No More Learning

Mr.
Cary thinks that Dante had as much right to avail himself of "the
popular creed in all its extravagance" as Homer had of his gods, or
Shakspeare of his fairies. But the distinction is obvious. Homer did not
personally identify himself with a creed, or do his utmost to perpetuate
the worst parts of it in behalf of a ferocious inquisitorial church, and
to the risk of endangering the peace of millions of gentle minds.

The great poem thus misnomered is partly a system of theology, partly an
abstract of the knowledge of the day, but chiefly a series of passionate
and imaginative pictures, altogether forming an account of the author's
times, his friends, his enemies, and himself, written to vent the spleen
of his exile, and the rest of his feelings, good and bad, and to reform
church and state by a spirit of resentment and obloquy, which highly
needed reform itself. It has also a design strictly self-referential.
The author feigns, that the beatified spirit of his mistress has
obtained leave to warn and purify his soul by shewing him the state of
things in the next world. She deputes the soul of his master Virgil
to conduct him through hell and purgatory, and then takes him herself
through the spheres of heaven, where Saint Peter catechises and confirms
him, and where he is finally honoured with sights of the Virgin Mary, of
Christ, and even a glimpse of the Supreme Being!

His hell, considered as a place, is, to speak geologically, a most
fantastical formation. It descends from beneath Jerusalem to the centre
of the earth, and is a funnel graduated in circles, each circle being a
separate place of torment for a different vice or its co-ordinates, and
the point of the funnel terminating with Satan stuck into ice. Purgatory
is a corresponding mountain on the other side of the globe, commencing
with the antipodes of Jerusalem, and divided into exterior circles of
expiation, which end in a table-land forming the terrestrial paradise.
From this the hero and his mistress ascend by a flight, exquisitely
conceived, to the stars; where the sun and the planets of the Ptolemaic
system (for the true one was unknown in Dante's time) form a series of
heavens for different virtues, the whole terminating in the empyrean, or
region of pure light, and the presence of the Beatific Vision.

The boundaries of old and new, strange as it may now seem to us, were so
confused in those days, and books were so rare, and the Latin poets held
in such invincible reverence, that Dante, in one and the same poem,
speaks of the false gods of Paganism, and yet retains much of its lower
mythology; nay, invokes Apollo himself at the door of paradise. There
was, perhaps, some mystical and even philosophical inclusion of the
past in this medley, as recognising the constant superintendence of
Providence; but that Dante partook of what may be called the literary
superstition of the time, even for want of better knowledge, is clear
from the grave historical use he makes of poetic fables in his treatise
on Monarchy, and in the very arguments which he puts into the mouths of
saints and apostles. There are lingering feelings to this effect even
now among the peasantry of Italy; where, the reader need not be told,
Pagan customs of all sorts, including religious and most reverend ones,
are existing under the sanction of other names;--heathenisms christened.
A Tuscan postilion, once enumerating to me some of the native poets,
concluded his list with Apollo; and a plaster-cast man over here, in
London, appeared much puzzled, when conversing on the subject with a
friend of mine, how to discrepate Samson from Hercules.

Dante accordingly, while, with the frightful bigotry of the schools, he
puts the whole Pagan world into hell-borders (with the exception of two
or three, whose salvation adds to the absurdity), mingles the hell of
Virgil with that of Tertullian and St. Dominic; sets Minos at the door
as judge; retains Charon in his old office of boatman over the Stygian
lake; puts fabulous people with real among the damned, Dido, and Cacus,
and Ephialtes, with Ezzelino and Pope Nicholas the Fifth; and associates
the Centaurs and the Furies with the agents of diabolical torture. It
has pleased him also to elevate Cato of Utica to the office of warder of
purgatory, though the censor's poor good wife, Marcia, is detained in
the regions below. By these and other far greater inconsistencies,
the whole place of punishment becomes a _reductio ad absurdum_, as
ridiculous as it is melancholy; so that one is astonished how so great a
man, and especially a man who thought himself so far advanced beyond his
age, and who possessed such powers of discerning the good and beautiful,
could endure to let his mind live in so foul and foolish a region for
any length of time, and there wreak and harden the unworthiest of his
passions. Genius, nevertheless, is so commensurate with absurdity
throughout the book, and there are even such sweet and balmy as well as
sublime pictures in it occasionally, nay often, that not only will
the poem ever be worthy of admiration, but when those increasing
purifications of Christianity which our blessed reformers began, shall
finally precipitate the whole dregs of the author into the mythology to
which they belong, the world will derive a pleasure from it to an amount
not to be conceived till the arrival of that day. Dante, meantime, with
an impartiality which has been admired by those who can approve the
assumption of a theological tyranny at the expense of common feeling
and decency, has put friends as well as foes into hell: tutors of his
childhood, kinsmen of those who treated him hospitably, even the father
of his beloved friend, Guido Cavalcante--the last for not believing in a
God: therein doing the worst thing possible in behalf of the belief, and
totally differing both with the pious heathen Plutarch, and the great
Christian philosopher Bacon, who were of opinion that a contumelious
belief is worse than none, and that it is far better and more pious to
believe in "no God at all," than in a God who would "eat his children
as soon as they were born. " And Dante makes him do worse; for the whole
unbaptised infant world, Christian as well as Pagan, is in his Tartarus.

Milton has spoken of the "milder shades of Purgatory;" and truly they
possess great beauties. Even in a theological point of view they are
something like a bit of Christian refreshment after the horrors of the
_Inferno_. The first emerging from the hideous gulf to the sight of the
blue serenity of heaven, is painted in a manner inexpressibly charming.
So is the sea-shore with the coming of the angel; the valley, with the
angels in green; the repose at night on the rocks; and twenty other
pictures of gentleness and love. And yet, special and great has been the
escape of the Protestant world from this part of Roman Catholic belief;
for Purgatory is the heaviest stone that hangs about the neck of the
old and feeble in that communion. Hell is avoidable by repentance; but
Purgatory, what modest conscience shall escape? Mr. Cary, in a note on a
passage in which Dante recommends his readers to think on what follows
this expiatory state, rather than what is suffered there,[23] looks upon
the poet's injunction as an "unanswerable objection to the doctrine of
purgatory," it being difficult to conceive "how the best can meet death
without horror, if they believe it must be followed by immediate and
intense suffering. " Luckily, assent is not belief; and mankind's
feelings are for the most part superior to their opinions; otherwise
the world would have been in a bad way indeed, and nature not been
vindicated of her children. But let us watch and be on our guard against
all resuscitations of superstition.

