Dante's Poetic Conception Of Woman

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Title:     Dante's Poetic Conception Of Woman
Author: Alfred Austin [More Titles by Austin]

The imaginative estimate or ideal conception of Woman by the Poets has always been deemed exceptionally interesting, especially by women themselves, for, as a rule, it is agreeable; and, even if the presentation be sometimes a little overcharged with glowing colour, all of us, men and women alike, are not otherwise than pleased with descriptions that portray us, not exactly as we are, but as we should like to be. Withal, a portrait, to obtain recognition, must have in it some resemblance to the original; and, speaking in the most prosaic manner, one need not hesitate to affirm that any representation of women, at least of womanly women, that was not attractive would be a travesty of the fact.

Alike in the Vita Nuova and the Divina Commedia, Beatrice Portinari figures so largely, and Dante's love for her from childhood in her tenth till her death in her twenty-sixth year is so striking that most persons think of the great Florentine Poet in association with no other women, their characters, their occupations, temptations, weaknesses, virtues, and everyday duties. Yet no man could be a Poet such as Dante who confined his ken to so limited a field of observation and feeling, and to whom the whole range of feminine emotion and action was not familiar; and, in the exposition of that theme, I would invite attention to that wider range and scope of interest, though from it Beatrice will not be forgotten. Let us turn, first of all, to the fifteenth canto of the Paradiso, where Cacciaguida, the Poet's ancestor, describes, while Beatrice looks on with assenting smile, the simplicity of Florentine manners in former times, alike in men and women, but in women especially--times dear to Dante, since they immediately preceded those in which he himself lived.

Fiorenza,

says Cacciaguida, calling the city by its original name,

Fiorenza, dentro della cerchia antica,
Si stava in pace, sobria e pudica.
Non avea catenella, non corona,
Non donne contigiate, non cintura,
Che fosse a veder più che la persona.

Florence, within her ancient boundaries
Was chaste, and sober, and in peace abode.
No golden bracelets and no head-tires then,
Transparent garments, rich embroideries,
That caught the eye more than the wearer's self.

He goes on to say that the Florentine ladies of that day left their mirror without any artificial colouring on their cheeks. Mothers themselves tended the cradle, and maidens and matrons drew off the thread from the distaff, while listening to old tales of Troy, Fiesole, and Rome. It is Dante's own description of the manners and customs of the days when he was a child.

Some, perhaps, will ask, "Surely there is nothing very poetic in the foregoing description of woman?" If so, one must reply, indeed there is, and only the acceptance of the idea of Poetry prevailing amongst us of late years, which is essentially false, because so narrow and so exclusive of the simplest poetry at one end of the scale, and of the highest poetry at the other, could make any one doubt that a really poetic and imaginative conception of woman must include the dedication, though not the entire dedication, of herself to domestic duty and tenderness.

Is there nothing poetic in Wordsworth's picture of a girl turning her wheel beside an English fire?

Is there nothing poetic in Byron's description?--

A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose hopes are innocent.

Or in Coventry Patmore's?--

So wise in all she ought to know,
So ignorant in all beside.

Is there, I venture to ask, nothing poetic, nothing romantic in the description of a young girl who blends with cultivated sensibility to Literature and Art homely tasks thus described?--

... She brims the pail,
Straining the udders with her dainty palms,
Sweet as the milk they drain. She skims the cream,
And, with her sleeves rolled up and round white arms,
Makes the churn sing like boulder-baffled stream.
A wimple on her head, and kirtled short,
She hangs the snow-white linen in the wind,
A heavenly earthliness.

In the whole range of poetic literature there is no more celebrated passage than the essentially domestic picture, in the Sixth Book of the Iliad, of Hector, Andromache, and their baby boy, where the Trojan hero, before sallying forth to battle afresh, stretches out his arms to clasp the little Astyanax. It might be pedantic to recite the passage in the original. But here is an excellent translation of it by Mr. Walter Leaf:

So spake glorious Hector, and stretched out his arms to his boy. But the child shrank back to the bosom of his fair-girdled nurse, dismayed at his dear father's aspect, and in dread at the horse-hair crest that he beheld nodding fiercely from the helmet's top. Then his dear father laughed aloud, and his lady-mother; and forthwith glorious Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it, all gleaming, upon the ground; then kissed he his dear son, and dandled him in his arms.

Surely everybody feels the poetic, the romantic character of the incident, founded on the loves of the household and the hearth. Turn to Chaucer, to Milton, to Shakespeare, to any great Poet, and you will find that, like Dante, they included simple duties in their poetic conception of woman. Only in an age sicklied o'er with lackadaisical or sensuous sentimentality could it be otherwise.

But a poet's ideals of what women should be, and often are, is shown not only by what he extols, but by what he condemns, and, in this respect, Dante, poet-like, is sparing and reserved. Most--indeed, nearly all--of the persons whom he indicates by name as being eternally punished in the Circles of the Inferno are men; partly, perhaps, because Dante, who, it must be owned, would have been loved by Doctor Johnson as a good hater, had political and other scores of the kind to settle with those he describes as having a perpetual lease in the lower regions, but in part, also, because he could not bring himself to write harshly of any woman he had known. But to a few notorious female rebels against what he deemed womanly character and conduct, and who had lived many hundred years before his day, he is pitilessly severe. It would be difficult to quote lines from any Poet more so than those in which he describes Semiramis as among those whom

Nulla speranza gli conforta mai.

She has not even hope to fall back on as a mitigation of her endless torments. Of her offences against his ideal of woman he says:

A vizio di lussuria fu si rotta,
Che libito fe lecito in sua legge,
Per torre il biasmo in che era condotta.

