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Title: Dante's Realistic Treatment Of The Ideal
Author: Alfred Austin [
More Titles by Austin]
READ AT THE TWENTIETH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE DANTE SOCIETY ON JUNE 13, 1900.
To discourse of Dante, concerning whom, ever since Boccaccio lectured on the Divina Commedia in the Duomo of Florence, more than five hundred years ago, there has been an unbroken procession of loving commentators, must always be a difficult undertaking; and the difficulty is increased when the audience addressed, as I believe is the case this evening, is composed, for the most part, of serious students of the austere Florentine. The only claim I can have on your attention is that I am, in that respect at least, in a more or less degree, one of yourselves. It is now close on forty years since, in Rome, as Rome then was, one repaired, day after day, to the Baths of Caracalla--not, as now, denuded of the sylvan growth of successive centuries, but cloaked, from shattered base to ruined summit, in tangled greenery--and in the silent sunshine of an Imperial Past surrendered oneself to
quella fonte
Che spande di parlar sì largo fiume,
that unfailing stream of spacious speech which Dante, you remember, ascribes to Virgil, which Dante equally shares with him, and to each alike of whom one can sincerely say:
Vagliami il lungo studio e il grande amore,
Che m'han fatto cercar lo tuo volume.
But love and study of Dante will not of themselves suffice to make discourse concerning him interesting or adequate; and I am deeply impressed with the disadvantages under which I labour this evening. But my task has been made even exceptionally perilous, since it has been preceded by the entrancing influence of music, and music that borrowed an added charm from the melodious words of the poet himself. May it not be with you as it was with him when the musician Casella--"Casella mio"--acceded to his request in the Purgatorial Realm, and sang to him, he says,
sì dolcemente,
Che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona--
sang to him so sweetly that the sweetness of it still sounded in his ears; words that strangely recall the couplet in Wordsworth, though I scarcely think Wordsworth was a Dante scholar:
The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more.
Many of you remember, I am sure, the entire passage in the second canto of the Purgatorio. But, since there may be some who have forgotten it--and the best passages in the Divina Commedia can never be recalled too often--and since, moreover, it will serve as a fitting introduction to the theme on which I propose for a brief while to descant this evening, let me recall it to your remembrance. Companioned by Virgil, and newly arrived on the shores of Purgatory, Dante perceives a barque approaching, so swift and light that it causes no ripple on the water, driven and steered only by the wings of an Angel of the Lord, and carrying a hundred disembodied spirits, singing "In exitu Israel de Ægypto." As they disembark, one of them recognises Dante, and stretches out his arms to embrace the Poet. The passage is too beautiful to be shorn of its loveliness either by curtailment or by mere translation:
Io vidi uno di lor trarresi avante
Per abbracciarmi con sì grande affetto,
Che mosse me a far lo somigliante.
O ombre vane, fuor che nell' aspetto!
Tre volte dietro a lei le mani avvinsi,
E tante mi tornai con esse al petto.
Among them was there one who forward pressed,
So keen to fold me to his heart, that I
Instinctively was moved to do the like.
O shades intangible, save in your seeming!
Toward him did I thrice outstretch my arms,
And thrice they fell back empty to my side.[1]
Footnote:
[1] The renderings into English verse from Dante are by the author of the paper.
Words that will recall to many of you the lines in the second book of the _Æneid, where Æneas describes to Dido how the phantom of his perished wife appeared to him as he was seeking for her through the flames and smoke of Troy, and how in vain he strove to fold her in one farewell embrace.
Ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum,
Ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago.
Similarly, the incorporeal figure in the Divine Comedy bids Dante desist from the attempt to embrace him, since it is useless; and then Dante discerns it is that of Casella, who used oftentimes in Florence to sing to him, and now assures the poet that, as he loved him upon earth, so here he loves him still. Encouraged by the tender words, Dante calls him "Casella mio," and addresses to him the following request:
Se nuova legge non ti toglie
Memoria o uso all' amoroso canto,
Che mi solea quetar tutte mie voglie,
Di ciò ti piaccia consolare alquanto
L'anima mia, che con la sua persona
Venendo qui, è affannata tanto.