As to our Florentine's Heaven, it is full of beauties also, though
sometimes of a more questionable and pantomimical sort than is to be
found in either of the other books. I shall speak of some of them
presently; but the general impression of the place is, that it is no
heaven at all. He says it is, and talks much of its smiles and its
beatitude; but always excepting the poetry--especially the similes
brought from the more heavenly earth--we realise little but a
fantastical assemblage of doctors and doubtful characters, far more
angry and theological than celestial; giddy raptures of monks and
inquisitors dancing in circles, and saints denouncing popes and
Florentines; in short, a heaven libelling itself with invectives against
earth, and terminating in a great presumption. Many of the people put
there, a Calvinistic Dante would have consigned to the "other place;"
and some, if now living, would not be admitted into decent society. At
the beginning of one of the cantos, the poet congratulates himself,
with a complacent superiority, on his being in heaven and occupied with
celestial matters, while his poor fellow-creatures are wandering and
blundering on earth. But he had never got there! A divine--worthy of
that name--of the Church of England (Dr. Whichcote), has beautifully
said, that "heaven is first a temper, and then a place. " According to
this truly celestial topography, the implacable Florentine had not
reached its outermost court. Again, his heavenly mistress, Beatrice,
besides being far too didactic to sustain the womanly part of her
character properly, alternates her smiles and her sarcasms in a way that
jars horribly against the occasional enchantment of her aspect. She does
not scruple to burst into taunts of the Florentines in the presence of
Jesus himself; and the spirit of his ancestor, Cacciaguida, in the very
bosom of Christian bliss, promises him revenge on his enemies! Is this
the kind of zeal that is to be exempt from objection in a man who
objected to all the world? or will it be thought a profaneness against
such profanity, to remind the reader of the philosopher in Swift, who
"while gazing on the stars, was betrayed by his lower parts into a
ditch! "

The reader's time need not be wasted with the allegorical and other
mystical significations given to the poem; still less on the question
whether Beatrice is theology, or a young lady, or both; and least of all
on the discovery of the ingenious Signor Rossetti, that Dante and all
the other great old Italian writers meant nothing, either by their
mistresses or their mythology, but attacks on the court of Rome. Suffice
it, that besides all other possible meanings, Dante himself has told us
that his poem has its obvious and literal meaning; that he means a spade
by a spade, purgatory by purgatory, and truly and unaffectedly to devote
his friends to the infernal regions whenever he does so. I confess I
think it is a great pity that Guido Cavalcante did not live to read the
poem, especially the passage about his father. The understanding of
Guido, who had not the admiration for Virgil that Dante had (very likely
for reasons that have been thought sound in modern times), was in all
probability as good as that of his friend in many respects, and perhaps
more so in one or two; and modern criticism might have been saved some
of its pains of objection by the poet's contemporary.

The author did not live to publish, in any formal manner, his
extraordinary poem, probably did not intend to do so, except under those
circumstances of political triumph which he was always looking for; but
as he shewed portions of it to his friends, it was no doubt talked of
to a certain extent, and must have exasperated such of his enemies as
considered him worth their hostility. No wonder they did all they could
to keep him out of Florence. What would they have said of him, could
they have written a counter poem? What would even his friends have said
of him? for we see in what manner he has treated even those; and yet how
could he possibly know, with respect either to friends or enemies, what
passed between them and their consciences? or who was it that gave
him his right to generate the boasted distinction between an author's
feelings as a man and his assumed office as a theologian, and parade
the latter at the former's expense? His own spleen, hatred, and avowed
sentiments of vengeance, are manifest throughout the poem; and there is
this, indeed, to be said for the moral and religious inconsistencies
both of the man and his verse, that in those violent times the spirit
of Christian charity, and even the sentiment of personal shame, were so
little understood, that the author in one part of it is made to blush by
a friend for not having avenged him; and it is said to have been thought
a compliment to put a lady herself into hell, that she might be talked
of, provided it was for something not odious. An admirer of this
infernal kind of celebrity, even in later times, declared that he would
have given a sum of money (I forget to what amount) if Dante had but
done as much for one of his ancestors. It has been argued, that in all
the parties concerned in these curious ethics there is a generous love
of distinction, and a strong craving after life, action, and sympathy
of some kind or other. Granted; there are all sorts of half-good,
half-barbarous feelings in Dante's poem. Let justice be done to the
good half; but do not let us take the ferocity for wisdom and piety; or
pretend, in the complacency of our own freedom from superstition, to see
no danger of harm to the less fortunate among our fellow-creatures in
the support it receives from a man of genius. Bedlams have been filled
with such horrors; thousands, nay millions of feeble minds are suffering
by them or from them, at this minute, all over the world. Dante's best
critic, Foscolo, has said much of the heroical nature of the age in
which the poet lived; but he adds, that its mixture of knowledge and
absurdity is almost inexplicable. The truth is, that like everything
else which appears harsh and unaccountable in nature, it was an excess
of the materials for good, working in an over-active and inexperienced
manner; but knowing this, we are bound, for the sake of the good, not
to retard its improvement by ignoring existing impieties, or blind
ourselves to the perpetuating tendencies of the bigotries of great men.
Oh! had the first indoctrinators of Christian feeling, while enlisting
the "divine Plato" into the service of diviner charity, only kept the
latter just enough in mind to discern the beautiful difference between
the philosopher's unmalignant and improvable evil, and their own
malignant and eternal one, what a world of folly and misery they might
have saved us! But as the evil has happened, let us hope that even this
form of it has had its uses. If Dante thought it salutary to the world
to maintain a system of religious terror, the same charity which can
hope that it may once have been so, has taught us how to commence a
better. But did he, after all, or did he not, think it salutary? Did
he think so, believing the creed himself? or did he think it from an
unwilling sense of its necessity? Or, lastly, did he write only as a
mythologist, and care for nothing but the exercise of his spleen and
genius? If he had no other object than that, his conscientiousness would
be reduced to a low pitch indeed. Foscolo is of opinion he was not only
in earnest, but that he was very near taking himself for an apostle, and
would have done so had his prophecies succeeded, perhaps with success to
the pretension. [24] Thank heaven, his "Hell" has not embittered the mild
reading-desks of the Church of England.

