, transforms, tyrannises over it. The 
 boy hears distant sounds of the great human drama, 
 far from him, which he never sees ; but he makes 
 one for himself, with names, and persons, and his- 
 tories : he fights and conquers and rewards and 
 punishes, a despot above law and fear ; and he has, 
 too, glimpses of beauty only glimpses of living beauty 
 the Palma of his future life ; but he can give a 
 life of his own to the beauty of marble in one of the 
 chambers which he haunts. 
 
 A vault, see ; thick 
 
 Black shade about the ceiling, though fine slits 
 Across the buttress suffer light by fits 
 Upon a marvel in the midst. Nay, stoop 
 A dullish grey-streaked cumbrous font, a group 
 Round it, each side of it, where'er one sees 
 Upholds it ; shrinking Caryatides 
 Of just-tinged marble like Eve's lilied flesh 
 Beneath her milker's finger when the fresh 
 First pulse of life shot brightening the snow. 
 The font's edge burthens every shoulder, so 
 They muse upon the ground, eyelids half closed ; 
 Some, with meek arms behind their backs disposed, 
 
 U
 
 242 ' SORDELLO ' 
 
 Some, crossed above their bosoms, some, to veil 
 
 Their eyes, some, propping chin and cheek so pale. 
 
 Some, hanging slack an utter helpless length 
 
 Dead as a buried vestal whose whole strength 
 
 Goes when the grate above shuts heavily. 
 
 So dwell these noiseless girls, patient to see. 
 
 Like priestesses because of sin impure 
 
 Penanced for ever, who resigned endure, 
 
 Having that once drunk sweetness to the dregs. 
 
 And every eve, Bordello's visit begs 
 
 Pardon for them : constant as eve he came 
 
 To sit beside each in her turn, the same 
 
 As one of them, a certain space : and awe 
 
 Made a great indistinctness till he saw 
 
 Sunset slant cheerful through the buttress chinks, 
 
 Gold seven times globed ; surely our maiden shrinks 
 
 And a smile stirs her as if one faint grain 
 
 Her load were lightened, one shade less the stain 
 
 Obscured her forehead, yet one more bead slipt 
 
 From off the rosary whereby the crypt 
 
 Keeps count of the contritions of its charge ? 
 
 Then with a step more light, a heart more large, 
 
 He may depart, leave her and every one 
 
 To linger out the penance in mute stone. 
 
 Ah, but Sordcllo ? 'Tis the tale I mean 
 
 To tell you. 
 
 So, unknown to himself, he develops power power 
 within himself to see, to create, to combine, to colour, 
 for his own delight ; he is his own singer, inexhaust- 
 ible, untired, and he is his own audience. And out
 
 SOBDELLO ' 243 
 
 of this life, left all to itself, as the wild flower from 
 its chance seed in kindly ground, Sordello grows 
 to be a true poet ; and discovers it to himself and to 
 others, in a Troubadour contest with the minstrel 
 Eglamor the mind of real insight and genuine 
 imagination matched against practised but artificial 
 talent. 
 
 But there are two classes of souls dowered with 
 the great poetic gift, made to see and feel all that is 
 great and beautiful, and to open the eyes of men to 
 see and feel it too. Both have, it may be, in equal 
 measure, that quick sense to which, as the days and 
 years pass, is revealed in marvellous abundance, the 
 mystery and loveliness of the world. 
 
 Fresh births of beauty wake 
 Fresh homage, every grade of love is past, 
 With every mode of loveliness : then cast 
 Inferior idols off their borrowed crown 
 Before a coming glory. Up and down 
 Runs arrowy fire, while earthly forms combine 
 To throb the secret forth ; a touch divine 
 And the sealed eyeball owns the mystic rod ; 
 Visibly through his garden walketh God. 
 So fare they. Now revert. One character 
 Denotes them through the progress and the stir, 
 A need to blend with eacb external charm, 
 Bury themselves, the whole heart wide and warm, 
 In something not themselves ; they would belong 
 To what they worship stronger and more strong
 
 244 ' SORDELLO 
 
 Thus prodigally fed which gathers shape 
 
 And feature, soon imprisons past escape 
 
 The votary framed to love and to submit 
 
 Nor ask, as passionate he kneels to it, 
 
 Whence grew the idol's empery. So runs 
 
 A legend ; light had birth ere moons and suns, 
 
 Flowing through space a river and alone, 
 
 Till chaos burst and blank the spheres were strown 
 
 Hither and thither, foundering and blind : 
 
 When into each of them rushed light to find 
 
 Itself no place, foiled of its radiant chance. 
 