If by new dispensation not deprived
Of the remembrance of belovëd song
Wherewith you used to soothe my restlessness,
I pray you now a little while assuage
My spirit, which, since burdened with the body
In journeying here, is wearied utterly.
Quickly comes the melodious response:
"Amor che nella mente mi ragiona,"
Cominciò egli allor sì dolcemente,
Che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona.
Lo mio Maestro, ed io, e quella gente
Ch'eran con lui, parevan sì contenti,
Com'a nessun toccasse altro la mente.
"Love that holds high discourse within mind,"
With such sweet tenderness he thus began
That still the sweetness lingers in my ear.
Virgil, and I, and that uncarnal group
That with him were, so captivated seemed,
That in our hearts was room for naught beside.
Not so, however, the guide of the spirits newly arrived in Purgatory. Seeing them "fissi ed attenti alle sue note," enthralled by Casella's singing, he begins to rate them soundly as "spiriti lenti," lazy, loitering spirits, asks them what they mean by thus halting on the way, and bids them hasten to the spot where they will be gradually purged of their earthly offences, and be admitted to the face of God. The canto closes with the following exquisite lines:
Come quando, cogliendo biada o loglio,
Gli colombi adunati alla pastura,
Queti, senza mostrar l'usato orgoglio,
Se cosa appare ond' elli abbian paura,
Subitamente lasciano star l'esca,
Perchè assaliti son da maggior cura;
Così vid'io quella masnada fresca
Lasciar il canto, e fuggir ver la costa,
Com'uom che va, nè sa dove riesca.
As when a flight of doves, in quest of food,
Have settled on a field of wheat or tares,
And there still feed in silent quietude,
If by some apparition that they dread
A sudden scared, forthway desert the meal,
Since by more strong anxiety assailed,
So saw I that new-landed company
Forsake the song and seek the mountain side,
Like one who flees, but flies he knows not whither.
Now, if we consider this episode in its integrity, do we not find ourselves, from first to last, essentially in the region of the Ideal? Whether you believe in the existence of a local habitation named Purgatory, or you do not, none of us, not even Dante himself, has seen it, save with the mind's eye. It was said of his austere countenance by his contemporaries that it was the face of the man who had seen Hell. But the phrase, after all, was figurative, and not even the divine poet had, with the bodily vision, seen what Virgil, in one of the most pathetic of his lines, calls the further ashore. Moreover, for awhile, and in what may be termed the exordium of the episode, Dante surrenders himself wholly to this Ideal, and treats it idealistically. First he discerns only two wings of pure white light, which, when he has grown more accustomed to their brightness, he perceives to be the Angel of the Lord, the steersman of the purgatorial bark:
Vedi che sdegna gli argomenti umani,
Sì che remo non vuol, nè altro velo
Che l'ale sue, tra liti sì lontani
* * * * *
Trattando l'aere con l'eterne penne--
lines that for ethereal beauty, are, I think unmatched; and I will not presume to render them into verse. But what they say is that the Angel had no need of mortal expedients, of sail, or oar, or anything beside, save his own wings, that fanned the air with their eternal breath. The barque, thus driven and thus steered, is equally unsubstantial and ideal, for it makes no ripple in the wave through which it glides. But at length--not, you may be quite sure, of purpose prepense, but guided by that unerring instinct which is the great poet's supreme gift--Dante gradually passes from idealistic to realistic treatment of the episode, thereby compelling you, by what Shakespeare, in The Tempest, through the mouth of Prospero, calls "my so potent art," to believe implicitly in its occurrence, even if your incapacity to linger too long in the rarefied atmosphere of the Ideal has begun to render you incredulous concerning it. For all at once he introduces Casella, Florence, his own past cares and labours there, the weariness of the spirit that comes over all of us, even from our very spiritual efforts, and the soothing power of tender music. Then, with a passing touch of happy egotism, which has such a charm for us in poets that are dead, but which, I am told, is resented, though perhaps not by the gracious or the wise, in living ones, Dante enforces our belief by representing Casella as forthwith chanting a line of the poet's own that occurs in a Canzone of the Convito:
Amor che nella mente mi ragiona. Love that holds high discourse within my mind.