If King George the Third himself, with all his arbitrary notions, and
willing religious acquiescence, could not endure the creed of St.
Athanasius with its damnatory enjoinments of the impossible, what would
have been said to the inscription over Dante's hell-gate, or the
account of Ugolino eating an archbishop, in the gentle chapels of Queen
Victoria? May those chapels have every beauty in them, and every air of
heaven, that painting and music can bestow--divine gifts, not unworthy
to be set before their Divine Bestower; but far from them be kept the
foul fiends of inhumanity and superstition!

It is certainly impossible to get at a thorough knowledge of the
opinions of Dante even in theology; and his morals, if judged according
to the received standard, are not seldom puzzling. He rarely thinks as
the popes do; sometimes not as the Church does: he is lax, for instance,
on the subject of absolution by the priest at death. [25] All you can be
sure of is, the predominance of his will, the most wonderful poetry, and
the notions he entertained of the degrees of vice and virtue. Towards
the errors of love he is inclined to be so lenient (some think because
he had indulged in them himself), that it is pretty clear he would not
have put Paulo and Francesca into hell, if their story had not been
too recent, and their death too sudden, to allow him to assume their
repentance in the teeth of the evidence required. He avails himself of
orthodox license to put "the harlot Rahab" into heaven ("cette bonne
fille de Jericho," as Ginguéné calls her); nay, he puts her into the
planet Venus, as if to compliment her on her profession; and one of her
companions there is a fair Ghibelline, sister of the tyrant Ezzelino, a
lady famous for her gallantries, of whom the poet good-naturedly says,
that she "was overcome by her star"--to wit, the said planet Venus; and
yet he makes her the organ of the most unfeminine triumphs over the
Guelphs. But both these ladies, it is to be understood, repented--for
they had time for repentance; their good fortune saved them. Poor
murdered Francesca had no time to repent; therefore her mischance was
her damnation! Such are the compliments theology pays to the Creator.
In fact, nothing is really punished in Dante's Catholic hell but
impenitence, deliberate or accidental. No delay of repentance, however
dangerous, hinders the most hard-hearted villain from reaching his
heaven. The best man goes to hell for ever, if he does not think he has
sinned as Dante thinks; the worst is beatified, if he agrees with him:
the only thing which every body is sure of, is some dreadful duration
of agony in purgatory--the great horror of Catholic death beds.
Protestantism may well hug itself on having escaped it. O Luther!
vast was the good you did us. O gentle Church of England! let nothing
persuade you that it is better to preach frightful and foolish ideas of
God from your pulpits, than loving-kindness to all men, and peace above
all things.

If Dante had erred only on the side of indulgence, humanity could easily
have forgiven him--for the excesses of charity are the extensions of
hope; but, unfortunately, where he is sweet-natured once, he is bitter a
hundred times. This is the impression he makes on universalists of all
creeds and parties; that is to say, on men who having run the whole
round of sympathy with their fellow-creatures, become the only final
judges of sovereign pretension. It is very well for individuals to
make a god of Dante for some encouragement of their own position or
pretension; but a god for the world at large he never was, or can be;
and I doubt if an impression to this effect was not always, from the
very dawn of our literature, the one entertained of him by the genius
of our native country, which could never long endure any kind of
unwarrantable dictation. Chaucer evidently thought him a man who would
spare no unnecessary probe to the feelings (see the close of his version
of _Ugolino_). Spenser says not a word of him, though he copied Tasso,
and eulogised Ariosto. Shakspeare would assuredly have put him into
the list of those presumptuous lookers into eternity who "_take upon
themselves to know" (Cymbeline_, act v. sc. 4). Milton, in his sonnet
to Henry Lawes, calls him "that sad Florentine"--a lamenting epithet,
by which we do not designate a man whom we desire to resemble. The
historian of English poetry, admirably applying to him a passage out of
Milton, says that "Hell grows darker at his frown. " [26]

Walter Scott could not read him, at least not with pleasure. He tells
Miss Seward that the "plan" of the poem appeared to him "unhappy;
the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and
uninteresting. " [27] Uninteresting, I think, it is impossible to consider
it. The known world is there, and the unknown pretends to be there; and
both are surely interesting to most people.

Landor, in his delightful book the _Pentameron_--a book full of the
profoundest as well as sweetest humanity--makes Petrarch follow up
Boccaccio's eulogies of the episode of Paulo and Francesca with
ebullitions of surprise and horror:

"_Petrarca_. Perfection of poetry! The greater is my wonder at
discovering nothing else of the same order or cast in this whole section
of the poem. He who fainted at the recital of Francesca,

'And he who fell as a dead body falls'

would exterminate all the inhabitants of every town in Italy! What
execrations against Florence, Pistoia, Pisa, Siena, Genoa! what hatred
against the whole human race! what exultation and merriment at eternal
and immitigable sufferings! Seeing this, I cannot but consider the
_Inferno_ as the most immoral and impious book that ever was written.
Yet, hopeless that our country shall ever see again such poetry, and
certain that without it our future poets would be more feebly urged
forward to excellence, I would have dissuaded Dante from cancelling it,
if this had been his intention. " [28]

Most happily is the distinction here intimated between the
undesirableness of Dante's book in a moral and religious point of view,
and the greater desirableness of it, nevertheless, as a pattern of
poetry; for absurdity, however potent, wears itself out in the end, and
leaves what is good and beautiful to vindicate even so foul an origin.

Again, Petrarch says, "What an object of sadness and of consternation,
he who rises up from hell like a giant refreshed!