 Let such forego their just inheritance ! 
 
 For there's a class that eagerly looks, too, 
 
 On beauty, but, unlike the gentler crew, 
 
 Proclaims each new revealment born a twin 
 
 With a distinctest consciousness within 
 
 Referring still the quality, now first 
 
 Revealed, to their own soul its instinct nursed 
 
 In silence, now remembered better, shown 
 
 More thoroughly, but not the less their own ; 
 
 A dream come true ; the special exercise 
 
 Of any special function that implies 
 
 The being fair, or good, or wise, or strong, 
 
 Dormant within their nature all along 
 
 Whose fault ? So homage, other souls direct 
 
 Without, turns inward. 
 
 To which of these docs Sordello belong ? Alas , 
 his child's life, his boy's life, has given him nothing 
 to love, nothing to care for but himself: his gift has 
 only created realms to do him homage : it has made
 
 ' SORDELLO ' 245 
 
 him his own idol, whose claims are absolute and 
 limitless. Except the thrill at Palma's beauty, there 
 is nothing outside him, to sway him, to claim duty 
 and service. He finds himself a poet, saluted as such 
 by the pathetic recognition of his defeated and broken- 
 hearted rival, crowned by the hand of Palma herself. 
 He is spellbound, fascinated by the amazement of un- 
 imagined success. A career of intoxicating triumph 
 and fame is before him. He is the favourite of 
 Mantua, applauded, criticised, envied. Strength 
 grows within him, and new and varied demands task 
 it ; and the longing grows, too, for larger recognition, 
 for more unqualified and exclusive worship. And 
 Apollo has no reason to complain that his altars 
 want incense " tantus doquentice vir existens non solum 
 in poetando, sed quomodolibei loquendo," is the judgment 
 handed down by his great successor. He has all he 
 imagined : all he thought due to him. His " desire " 
 is given him ; and with it " leanness sent into his soul." 
 The worship asked for to himself ends in satiety, 
 listlessness, despair. After all, he finds that he does 
 not do his best. His conscience, as one who thinks 
 and knows, reproaches him. He knows that there 
 is something truer and deeper in him, than what he 
 has to put forth on the spur of the moment, to keep 
 his character with judges whom he sees through and 
 despises.
 
 246 ' SORDELLO ' 
 
 Ere he could fix 
 
 On aught, in rushed the Mantuans ; much they cared 
 For his perplexity. . . . 
 
 Whatever topics they might start 
 Had to be groped for in his consciousness 
 Straight, and as straight delivered them by guess. 
 Only obliged to ask himself, " What was ?" 
 A speedy answer followed ; but, alas, 
 One of God's large ones, tardy to condense 
 Itself into a period ; . . . . 
 
 The question Naddo asked, 
 Had just a lifetime moderately tasked 
 To answer, Nadtlo's fashion. More disgust 
 And more : why move his soul, since move it must 
 At minute's notice or as good it failed 
 To move at all ? The end was, he retailed 
 Some ready-made opinion, put to use 
 This quip, that maxim, ventured reproduce 
 Gestures and tones at any folly caught 
 Serving to finish with, nor too much sought 
 If false or true 't was spoken. 
 
 The great dream, that the world was to put its seal 
 on his hungry self-worship, ends in blank disappoint- 
 ment. All this is worked out into the details of a 
 distinct story, with its incidents, scenery, vicissitudes, 
 as if they had come from a chronicle with its exhi- 
 bitions of character, feeling, mental activity, as a 
 dramatist interprets and imagines them. Much of 
 this continued illustration of the course and changes 
 of such a soul as Sordello is supposed to be, is, as it
 
 ' BORDELLO ' 247 
 
 could not fail to be for a poet like Mr. Browning, 
 powerful, subtle, and original. In some parts, it is 
 not easy to follow his meaning : in some, we certainly 
 need an explanatory note. But on the whole, what 
 Bordello's strength and weakness are, what he wants 
 and longs for, where he seeks his happiness and why 
 he misses it, are perfectly intelligible. It is no 
 recondite ^tory. He who turns round God's gifts to 
 his own self-worship will lose what they were meant 
 to bring him, and will find his self-worship a cheat 
 and a delusion. 
 