For a moment we seem to be again transported into the pure realm of the Ideal, as not Dante and Virgil alone, but the souls just landed on the shores of Purgatory, are described as being so enthralled by the song--
tutti fissi ed attenti--that they can think of and heed nothing else. But quickly comes another realistic touch in the reproof to the spellbound spirits not there to loiter listening to the strain, but to hurry forward to their destined bourne. Finally, as if to confirm the impression of absolute reality, while not removing us from the world, or withdrawing from us the charm, of the Ideal, the poet ends with the exquisite but familiar simile of the startled doves already recited to you.
What is the impression left, what the result produced, by the entire canto? Surely it is that the poet's imagination, operating through the poet's realistic treatment of the Ideal, and his idealistic treatment of the Real, has taken us all captive, so that we feel nothing of the Incredulus odi disposition, the unwillingness to believe, and the mental antipathy engendered by that unwillingness, so tersely and so truly described by Horace, but yield credence wholly and absolutely to the existence of a place called Purgatory, with its circles, its denizens, its hopes, its aspirations, and purifying power. But, read where you will in the pages of the Divina Commedia, you will find this is one of the main causes of its permanent hold on the attention of the world. Its theology may to many seem open to question, to some obsolete and out of date; its astronomy necessarily labours under the disadvantage of having been prior to the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, not to speak of the great astronomers of later date, including our own times; and its erudition, weighty and wonderful as it is, can occasionally be shown by more recent and more advantageously circumstanced scholarship to be faulty and inaccurate. But so long as these are presented to us nimbused by the wizard light that fuses the Real and the Ideal, we believe while we read and listen, and that is enough. The very first line of the Divina Commedia, so familiar to every one, though it is to introduce us to the horrors of the Inferno, is so realistic, so within the range of the experience of all who have reached the meridian of life or even looked on that period in others, that we are at once predisposed to yield our imagination passively to what follows. But I must allow that the passage which does immediately follow, and which discourses of the panther, the lion, and the wolf, is so symbolic, and has lent itself to so many suggestions and interpretations, that, had the poem generally been conceived and composed in that fashion, it would not only have fallen short of immortality, it would long since have been buried in the pool of Lethe, which is the predestined resting-place of all untempered and unredeemed symbolism in verse. I smile, and I have no doubt you will smile also, when I say that I, too, have my own interpretation of the inner meaning of those three menacing beasts. But be assured I have not the smallest intention of communicating it to you. I gladly pass on, gladly and quickly, as Dante himself passes on, to a more welcome and less disputable apparition, who answers, when questioned as to who and what he is, that man he is not, but man he was; that his parents were of Lombardy, and all his folk of Mantuan stock; that he lived in the age of the great Cæsar and the fortunate Augustus; that he was a poet--Poeta fui--sang of the just and right-minded son of Anchises, the pious Æneas, who came to Italy and founded a greater city even than Troy, when proud Ilium was levelled to the dust. In the presence of Virgil we forget the embarrassing symbolism of the preceding passage, and believe once more; and, when Dante addresses him in lines of affectionate awe, that you all know by heart, and with repeating which all lovers of poets and poetry console themselves when the prosaic world passes on the other side, every doubt, every misgiving, every lingering remnant of incredulity is dismissed, and we are prepared, nay, we are eager, to take the triple journey, along two-thirds of which Virgil tells Dante he has been sent by the Imperador che lassù regna, the Ruler of the Universe, to conduct him. Prepared we are, nay, eager, I say, to hear the disperate strida of the spiriti dolenti, the wailings of despair of the eternally lost, and the yearning sighs of those che son contenti nel fuoco, who are resigned to purgatorial pain, and scarce suffer from it, since they are buoyed up by the hope of finally joining the beate genti, and, along with the blessed, seeing the face of God.