"_Boccaccio_. Strange perversion! A pillar of smoke by day and of fire
by night, to guide no one. Paradise had fewer wants for him to satisfy
than hell had, all which he fed to repletion; but let us rather look to
his poetry than his temper. "

See also what is said in that admirable book further on (p. 50),
respecting the most impious and absurd passage in all Dante's poem, the
assumption about Divine Love in the inscription over hell-gate--one of
those monstrosities of conception which none ever had the effrontery to
pretend to vindicate, except theologians who profess to be superior to
the priests of Moloch, and who yet defy every feeling of decency and
humanity for the purpose of explaining their own worldly, frightened,
or hard-hearted submission to the mistakes of the most wretched
understandings. Ugo Foscolo, an excellent critic where his own temper
and violence did not interfere, sees nothing but jealousy in Petrarch's
dislike of Dante, and nothing but Jesuitism in similar feelings
entertained by such men as Tiraboschi. But all gentle and considerate
hearts must dislike the rage and bigotry in Dante, even were it true (as
the Dantesque Foscolo thinks) that Italy will never be regenerated till
one-half of it is baptised in the blood of the other! [29] Such men, with
all their acuteness, are incapable of seeing what can be effected by
nobler and serener times, and the progress of civilisation. They fancy,
no doubt, that they are vindicating the energies of Nature herself, and
the inevitable necessity of "doing evil that good may come. " But Dante
in so doing violated the Scripture he professed to revere; and men must
not assume to themselves that final knowledge of results, which is the
only warrant of the privilege, and the possession of which is to be
arrogated by no earthly wisdom. One calm discovery of science may do
away with all the boasted eternal necessities of the angry and the
self-idolatrous. The passions that may be necessary to savages are not
bound to remain so to civilised men, any more than the eating of man's
flesh or the worship of Jugghernaut. When we think of the wonderful
things lately done by science for the intercourse of the world, and
the beautiful and tranquil books of philosophy written by men of equal
energy and benevolence, and opening the peacefulest hopes for mankind,
and views of creation to which Dante's universe was a nutshell,--such
a vision as that of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no
better than the dream of an hypochondriacal savage, and his nutshell a
rottenness to be spit out of the mouth.

Heaven send that the great poet's want of charity has not made myself
presumptuous and uncharitable! But it is in the name of society I
speak; and words, at all events, now-a-days are not the terrible,
stake-preceding things they were in his. Readers in general,
however--even those of the literary world--have little conception of
the extent to which Dante carries either his cruelty or his abuse. The
former (of which I shall give some examples presently) shews appalling
habits of personal resentment; the latter is outrageous to a pitch of
the ludicrous--positively screaming. I will give some specimens of it
out of Foscolo himself, who collects them for a different purpose;
though, with all his idolatry of Dante, he was far from being insensible
to his mistakes.

"The people of Sienna," according to this national and Christian poet,
were "a parcel of cox-combs; those of Arezzo, dogs; and of Casentino,
hogs. Lucca made a trade of perjury. Pistoia was a den of beasts, and
ought to be reduced to ashes; and the river Arno should overflow and
drown every soul in Pisa. Almost all the women in Florence walked
half-naked in public, and were abandoned in private. Every brother,
husband, son, and father, in Bologna, set their women to sale. In all
Lombardy were not to be found three men who were not rascals; and in
Genoa and Romagna people went about pretending to be men, but in reality
were bodies inhabited by devils, their souls having gone to the 'lowest
pit of hell' to join the betrayers of their friends and kinsmen. " [30]

So much for his beloved countrymen. As for foreigners, particularly
kings, "Edward the First of England, and Robert of Scotland, were a
couple of grasping fools; the Emperor Albert was an usurper; Alphonso
the Second, of Spain, a debauchee; the King of Bohemia a coward;
Frederick of Arragon a coward and miser; the Kings of Portugal and
Norway forgers; the King of Naples a man whose virtues were expressed
by a unit, and his vices by a million; and the King of France, the
descendant of a Paris butcher, and of progenitors who poisoned St.
Thomas Aquinas, their descendants conquering with the arms of Judas
rather than of soldiers, and selling the flesh of their daughters to old
men, in order to extricate themselves from a danger. " [31]

When we add to these invectives, damnations of friends as well as foes,
of companions, lawyers, men of letters, princes, philosophers, popes,
pagans, innocent people as well as guilty, fools and wise, capable and
incapable, men, women, and children,--it is really no better than a kind
of diabolical sublimation of Lord Thurlow's anathemas in the _Rolliad_,
which begins with

"Damnation seize ye all;"

and ends with

"Damn them beyond what mortal tongue can tell,
Confound, sink, plunge them all to deepest blackest hell. " [32]

In the gross, indeed, this is ridiculous enough.

No burlesque can beat it. But in the particular, one is astonished and
saddened at the cruelties in which the poet allows his imagination to
riot horrors generally described with too intense a verisimilitude not
to excite our admiration, with too astounding a perseverance not to
amaze our humanity, and sometimes with an amount of positive joy
and delight that makes us ready to shut the book with disgust and
indignation. Thus, in a circle in hell, where traitors are stuck up
to their chins in ice (canto xxxii. ), the visitor, in walking about,
happens to give one of their faces a kick; the sufferer weeps, and
then curses him--with such infernal truth does the writer combine the
malignant with the pathetic! Dante replies to the curse by asking the
man his name. He is refused it. He then seizes the miserable wretch
by the hair, in order to force him to the disclosure; and Virgil is
represented as commending the barbarity! [33] But he does worse. To
barbarity he adds treachery of his own. He tells another poor wretch,
whose face is iced up with his tears, as if he had worn a crystal vizor,
that if he will disclose his name and offence, he will relieve his eyes
awhile, _that he may weep_. The man does so; and the ferocious poet
then refuses to perform his promise, adding mockery to falsehood, and
observing that ill manners are the only courtesy proper to wards such
a fellow! [34] It has been conjectured, that Macchiavelli apparently
encouraged the enormities of the princes of his time, with a design to
expose them to indignation. It might have been thought of Dante, if he
had not taken a part in the cruelty, that he detailed the horrors of his
hell out of a wish to disgust the world with its frightful notions of
God. This is certainly the effect of the worst part of his descriptions
in an age like the present. Black burning gulfs, full of outcries
and blasphemy, feet red-hot with fire, men eternally eating their
fellow-creatures, frozen wretches malignantly dashing their iced heads
against one another, other adversaries mutually exchanging shapes by
force of an attraction at once irresistible and loathing, and spitting
with hate and disgust when it is done--Enough, enough, for God's sake!
Take the disgust out of one's senses, O flower of true Christian wisdom
and charity, now beginning to fill the air with fragrance!