 But the second part is less intelligible. Sordello 
 rises to a higher ideal of life. How this comes about 
 through Palma's influence is told us, but does not 
 appear as clearly as might be wished. But it does 
 come about He learns that life is not for mere 
 amusement, or pleasure, or glory, or even resigned 
 disappointment; but that to satisfy the standard 
 which he cannot but acknowledge, he must look at 
 the world as it is, not as he may choose to imagine 
 it: he must recognise that he is part of a great 
 brotherhood, a great suffering brotherhood : that he 
 owes it infinite obligations of patient sympathy, duty, 
 help ; and that only a life led under the consciousness 
 of these obligations can satisfy him and make him 
 happy. Imagination, the poet's gift, even more than 
 sight, has made him understand this : it is a gift for
 
 248 ' SORDELLO ' 
 
 which he is responsible. But the story passes on 
 in Mr. Browning's hands into a pathetic tragedy. 
 Sordello sees his mission, but somehow fails to fulfil 
 it : resists the temptation that would divert him from 
 it, resists it in its gross sense, and yet does not see 
 to what account the occasion might be turned. The 
 talent, one or five, is not put to wrong use, but is not 
 used, because he fails to find, though he wishes, how 
 to help mankind. This is his fault ; and so, because 
 " what he should have been, could be, and was not " 
 because he missed something which "he wished 
 should go to him, not he to it" therefore Dante 
 justly finds him, not among the lost, but among the 
 greatly negligent, almost the "slothful servant," 
 " servus piger " ; among the well-intentioned leaders 
 of mankind who had trifled over their tasks. Dante 
 did that which bound him for ever to his fellows ; 
 which made all Italians henceforth brethren ; which 
 gave eyes to see to all generations of mankind; 
 which lifted their souls from the sin and soil of 
 time to the eternal light. Sordello has remained a 
 name a name added to a few ballads. 
 
 But what Mr. Browning's telling does not make 
 plain is, wherein was the failure. Doubtless, Sordello 
 is beaten by his half-heartedness : he is, and he knows 
 he is, too weak for a great work But where and 
 how does this show itself? What is it that he ought
 
 SORDELLO* 249 
 
 to have done, might have done, and did not? His 
 temptation, it would seem, was when, after Salinguerra 
 had recognised him as his long-lost son, after he had 
 listened, first with amusement and then with impatient 
 scorn, to Bordello's pleadings for the poor and miserable 
 multitudes, and finally had been cowed and overawed 
 by Bordello's gathering earnestness and passion, 
 Salinguerra had offered him the armed leadership of 
 Lombardy, perhaps of Italy. There it was for him 
 to take, if he would. But to take it, was to take it 
 with its small chances of justice and mercy, with 
 all its certainties witness Salinguerra himself of 
 violence and cruelty : it was to continue that which 
 had appalled his soul with its ghastly terrors. That, 
 surely, was not what he was called to ; and he resisted 
 the temptation. But he had only strength to refuse 
 it, and no more : he had not heart or will to see what 
 it led to; and refusing it, in Mr. Browning's story, 
 he dies : his work left undone in despair, his divine 
 work unfinished, while the poor hermit-bee, which 
 had been working all the day, was able to accomplish 
 what God had given it to do. 
 
 By this, the hermit-bee has stopped 
 His day's toil at Quito : the new-cropped 
 Dead vine-leaf answers, now 'tis eve, he bit, 
 Twirled so, and filed all day : the mantwn't fit 
 Ood counselled for. Aa easy guess the word
 
 250 ' BORDELLO * 
 
 That passed betwixt them, and become the third 
 To the soft small unfrighted bee, as tax 
 Him with one fault so, no remembrance racks 
 Of the stone maidens and the font of stone 
 He, creeping through the crevice leaves alone. 
 Alas, my friend, alas Sordello, whom 
 Anon they laid within that old font tomb, 
 And, yet again, alas. 
 
 But then, what had he to do ? Was he too late 
 for everything ? Was it the Nemesis of power wasted 
 long ago ? Was the opportunity gone for being among 
 the masters of thought, or the masters of action, or 
 the masters, like St. Francis, of sympathy ? Could he 
 have made a nobler use of what Salinguerra offered, 
 for the real good of Italy, and had he not the heart t 
 Or, is his death, which is told with such strange 
 reticence, meant to leave us in darkness, with the 
 suggestion that love may accomplish in another life 
 what a poor fellow-mortal failed to accomplish here ? 
 