Allor si mosse, ed io gli tenni dietro,
says Dante in the closing line of this, the First Canto of the
Divina Commedia.
Then moved he on, and I paced after him.
Could you have a more realistic touch? So realistic, so real is it, in the Realm of the Ideal, that, just as Dante followed Virgil, so we follow both, humble and unquestioning believers in whatever may be told us.
I am not unaware that, in an age in which the approval of inflexibly avenging justice consequent on wrongdoing is less marked and less frequent than sentimental compassion for the wrongdoer, the punishments inflicted in the Inferno for the infraction of the Divine Law, as Dante understood it, are found repellent by many persons, and agreeable to few. I grant that they are appalling in their sternness; nor was Dante himself unconscious of this, for he does describe Minos as "scowling horribly" as the souls of the damned came before him for judgment, and for discriminating consignment to their allotted circle of torture. Always terse, and therefore all the more terrible, he nevertheless exhausts the vocabulary of torment in describing the doloroso ospizio, the dolorous home from which they will never return. As Milton speaks of the "darkness visible" of Hell, so Dante, before him, writes of it as loco d'ogni luce muto, a place silent of light, but that wails and moans like a tempestuous sea, battered and buffeted by jarring winds, finally designated
La bufera infernal, che mai non resta. The infernal hurricane that ceases never.
Of those who are whirled about by it,
di qua, di là, di giù, di su, hither and thither, upward and downward, he writes the awful line:
Nulla speranza li conforta mai,
Non che di posa, ma di minor pena.
They have no hope of consolation ever,
Or even mitigation of their woe.
I could not bring myself, and I am sure you would not wish me to cite more minutely, the magnificently merciless phrases--all of them thoroughly realistic touches concerning ideal torment--wherewith Dante here makes his terza rima an instrument or organ on which to sound the very diapason of the damned; and, did he dwell overlong on those deep, distressing octaves of endless suffering, without passing by easy and natural gradations into the pathetic minor, he would end by alienating all but the austerer natures. But he is too great an artist, too human, too congenitally and rootedly a poet, to make that mistake. I am sure you all know in which canto of the Inferno occur the terrific phrases I have been citing, and need no telling that they are immediately followed by the most tender and tearful passage in the wide range of poetic literature. While even yet the sound of la bufera infernal seems howling in our ears, suddenly it all subsides, and we hear instead a musically plaintive voice saying:
Siede la terra, dove nata fui,
Sulla marina dove il Po discende,
Per aver pace co' seguaci sui.
The land where I was born sits by the sea,
Unto whose shore a restless river rolls,
To be at peace with all its followers.
Then comes the love-story of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, told in such exquisite accents, so veiled in music, so transfigured by verse, that even the sternest moralist, I imagine, can hardly bring himself to call it illicit. I confess I think it the loveliest single passage in poetry ever written; yes, lovelier even than anything in Shakespeare, for it has all Shakespeare's genius, and more than Shakespeare's art; and I compassionate the man or woman who, having had the gift of birth, goes down to the grave without having read it. There is no such other love-story, no such other example of the lacrymæ rerum, the deep abiding tearfulness of things. Nothing should be taken from, nothing can be added to it. To me it seems sacred, like the Ark of the Covenant, that no one must presume to touch; and I own I tremble as I presume, here and there, to attempt, unavailingly, to translate it. It was my good fortune to be in Florence in the month of May 1865, when the City of Flowers, the City of Dante, which then seemed peopled with nightingales and roses, was celebrating the six-hundredth anniversary of the birth of her exiled poet; and those of us who loved him assembled in the Pagliano Theatre to hear Ristori, Salvini, and Rossi repeat, to the accompaniment of living pictures, the best-known passages of the Divina Commedia. One of those supreme elocutionists, who still lives, recited the story of Paolo and Francesca; and from her gifted voice we heard of the tempo de' dolci sospiri and i dubbiosi aesiri, the season of sweet sighs and hesitating desires, the disiato riso, the longed-for smile, the trembling kiss, the closing of the volume, and then the final lines of the canto:
Mentre che l'uno spirto questo disse,
L'altro piangeva sì, che di pietade
Io venni men così com'io morisse:
E caddi, come corpo morto cade.