But it will be said that Dante did all this out of his hate of cruelty
itself, and of treachery itself. Partly no doubt he did; and entirely he
thought he did. But see how the notions of such retribution react upon
the judge, and produce in him the bad passions he punishes. It is true
the punishments are imaginary. Were a human being actually to see such
things, he must be dehumanised or he would cry out against them with
horror and detestation. But the poem draws them as truths; the writer's
creed threatened them; he himself contributed to maintain the belief;
and however we may suppose such a belief to have had its use in giving
alarm to ruffian passions and barbarously ignorant times, an age arrives
when a beneficent Providence permits itself to be better understood, and
dissipates the superfluous horror.

Many, indeed, of the absurdities of Dante's poem are too obvious
now-a-days to need remark. Even the composition of the poem,
egotistically said to be faultless by such critics as Alfieri, who
thought they resembled him, partakes, as every body's style does, of the
faults as well as good qualities of the man. It is nervous, concise,
full almost as it can hold, picturesque, mighty, primeval; but it is
often obscure, often harsh, and forced in its constructions, defective
in melody, and wilful and superfluous in the rhyme. Sometimes, also,
the writer is inconsistent in circumstance (probably from not having
corrected the poem); and he is not above being filthy. Even in the
episode of Paulo and Francesca, which has so often been pronounced
faultless, and which is unquestionably one of the most beautiful
pieces of writing in the world, some of these faults are observable,
particularly in the obscurity of the passage about _tolta forma_, the
cessation of the incessant tempest, and the non-adjuration of the two
lovers in the manner that Virgil prescribes.

But truly it is said, that when Dante is great, nobody surpasses him. I
doubt if anybody equals him, as to the constant intensity and incessant
variety of his pictures; and whatever he paints, he throws, as it were,
upon its own powers; as though an artist should draw figures that
started into life, and proceeded to action for themselves, frightening
their creator. Every motion, word, and look of these creatures becomes
full of sensibility and suggestions. The invisible is at the back of the
visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence describes a character, nay,
forms the most striking part of a story; a word acts as a flash of
lightning, which displays some gloomy neighbourhood, where a tower is
standing, with dreadful faces at the window; or where, at your feet,
full of eternal voices, one abyss is beheld dropping out of another in
the lurid light of torment. In the present volume a story will be found
which tells a long tragedy in half-a-dozen lines. Dante has the
minute probabilities of a Defoe in the midst of the loftiest and most
generalising poetry; and this feeling of matter-of-fact is impressed by
fictions the most improbable, nay, the most ridiculous and revolting.
You laugh at the absurdity; you are shocked at the detestable cruelty;
yet, for the moment, the thing almost seems as if it must be true. You
feel as you do in a dream, and after it;--you wake and laugh, but the
absurdity seemed true at the time; and while you laugh you shudder.

Enough of this crueller part of his genius has been exhibited; but it is
seldom you can have the genius without sadness. In the circle of hell,
soothsayers walk along weeping, with their faces turned the wrong way,
so that their tears fall between their shoulders. The picture is still
more dreadful. Warton thinks it ridiculous. But I cannot help feeling
with the poet, that it is dreadfully pathetic. It is the last mortifying
insult to human pretension. Warton, who has a grudge against Dante
natural to a man of happier piety, thinks him ridiculous also in
describing the monster Geryon lying upon the edge of one of the gulfs
of hell "like a beaver" (canto xvii. ). He is of opinion that the writer
only does it to shew his knowledge of natural history. But surely the
idea of so strange and awful a creature (a huge mild-faced man ending in
a dragon's body) lying familiarly on the edge of the gulf, as a beaver
does by the water, combines the supernatural with the familiar in a very
impressive manner. It is this combination of extremes which is the life
and soul of the whole poem; you have this world in the next; the same
persons, passions, remembrances, intensified by superhuman despairs
or beatitudes; the speechless entrancements of bliss, the purgatorial
trials of hope and patience; the supports of hate and anger (such as
they are) in hell itself; nay, of loving despairs, and a self-pity made
unboundedly pathetic by endless suffering. Hence there it no love-story
so affecting as that of Paulo and Francesca thus told and perpetuated in
another world; no father's misery so enforced upon us as Ugolino's, who,
for hundreds of years, has not grown tired of the revenge to which it
wrought him. Dante even puts this weight and continuity of feeling into
passages of mere transient emotion or illustration, unconnected with the
next world; as in the famous instance of the verses about evening, and
many others which the reader will meet with in this volume. Indeed, if
pathos and the most impressive simplicity, and graceful beauty of all
kinds, and abundant grandeur, can pay (as the reader, I believe, will
think it does even in a prose abstract), for the pangs of moral discord
and absurdity inflicted by the perusal of Dante's poem, it may challenge
competition with any in point of interest. His Heaven, it is true,
though containing both sublime and lovely passages, is not so good as
his Earth. The more unearthly he tried to make it, the less heavenly
it became.
When he is content with earth in heaven itself,-when he
literalises a metaphor, and with exquisite felicity finds himself
_arrived there_ in consequence of fixing his eyes on the eyes of
Beatrice, then he is most celestial. But his endeavours to express
degrees of beatitude and holiness by varieties of flame and light,--of
dancing lights, revolving lights, lights of smiles, of stars, of starry
crosses, of didactic letters and sentences, of animal figures made up of
stars full of blessed souls, with saints _forming an eagle's beak_ and
David in its _eye! _--such superhuman attempts become for the most part
tricks of theatrical machinery, on which we gaze with little curiosity
and no respect.

His angels, however, are another matter. Belief was prepared for those
winged human forms, and they furnished him with some of his most
beautiful combinations of the natural with the supernatural. Ginguéné
has remarked the singular variety as well as beauty of Dante's angels.
Milton's, indeed, are commonplace in the comparison. In the eighth canto
of the _Inferno_, the devils insolently refuse the poet and his guide an
entrance into the city of Dis:--an angel comes sweeping over the Stygian
lake to enforce it; the noise of his wings makes the shores tremble, and
is like a crashing whirlwind such as beats down the trees and sends the
peasants and their herds flying before it. The heavenly messenger, after
rebuking the devils, touches the portals of the city with his wand; they
fly open; and he returns the way he came without uttering a word to the
two companions. His face was that of one occupied with other thoughts.
This angel is announced by a tempest. Another, who brings the souls of
the departed to Purgatory, is first discovered at a distance, gradually
disclosing white splendours, which are his wings and garments. He comes
in a boat, of which his wings are the sails; and as he approaches, it is
impossible to look him in the face for its brightness. Two other angels
have green wings and green garments, and the drapery is kept in motion
like a flag by the vehement action of the wings. A fifth has a face like
the morning star, casting forth quivering beams. A sixth is of a lustre
so oppressive, that the poet feels a weight on his eyes before he knows
what is coming. Another's presence affects the senses like the fragrance
of a May-morning; and another is in garments dark as cinders, but has
a sword in his hand too sparkling to be gazed at. Dante's occasional
pictures of the beauties of external nature are worthy of these angelic
creations, and to the last degree fresh and lovely. You long to bathe
your eyes, smarting with the fumes of hell, in his dews. You gaze
enchanted on his green fields and his celestial blue skies, the more so
from the pain and sorrow in midst of which the visions are created.