 Che cima di giudizio non s'avvalla, 
 Perche foco d'amor compia in tin punto, 
 Ci6 che dee satisfar chi qui si etalla. 
 
 Sordello, it must always be remembered, has 
 wasted half his life, and, as he says, Nature does 
 not give a second life to mend the first The man 
 who has dawdled away his first years of power in 
 what is frivolous and selfish, cannot start on the same
 
 ' BORDELLO ' 251 
 
 level with the man who from the first has been in 
 earnest When, at last, Sordello comes to be in 
 earnest, he has already lost much of his time of 
 preparation for a true life's work. He has missed his 
 chance of knowing its true conditions. So in his 
 very earnestness he is continually jarring against 
 these conditions. He sees great things done in the 
 world Rome, for instance, or human civilisation 
 and he wants to do great things. But he mistakes 
 the way they are done not all at once, not by some 
 great stroke, but as nature develops the tree, or as 
 the coral-reef is built up. " A man can do but a man's 
 portion, the last of each series of workmen." 
 
 And then a low voice wound into his heart : 
 
 "Sordello !" (Low as some old Pythoness 
 
 Conceding to a Lydian King's distress 
 
 The cause of his long error one mistake 
 
 Of her past oracle) " Sordello, wake ! 
 
 Qod has conceded two sights to a man 
 
 One, of men's whole work, Time's completed plan, 
 
 The other, of the minute's work, man's first 
 
 Step to the plan's completeness : what's dispersed 
 
 Save hope of that supreme step which, descried 
 
 Earliest, was meant still to remain untried 
 
 Only to give you heart to take your own 
 
 Step, and there stay leaving the rest alone ? 
 
 Where is the vanity ? Why count as one 
 
 The first step, with the last step ? What is gone 
 
 Except Koine's aery magnificence,
 
 252 BORDELLO ' 
 
 That last step you'd take first ? an evidence 
 
 You were God : be man now ! Let those glance-: fall ! 
 
 The basis, the beginning step of all, 
 
 Which proves you just a man is that gone too ? 
 
 Pity to disconcert one versed as you 
 
 In fate's ill-nature ! but its full extent 
 
 Eludes Sordello, even : the veil rent, 
 
 Read the black writing that collective man 
 
 Outstrips the individual ! Who began 
 
 The acknowledged greatnesses ? Ay, your own art 
 
 Shall serve us : put the poet's mimes apart 
 
 Close with the poet's self, and lo, a dim 
 
 Yet too plain form divides itself from him ! 
 
 Alcamo's song enmeshes the lulled Isle, 
 
 Woven into the echoes left erewhile 
 
 By Nina, one soft web of song : no more 
 
 Turning his name, then, flower-like o'er and o'er ! 
 
 An elder poet in the younger's place ; 
 
 Nina's the strength, but Alcamo's the grace : 
 
 Each neutralizes each then ! Search your fill ; 
 
 You get no whole and perfect Poet still 
 
 New Ninas, Alcamos, till time's mid-night 
 
 Shrouds all or better say, the shutting light 
 
 Of a forgotten yesterday." 
 
 The "multitude " of his imagination is a very 
 different thing from the concrete multitudes whose 
 various items meet him : the ideal Rome falls to 
 pieces in the presence of the real Rome ; and he has 
 not power to harmonise the two. How should he 
 help the great " cause," not of Guelf or Ghibelline,
 
 ' BORDELLO ' 253 
 
 but of mankind ? He might help it by his gift as a 
 poet he might help it by hand and action. Should 
 he trust his great gift of access to the souls of men 1 
 Should he throw heart and life into its exercise ? or 
 should he take the judge's badge, the soldier's sceptre, 
 and rival Charlemagne and Hildebrand ? Ah, there 
 is no time now for the first: he saw through the tempta- 
 tion of the last, and refused to " oppress the world " 
 He sees no other way. And so he failed. 
 