While the one told to us this dolorous tale,
The other wept so bitterly, that I
Out of sheer pity felt as like to die;
And down I fell, even as a dead body falls.
This unmatched tale of tender transgression and vainly penitential tears almost reconciles us to the more abstract description of punishment that precedes it, and the detailed account of pitiless penalty that follows it, in succeeding cantos; and the absolute fusion of the ideal and the real in the woeful story imparts to it a verisimilitude irresistible even by the most unimaginative and incredulous. Rimini, Ravenna, Malatesta, are names so familiar to us all that any story concerning them would have to be to the last degree improbable to move our incredulity. But who is it that is not prepared to believe in the sorrows of a love-tale?
Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.
It is the greatest of all masters of the human heart, the greatest and wisest teacher concerning human life, who tells us that; and Dante, who in this respect is to be almost as much trusted as Shakespeare himself, makes Francesca, with her truly feminine temperament, say:
Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona,
Mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
Che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona.
Love that compels all who are loved to love,
Entangled both in such abiding charm,
That, as you see, he still deserts me not.
As we hear those words, it is no longer Rimini, Ravenna, Malatesta, Paolo, Francesca, that arrest our attention and rivet it by their reality. We are enthralled by the ideal realism, or realistic idealism, call it which you will, of the larger and wider world we all inhabit, of this vast and universal theatre, of whose stage Love remains to-day, as it was yesterday, and will remain for ever, the central figure, the dominant protagonist.
So far we have seen, by illustrations purposely taken from passages in the Inferno and the Purgatorio familiar to all serious readers of the Divine Comedy, how Dante, by realistic touches, makes us believe in the ideal, and how, by never for long quitting the region of the Ideal, he reconciles us to the most accurate and merciless realism. But there is a third Realm to which he is admitted, and whither he transports us, the Paradiso. Some prosaically precise person would, perhaps, say that the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio is not a portion of the Paradiso. But you know better, for in it Beatrice appears to her poet-lover:
Sotto verde manto,
Vestita di color di fiamma viva,
In mantle green, and girt with living light,
while angelic messengers and ministers from Heaven round her scatter lilies that never fade; and when Dante, overcome by the celestial vision, turns to Virgil with the same instinctive feeling of trust
Col quale il fantolin corre alla mamma,
Quando ha paura
--trust such as is shown by a little child hurrying to its mother when afraid, and exclaims, translating a line of Virgil's own:
Conosco i segni dell' antica fiamma,
O how I know, and feel, and recognise
The indications of my youthful love;--
he finds that Virgil, dolcissimo padre, his gentle parent and guide, has left him, and he stands alone in the presence of Beatrice, and hears her voice saying:
Non pianger anco, non pianger ancora;
Chè pianger ti convien per altra spada.
Weep not as yet, Dante, weep not as yet,
Though weep you shortly shall, and for good cause.
Tearless, and with downcast eyes, he listens to her just reproaches, trying not even to see the reflection of himself in the water of the translucent fountain at his side:--
Tanta vergogna mi gravò la fronte. So strong the shame that weighed my forehead down.
And so he turns aside his glance to the untransparent sward, till comes the line, awful in its reproving simplicity:
Guardami ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice! Look at me well! Yes, I am Beatrice!