Dante's grandeur of every kind is proportionate to that of his angels,
almost to his ferocity; and that is saying every thing. It is not
always the spiritual grandeur of Milton, the subjection of the material
impression to the moral; but it is equally such when he chooses, and
far more abundant. His infernal precipices--his black whirlwinds--his
innumerable cries and claspings of hands--his very odours of huge
loathsomeness--his giants at twilight standing up to the middle in pits,
like towers, and causing earthquakes when they move--his earthquake of
the mountain in Purgatory, when a spirit is set free for heaven--his
dignified Mantuan Sordello, silently regarding him and his guide as they
go by, "like a lion on his watch"--his blasphemer, Capaneus, lying in
unconquered rage and sullenness under an eternal rain of flakes of fire
(human precursor of Milton's Satan)--his aspect of Paradise, "as if the
universe had smiled"--his inhabitants of the whole planet Saturn crying
out _so loud_, in accordance with the anti-papal indignation of Saint
Pietro Damiano, that the poet, though among them, _could not hear what
they said_--and the blushing eclipse, like red clouds at sunset, which
takes place at the apostle Peter's denunciation of the sanguinary filth
of the court of Rome--all these sublimities, and many more, make us not
know whether to be more astonished at the greatness of the poet or the
raging littleness of the man. Grievous is it to be forced to bring two
such opposites together; and I wish, for the honour and glory of poetry,
I did not feel compelled to do so. But the swarthy Florentine had not
the healthy temperament of his brethren, and he fell upon evil times.
Compared with Homer and Shakspeare, his very intensity seems only
superior to theirs from an excess of the morbid; and he is inferior to
both in other sovereign qualities of poetry--to the one, in giving you
the healthiest general impression of nature itself--to Shakspeare, in
boundless universality--to most great poets, in thorough harmony and
delightfulness. He wanted (generally speaking) the music of a happy and
a happy-making disposition. Homer, from his large vital bosom, breathes
like a broad fresh air over the world, amidst alternate storm and
sunshine, making you aware that there is rough work to be faced, but
also activity and beauty to be enjoyed. The feeling of health and
strength is predominant. Life laughs at death itself, or meets it with
a noble confidence--is not taught to dread it as a malignant goblin.
Shakspeare has all the smiles as well as tears of nature, and discerns
the "soul of goodness in things evil. " He is comedy as well as
tragedy--the entire man in all his qualities, moods, and experiences;
and he beautifies all. And both those truly divine poets make nature
their subject through her own inspiriting medium--not through
the darkened glass of one man's spleen and resentment. Dante, in
constituting himself the hero of his poem, not only renders her, in the
general impression, as dreary as himself, in spite of the occasional
beautiful pictures he draws of her, but narrows her very immensity into
his pettiness. He fancied, alas, that he could build her universe over
again out of the politics of old Rome and the divinity of the schools!

Dante, besides his great poem, and a few Latin eclogues of no great
value, wrote lyrics full of Platonical sentiment, some of which
anticipated the loveliest of Petrarch's; and he was the author of
various prose works, political and philosophical, all more or less
masterly for the time in which he lived, and all coadjutors of his
poetry in fixing his native tongue. His account of his Early Life (the
_Vita Nuova_) is a most engaging history of a boyish passion, evidently
as real and true on his own side as love and truth can be, whatever
might be its mistake as to its object. The treatise on the Vernacular
Tongue (_de Vulgari Eloquio_) shews how critically he considered his
materials for impressing the world, and what a reader he was of every
production of his contemporaries. The Banquet (_Convito_) is but an
abstruse commentary on some of his minor poems; but the book on Monarchy
(_de Monarchia_) is a compound of ability and absurdity, in which his
great genius is fairly overborne by the barbarous pedantry of the age.
It is an argument to prove that the world must all be governed by one
man; that this one man must be the successor of the Roman Emperor--God
having manifestly designed the world to be subject for ever to the Roman
empire; and lastly, that this Emperor is equally designed by God to be
independent of the Pope--spiritually subject to him, indeed, but so far
only as a good son is subject to the religious advice of his father;
and thus making Church and State happy for ever in the two divided
supremacies. And all this assumption of the obsolete and impossible the
author gravely proves in all the forms of logic, by arguments drawn from
the history of Æneas, and the providential cackle of the Roman geese!

How can the patriots of modern Italy, justified as they are in extolling
the poet to the skies, see him plunge into such depths of bigotry in his
verse and childishness in his prose, and consent to perplex the friends
of advancement with making a type of their success out of so erring
though so great a man? Such slavishness, even to such greatness, is a
poor and unpromising thing, compared with an altogether unprejudiced
and forward-looking self-reliance. To have no faith in names has been
announced as one of their principles; and "God and Humanity" is their
motto. What, therefore, has Dante's name to do with their principles? or
what have the semi-barbarisms of the thirteenth century to do with the
final triumph of "God and Humanity? " Dante's lauded wish for that union
of the Italian States, which his fame has led them so fondly to identify
with their own, was but a portion of his greater and prouder wish to see
the whole world at the feet of his boasted ancestress, Rome. Not,
of course, that he had no view to what he considered good and just
government (for what sane despot purposes to rule without that? ); but
his good and just government was always to be founded on the _sine qua
non_ principle of universal Italian domination. [35]

All that Dante said or did has its interest for us in spite of his
errors, because he was an earnest and suffering man and a great genius;
but his fame must ever continue to lie where his greatest blame does,
in his principal work. He was a gratuitous logician, a preposterous
politician, a cruel theologian; but his wonderful imagination, and
(considering the bitterness that was in him) still more wonderful
sweetness, have gone into the hearts of his fellow-creatures, and will
remain there in spite of the moral and religious absurdities with which
they are mingled, and of the inability which the best-natured readers
feel to associate his entire memory, as a poet, with their usual
personal delight in a poet and his name.