 Who thus, by fortune ordering events, 
 Passed with posterity, to all intents, 
 For just the god he never could become. 
 As Knight, Bard, Gallant, men were never dumb 
 In praise of him : while what he should have been, 
 Could be, and was not the one step too mean 
 For him to take, we suffer fct this day 
 Because of : Ecelin had pushed away 
 Its chance ere Dante could arrive and take 
 That step Sordello spurned, for the world's sake 
 He did much but Sordello's chance was gone. 
 Thus, had Sordello dared that step alone, 
 Apollo had been compassed 'twas a Jit 
 He withed should go to him, not he to it 
 As one content to merely be supposed 
 Singing or fighting elsewhere, while he dozed 
 Really at home one who was chiefly glad 
 To have achieved the few real deeds he had, 
 Because that way assured they were not worth 
 Doing, so spared from doing them henceforth
 
 254 ' SORDELLO ' 
 
 A tree that covets fruitage and yet tastes 
 
 Never itself, itself. Had he embraced 
 
 Their cause then, men had plucked Hesperian fruit 
 
 And, praising that, just thrown him in to boot 
 
 All he was anxious to appear but scarce 
 
 Solicitous to be. A sorry farce 
 
 Such life is, after all 1 
 
 There is a subtle Scotch proverb, "Good reason 
 and part cause." There was "good reason" why he 
 should shrink from taking the place which Salinguerra 
 wanted him to take, and this was " part cause " why 
 he did nothing more. But it was only " part cause **; 
 the rest of the "cause" was his disinclination to 
 think out something better and more troublesome. 
 He failed, because wishes and will are not the same. 
 He who began with requiring everything to bow to 
 his will, ended by being unable to will the thing he 
 would. He can save himself from being what he 
 ought not to be what Salinguerra would have made 
 him, the heir of the power of the house of Romano 
 and of its selfishness and violence : further, the sup- 
 planter of the rightful heirs, whom Salinguerra 
 proposed to betray that step was "too mean for 
 him to take ; " though it would have been better for 
 the world if he had taken it, and kept out Ecelin 
 and Alberic. But he did nothing more. They 
 proved
 
 ' BORDELLO ' 255 
 
 Wherever's will 
 
 To do, there's plenty to be done, or ill 
 Or good. 
 
 He would not do the ill, but cared not to do tht 
 good from 
 
 His strange disbelief that aught was ever to be done 
 
 If the good had come to him of itself he would gladly 
 have taken it. But he had not the will to imagine 
 it, to seek it ; and so his noble and beautiful nature, 
 with all its grand possibilities, sank into uselessness 
 and into forgetfuluess. 
 
 Failed, as so many have failed, as so few have 
 not failed. But, as Mr. Browning teaches us, there 
 are different kinds of failure. That there may be 
 earthly falling short and imperfection, which is much 
 greater and more hopeful than great earthly achieve- 
 ment, is, indeed, one of his deepest convictions and 
 favourite lessons. It is developed with great power, 
 and greater clearness than here, in " Paracelsus " : 
 growing out of the strange mixture, in the highest 
 natures, of limitation and hope hope boundless, 
 limitations impassable, puzzling, humbling. Besides 
 failures which seem absolute and final, there are 
 failures that carry away with them noble qualities 
 and capacities full of promise, though they have 
 been beaten here failures which are greater even in
 
 256 ' BORDELLO ' 
 
 disaster than the smooth perfect successes with which 
 so many are content. Is not something to be put to 
 the limitations of our short, mortal life 1 to the dis- 
 parate conditions of soul and body an eternal soul 
 with a body of time, bringing what belongs to the 
 eternal into the mould of the temporary, and bursting 
 the vessel too weak to receive it ? 
 
 Now, of the present sphere we call 
 Life, are conditions ; take but this among 
 Many ; the body was to be so long 
 Youthful, no longer : but, since no control 
 Tied to that body's purposes his soul, 
 She chose to understand the body's trade 
 More than the body's self had fain conveyed 
 Her boundless to the body's bounded lot. 
 Hence, the soul permanent, the body not, 
 Scarce the one minute for enjoying here, 
 The soul must needs instruct her weak compeer, 
 Run o'er its capabilities and wring 
 A joy thence, she held worth experiencing : 
 Which, far from half discovered even, lo, 
 The minute gone, the body's power let go 
 Apportioned to that joy's acquirement ! Broke 
 Morning o'er earth, he yearned for all it woke, 
 From the volcano's vapour-flag, winds hoist 
 Black o'er the spread of sea, down to the moist 
 Dale's silken barley-spikes sullied with rain, 
 Swayed earthwards, heavily to rise again 
 The Small, a sphere as perfect as the Great 
 To the soul's absoluteness. Meditate
 
 ' SORDELLO ' 257 
 
 Too long on such a morning's cluster-chord 
 And the whole music it was framed afford, 
 The chord's might half discovered, what should pluck 
 One string, his finger, was found palsy -struck. 
 