Then full and fast flow the tears, like melting snows of Apennine under Slavonian blast.
But there is yet worse to come, yet harder to bear, when, not even addressing him, but turning from him to her heavenly escort, she speaks of him as "Questi," "this man," and tells them, in his hearing, how much his love for her might have done for him, had he still lived the vita nuova, the pure fresh life with which love had inspired him while she was yet on earth. But when she was withdrawn from him to Heaven, when she was of flesh disrobed and became pure spirit, and so was more deserving of love than before.
Questi si tolse a me, e diessi altrui.
This man from me withdrew himself, and gave
Himself to others.
What think you of that as a realistic treatment of the Ideal? If there be any among my audience, members of the sex commonly supposed to be the wiser, who but partly feel and imperfectly apprehend it, then let them ask any woman they will what she thinks of it, and she will answer, "It is supreme, it is unapproachable."
After such an illustration of the power of Dante over one of the main secrets of fascination in great poetry, it is unnecessary to go in search of more. With illustrating my theme of this evening I have done, and it only remains to add a few words of repetition and enforcement of what has been already indicated, lest perchance, if they were omitted, my meaning and purpose should be misapprehended or overlooked. Did you happen to observe that, a little while back, I used the phrase, "the ideal realism, or realistic idealism, call it which you will"? But now, before concluding, let me say, what has been in my mind all along, and has been there for many years, that great poetry consists of the combination of ideal Realism, realistic Idealism, and Idealism pure and simple. Upon that point much might be said, and perhaps some day I may venture to say it. In all ages the disposition of the more prosaic minds--by which term I do not mean minds belonging to persons devoid of feeling, or even of sentiment, but persons destitute of the poetic sense, or of what Poetry essentially is--has been to incline, in works of fiction whether in prose or verse, to Realism pure and simple; and the present Age, thanks to the invention of photography and the dissemination of novels that seek to describe persons and things such as they are or are supposed to be, has a peculiar and exceptional leaning in that direction. The direction is a dangerous one, for the last stage of Realism pure and simple in prose fiction is the exhibition of demoralised man and degraded woman. In poetry, thank Heaven, that operation is impossible. No doubt, it is possible in verse just as it is possible in prose, and perhaps even more so; and there are persons who will tell you that it is Poetry. But it is not, and never can be made such. Poetry is either the idealised Real, the realistic Ideal, or the Ideal pure and simple. In other words, as I long since endeavoured to show, Poetry is Transfiguration. Attempts are made in these days, as we all well know, to get you to accept Realism pure and simple as the newest and most inspired utterance of the Heavenly Maid. But they will not be successful. In that great hall of the Vatican, whither throng pilgrims from every quarter of the world, and to whose walls Raphael has bequeathed the ripest and richest fruits of his lucid, elevated, and elevating genius, is a presentation of the Muse. She is seated on a throne of majestic marble. Her feet are planted on the clouds, but her laurelled head and outstretched wings are high in the Empyrean, and round her maiden throat is a circlet enamelled with the unageing stars. With one hand she cherishes the lyre, with the other she grasps the Book of Wisdom; and her attendants are, not the sycophants of passing popularity, but the eternal angels of God, upholding a scroll wherein are inscribed the words Numine afflatur. She sings only when inspired. That is the Muse for me. Surely it is the Muse for you. At any rate, it was the Muse of Dante; the Muse that inspired the Divina Commedia through his love for Beatrice. As an old English song has it, "'Tis love that makes the world go round," a homely truth that Dante idealised and transfigured in the last line of his immortal poem:
L'Amor che muove il Sole e l'altre stelle.
Love,
That lights the sun and makes the planets sing;
love of Love, love of Beauty, love of Virtue, love of Country, love of Mankind; or, as one might put it in this age of physical discovery:
Electric love illuminates the world.
[The end]
Alfred Austin's essay: Dante's Realistic Treatment Of The Ideal
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