[Footnote 1: As notices of Dante's life have often been little but
repetitions of former ones, I think it due to the painstaking character
of this volume to state, that besides consulting various commentators
and critics, from Boccaccio to Fraticelli and others, I have diligently
perused the _Vita di Dante_, by Cesare Balbo, with Rocco's annotations;
the _Histoire Littéraire d'Italie,_ by Ginguéné; the _Discorso sul Testo
della Commedia_, by Foscolo; the _Amori e Rime di Dante_ of Arrivabene;
the _Veltro Allegorico di Dante_, by Troja; and Ozanam's _Dante et la
Philosophie Catholique an Treixième Siècle. _]

[Footnote 2: Canto xv. 88. ]

[Footnote 3: For the doubt apparently implied respecting the district,
see canto xvi. 43, or the summary of it in the present volume. The
following is the passage alluded to in the philosophical treatise
"Risponder si vorrebbe, non colle parole, ma col coltello, a tanta
bestialità. " _Convito,--Opere Minori_, 12mo, Fir. 1834, vol. II. p. 432.
"Beautiful mode" (says Perticeri in a note) "of settling questions. "]

[Footnote 4: _Istorie Fiorentine, II_. 43 (in _Tutte le Opere_, 4to,
1550). ]

[Footnote 5: The name has been varied into _Allagheri_, _Aligieri_,
_Alleghieri_, _Alligheri_, _Aligeri_, with the accent generally on the
third, but sometimes on the second syllable. See Foscolo, _Discorso sul
Testo, p_. 432. He says, that in Verona, where descendants of the poet
survive, they call it _Alìgeri_. But names, like other words, often
wander so far from their source, that it is impossible to ascertain it.
Who would suppose that _Pomfret_ came from _Pontefract_, or _wig_ from
_parrucca_? Coats of arms, unless in very special instances, prove
nothing but the whims of the heralds.

Those who like to hear of anything in connexion with Dante or his
name, may find something to stir their fancies in the following grim
significations of the word in the dictionaries:

"_Dante_, a kind of great wild beast in Africa, that hath a very hard
skin. "--_Florio's Dictionary_, edited by Torreggiano.

"_Dante_, an animal called otherwise the Great Beast. "--_Vocabolario
della Crusca, Compendiato_, Ven. 1729. ]

[Footnote 6: See the passage in "Hell," where Virgil, to express his
enthusiastic approbation of the scorn and cruelty which Dante chews to
one of the condemned, embraces and kisses him for a right "disdainful
soul," and blesses the "mother that bore him. "]

[Footnote 7: _Opere minori_, vol iii 12. Flor. 1839, pp. 292 &c. ]

[Footnote 8: "Béatrix quitta la terre dans tout l'éclat de la jeunesse
et de la virginité. " See the work as above entitled, Paris, 1840, p. 60.
The words in Latin, as quoted from the will by the critic alluded to in
the _Foreign Quarterly Review_ (No. _ 65, art. _Dante Allighieri_), are,
"Bici filiæ suæ et uxori D. (Domini) Simonis de Bardis. " "Bici" is
the Latin dative case of Bice, the abbreviation of Beatrice. This
employment, by the way, of an abbreviated name in a will, may seem to
go counter to the deductions respecting the name of Dante. And it
may really do so. Yet a will is not an epitaph, nor the address of a
beatified spirit; neither is equal familiarity perhaps implied, as a
matter of course, in the abbreviated names of male and female. ]

[Footnote 9: _Vita Nuova_. ut sup. p. 343]

[Footnote 10: _Vita Nuova_, p. 345. ]

[Footnote 11: In the article on _Dante, in_ the _Foreign Quarterly
Review_, (ut supra), the exordium of which made me hope that the
eloquent and assumption-denouncing writer was going to supply a good
final account of his author, equally satisfactory for its feeling
and its facts, but which ended in little better than the customary
gratuitousness of wholesale panegyric, I was surprised to find the
union with Gemma Donati characterised as "calm and cold,--rather the
accomplishment of a social duty than the result of an irresistible
impulse of the heart," p. 15. The accomplishment of the "social duty" is
an assumption, not very probable with regard to any body, and much less
so in a fiery Italian of twenty-six; but the addition of the epithets,
"calm and cold," gives it a sort of horror. A reader of this article,
evidently the production of a man of ability but of great wilfulness, is
tempted to express the disappointment it has given him in plainer terms
than might be wished, in consequence of the extraordinary license which
its writer does not scruple to allow to his own fancies, in expressing
his opinion of what he is pleased to think the fancies of others. ]

[Footnote 12: "Le invettive contr' essa per tanti secoli originarono
dalla enumerazione rettorica del Boccaccio di tutti gli inconvenienti
del matrimonio, e dove per altro ei dichiara,--'Certo io non affermo
queste cose a Dante essere avvenute, che non lo so; comechè vero sia,
che o a simili cose a queste, o ad altro che ne fusse cagione, egli una
volta da lei partitosi, che per consolazione de' suoi affanni gli era
stata data, mai nè dove ella fusse volle venire, nè sofferse che dove
egli fusse ella venisse giammai, con tutto che di più figliuoli egli
insieme con lei fusse parente. " _Discorso sul Testo_, ut sup. Londra,
Pickering, 1825, p. 184. ]

[Footnote 13: Foscolo, in the _Edinburgh review_, vol. xxx. p. 351. ]