 So, while Mr. Browning sorrowfully throws up his 
 Bordello's earthly conquests, his attempt to bind him- 
 self to his kind and do some great thing for it, his life 
 wasted by half-heartedness and self-pleasing, he does 
 not part without hope for his gentleness, his quick sym- 
 pathies, his readiness to let in the love of his fellows, 
 his nobler ideals, his refusal to exchange them for 
 lower ones. Sordello falls short of the heroic, of the 
 saintly, of that perfection which in its own conscious 
 imperfection rises higher and higher after the divine 
 and the unattainable. He falls short of this as much 
 as he is above the narrow completeness represented 
 by Eglamor, which accomplishes what it aims at 
 because it aims but low ; which is not troubled, 
 distracted, hindered by the mystery of wider and 
 deeper thoughts ; which may be simple and sincere 
 and contented in its limitations and lowliness ; which 
 may be stupid and ignorant self-satisfaction, but 
 which at any rate is incapable of the troubles and the 
 hopes of greatness. Sordello, like so many of u?, is 
 between the two. He has not made much of things 
 here, though he had the eye to see and the soul to 
 aspire. But may there not be a future for him still ? 
 
 S
 
 258 ' BORDELLO ' 
 
 For did not Dante meet with Sordello at the foot of 
 the steeps of the Mount of Cleansing having, it may 
 be, long to wait, but still there, where no more change 
 could harm him waiting amid " majestic pains," as 
 after such an experience he might well wait in still, 
 stern communion with himself till his time should 
 come? 
 
 The following lines seem to sum up the main 
 drift of Sordello. They are clouded by an inexcus- 
 able obscurity of language, allusion, and entangled 
 thought Yet they present in dim and imperfect 
 outline a great and profound idea, struggling to 
 disclose itself. In their force, and in their defects 
 in what they do, and in what they do not effect, 
 they are characteristic of the whole attempt 
 
 So much was plain then, proper in the past : 
 
 To be complete for, satisfy the whole 
 
 Series of spheres Eternity, his soul 
 
 Exceeded, so was incomplete for, each 
 
 Single sphere Time. But does our knowledge reach 
 
 No farther ? Is the cloud of hindrance broke 
 
 But by the failing of the fleshly yoke, 
 
 Its loves and hates, as now when death lets soar 
 
 Sordello, self-sufficient as before 
 
 Though during the mere space that shall elapse 
 
 Twixt his enthralment in new bonds, perhaps ? 
 
 Must life be ever just escaped, which should 
 
 Have been enjoyed ? nay, might have been and would,
 
 ' BORDELLO ' 259 
 
 Each purpose ordered right the soul's no whit 
 Beyond the body's purpose under it 
 Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay, 
 And that sky-space of water, ray for ray 
 And star for star, one richness where they mixed 
 As this and that wing of an angel, fixed, 
 Tumultuary splendours folded in 
 To die would soul, proportioned thus, begin 
 Exciting discontent, or surelier quell 
 The body if, aspiring, it rebel ? 
 But how so order life ? Still brutalize 
 The soul, the sad world's way, with muffled eyes 
 To all that was before, all that shall be 
 After this sphere and every quality 
 -Save some sole and immutable Great and Good 
 And Beauteous whither fate has loosed its hood 
 To follow ? Never may some soul see All 
 The Great Before and After, and the Small 
 Now, yet be saved by this the simplest lore, 
 And take the single course prescribed before, 
 As the king-bird witli ages on his plumes 
 Travels to die in his ancestral glooms ? 
 But where descry the Love that shall select 
 That course ? Here is a soul whom, to affect, 
 Nature has plied with all her means, from trees 
 And flowers e'en to the Multitude ! and these, 
 Decides he save or no ? One word to end ! 
 
 Ah my Bordello, I this once befriend 
 And speak for you. Of a Power above you still 
 Which, utterly incomprehensible, 
 Is out of rivalry, which thus you can 
 Love, tho' unloving all conceived by man
 
 260 ' BORDELLO ' 
 
 What need ! And of none the minutest duct 
 To that out-nature, nought that would instruct 
 And so let rivalry begin to live 
 But of a power its representative 
 Who, being for authority the same, 
 Communication different, should claim 
 A course, the first chose and this last revealed 
 This Human clear, as that Divine concealed 
 What utter need ! 
 
 THE END 
 
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