[Footnote 14: "Ahi piaciuto fosse al Dispensatore dell'universo, che la
cagione della mia scusa mai non fosse stata; che nè altri contro a me
avria fallato, nè io sofferto avrei pena ingiustamente; pena, dico,
d'esilio e di povertà. Poichè fu piacere de' cittadini della bellissima
e famosissima figlia di Roma, Florenza, di gettarmi fuori del suo
dolcissimo seno (nel quale nato e nudrito fui sino al colmo della mia
vita, e nel quale, con buona pace di quella, desidero con tutto il core
di riposare l'animo stanco, e terminare il tempo che m'è dato); per le
parti quasi tutte, alle quali questa lingua si stende, peregrino, quasi
mendicando, sono andato, mostrando contro a mia voglia la piaga della
fortuna, che suole ingiustamente al piagato molte volte essere imputata.
Veramente io sono stato legno sanza vela e sanza governo, portato a
diversi porti e foci e liti dal vento secco che vapora la dolorosa
povertà; e sono vile apparito agli occhi a molti, che forse per alcuna
fama in altra forma mi aveano immaginato; nel cospetto de' quali non
solamente mia persona inviliò, ma di minor pregio si fece ogni opera, si
già fatta, come quella che fosse a fare. "-_Opere Minori_, ut sup. vol.
ii. p. 20. ]

[Footnote 15: "In licteris vestris et reverentia debita et affectione
receptis, quam repatriatio mea cure sit vobis ex animo grata mente ac
diligenti animaversione concepi, etenim tanto me districtius obligastis,
quanto rarius exules invenire amicos contingit. ad illam vero
significata respondeo: et si non eatenus qualiter forsam pusillanimitas
appeteret aliquorum, ut sub examine vestri consilii ante judicium,
affectuose deposco. ecce igitur quod per licteras vestri mei: que
nepotis, necnon aliorum quamplurium amicorum significatum est mihi. per
ordinamentum nuper factum Florentie super absolutione bannitorum. quod
si solvere vellem certam pecunie quantitatem, vellemque pati notam
oblationis et absolvi possem et redire ut presens. in quo quidem duo
ridenda et male perconciliata sunt. Pater, dico male perconciliata per
illos qui tali expresserunt: nam vestre litere discretius et consultius
clausulate nicil de talibus continebant. estne ista revocatio gloriosa
qua d. all. (i. e. _Dantes Alligherius_) revocatur ad patriam per
trilustrium fere perpessus exilium? becne meruit conscientia manifesta
quibuslibet? hec sudor et labor continuatus in studiis? absit a viro
philosophie domestica temeraria terreni cordis humilitas, ut more
cujusdam cioli et aliorum infamiam quasi vinctus ipse se patiatur
offerri. absit a viro predicante justitiam, ut perpessus injuriam
inferentibus. velud benemerentibus, pecuniam suam solvat. non est hec
via redeundi ad patriam, Pater mi, sed si alia per vos, aut deinde per
alios invenietur que fame d. _(Dantis)_ que onori non deroget, illam non
lentis passibus acceptabo. quod si per nullam talem Florentia introitur,
nunquam Florentiam introibo. quidni? nonne solis astrorumque specula
ubique conspiciam? nonne dulcissimas veritates potero speculari ubique
sub celo, ni prius inglorium, imo ignominiosum populo, Florentineque
civitati am reddam? quippe panis non deficiet. "]


[Footnote 16: _Opere minori_, ut sup. vol iii. p. 186. ]

[Footnote 17: _Veltro Allegorico di Dante_, ut sup. p. 208, where the
Appendix contains the Latin original. ]

[Footnote 18: See Fraticelli's Dissertation on the Convito, in _Opere
Minori_, ut sup. vol. ii. p. 560. ]

[Footnote 19: _Discorso sul Testo_, p. 54. ]

[Footnote 20: _Balbo_. Naples edition, p. 132. ]

[Footnote 21: "Di se stesso presunse maravigliosamente tanto, che
essendo egli glorioso nel colmo del reggimento della republica, e
ragionandosi trà maggiori cittadini di mandare, per alcuna gran bisogna,
ambasciata a Bonifazio Papa VIII. , e che principe della ambasciata fosse
Dante, ed egli in ciò in presenzia di tutti quegli che ciò consigliavano
richiesto, avvenne, che soprastando egli alla risposta, alcun disse, che
pensi? alle quali parole egli rispose: penso, se io vo, chi rimane; e
s'io rimango, chi va: quasi esso solo fosse colui che tra tutti valesse
e per cui tutti gli altri valessero. " And he goes on to say respecting
the stone-throwing--"Appresso, come che il nostro poeta nelle sua
avversità paziente o no si fosse, in una fu impazientissimo: ed egli
infino al cominciamento del suo esilio stato guelfissimo, non essendogli
aperta la via del ritornare in casa sua, si fuor di modo diventò
ghibellino, che ogni femminella, ogni picciol fanciullo, e quante
volte avesse voluto, ragionando di parte, e la guelfa proponendo alla
ghibellino, l'avrebbe non solamente fatto turbare, ma a tanta insania
commosso, che se taciuto non fosse, a gittar le pietre l'avrebbe
condotto. " (_Vita di Dante_, prefixed to the Paris edition of the
Commedia, 1844, p. XXV. ) And then the "buon Boccaccio," with his
accustomed sweetness of nature, begs pardon of so great a man, for being
obliged to relate such things of him, and doubts whether his spirit may
not be looking down on him that moment _disdainfully_ from _heaven_!
Such an association of ideas had Dante produced between the celestial
and the scornful! ]

[Footnote 22: _Novelle di Franco Sacchetti_, Milan edition, 1804, vol.
ii. p. 148. It forms the setting, or frame-work, of an inferior story,
and is not mentioned in the heading. ]

[Footnote 23: _The Vision; or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, of Dante
Alighieri, &c. _ Smith's edition, 1844, p. 90. ]

[Footnote 24: _Discorso sul Testo_, pp. 64, 77-90, 335-338. ]

[Footnote 25: _Purgatorio_, canto III. 118, 138; referred to by Foscolo,
in the _Discorso sul Testo_, p. 383. ]

[Footnote 26: Warton's _History of English Poetry_, edition of 1840,
vol. iii. p. 214. ]

[Footnote 27: _Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott_, Bart. vol. ii.
p. 122. ]

[Footnote 28: _Pentameron and Pentalogia_, pp. 44-50. ]

[Footnote 29: _Discorso sul Testo_, p. 226. The whole passage (sect.
cx. ) is very eloquent, horrible, and _self-betraying_. ]

[Footnote 30: _Discorso_, as above, p. 101. ]

[Footnote 31: _Discorso_, p. 103. ]

[Footnote 32: _Criticisms on the Rolliad, and Probationary Odes for the_
_Laureateship_.