She was so steeped in wickedness that she promulgated laws permitting others to act as she herself did, in order to annul the stigma that would otherwise have been attached to her. He is a little hard and unjust to Dido, whom Virgil treats with such exquisite tenderness, in naming her along with "lustful Cleopatra" in the same passage. To Helen he is more indulgent, in words at least, content with saying that she was the guilty cause of dire events, "per cui tanto reo tempo si volse"; but she does not escape endless expiation. Some of my readers will remember how much more damning of her conduct is Virgil in the Sixth Book of the _Æneid, where Priam represents her as giving the signal to the Greeks to enter Troy, and having concealed his sword, that he may fall a helpless victim to the vengeance of Paris, whom the fair wanton wished to propitiate in the hour of her lord's triumph.

But what is Dante's attitude towards Francesca da Rimini, in the most beautiful passage, it seems to me, in the whole range of narrative Poetry? Many, I am sure, know it by heart, and have thereby fortified themselves against the modern less-refined treatment of it even by men aspiring to be regarded as poets. Often as one has repeated it to oneself, one has never felt that Dante had for Francesca any harsher feeling than sympathetic compassion. He casts around her the halo of the purest sentiment; he brings music of matchless verbal sweetness to the description of the hour, the place, the circumstances of her disinterested and unselfish surrender. The very lines in which he leads up to her pathetic story, lines in which his feeling concerning frail and hapless love seems to be purposely expressed in general and wide-embracing language, are in themselves significant to those who observe their meaning. He says that when he heard Virgil name the numerous knights and fair dames who were suffering from having subordinated prudence to impulse, he only felt troubled for them and bewildered.

Pietà mi vinse, e fu quasi smarrito.

The first thing he notices in Francesca and her lover is their buoyancy in the air, as though they were the finest and most tenuous of spirits; and when he says to Virgil that he would fain have speech with them, the reply is that he has only to appeal to them by the love that still moves them, and they will draw nigh to him. Then follows that lovely simile of doves floating to call, and Francesca's recognition of Dante with the words:

O animal grazioso e benigno!

who is sure to have pity on her hapless doom. When Francesca pauses in her narrative, and Dante bows his head for sorrow, Virgil shows what is his own feeling by the brief question addressed to Dante, "What think you?" Dante replies in a voice broken by emotion:

... O lasso,
Quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio
Menò costoro al doloroso passo!

and, turning to Francesca, he says that her fate fills his eyes with tears and his heart with anguish. Encouraged by the poet's sympathy, she tells him what happened, "al tempo de' dolci sospiri," in the season of sweet sighs, in itself a preliminary and melodious appeal for indulgence, and that he must be patient with her if she tells her tale, sobbing as she speaks. Torn between sweet remembrance and regret, she cannot refrain from recalling

... il disiato riso
Esser baciato da cotanto amante,

or intimating with supreme delicacy what ensued in the final line of her narrative:

Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

The story she had been reading with Paolo Malatesta of Lancelot and Guinevere fell from their hands, and that day they read no further on. And Dante? All he says is that he felt like to die for grief, and fell to the ground even as a dead body falls. From the first line to the last he utters no word of blame or reproach. He would not have been a poet had he done so.

Let us now turn from the fifth book of the Inferno to the third of the Paradiso, that we may add to our knowledge of Dante's poetic conception of Woman. He there beholds Piccarda Donati, whom he had known in her lifetime on earth, but at first does not recognise, because, as she herself says with heavenly humility, she is now much fairer to look on than she was then. Withal, she adds, she occupies only an inferior place in Heaven, because she was forced, and sorely against her own will, to violate her vow of virginity. She begins her story by saying simply:

Io fui nel mondo vergine sorella,

that she was a nun dedicated to God, and goes on to tell how she was violently torn from her cloister by her brother, Forese Donati, and his accomplices, to further family ambition, and compelled to submit to the marriage rite. Dante, feeling, as it seems to me, that this did not detract from her merit, asks her if she is contented with the relatively inferior position in Paradise she says she is assigned among celestial denizens. I trust many readers know her reply, for it is one of the noblest and most beautiful passages in the whole of the Divina Commedia. Like all fine passages in Poetry, adequate rendering of it in another tongue is not attainable. But the best translation of it with which I am acquainted is that of C. B. Cayley--no Cary, mark you--in terza rima, and of which I remember I availed myself when, many years ago, I was beginning to learn Italian, and read Dante for the first time among the then leafy-covered ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. Here is Piccarda's reply:

 

Our will, O brother mine, is kept at rest
By power of heavenly love, which makes us will,
For nought else thirsting, only things possessed.
If we should crave to be exalted still
More highly, then our will would not agree
With His, who gives to us the place we fill.
For 'tis of our own will the very ground,
That in the will of God we govern ours.

Then comes that supremely beautiful line, not to be surpassed by any line even in Dante:

In la sua voluntade è nostra pace.

Our peace is in submission to His will.

Is it fanciful to think that in that line also Dante has betrayed and bequeathed to us, perhaps unconsciously, his main conception of Woman, as a gentle and adoring creature, who finds her greatest happiness in subordinating her will to those who are deserving of the trust she reposes in them?

But Piccarda does not end the dialogue with her own story. She tells Dante that the great Costanza, as she calls her, who married the German Henry the Fifth, was also torn from a convent where she had taken the veil, and forced into Royal nuptials. But when she was thus compelled to violate her vows,

Contra suo grado e contra buona usanza,
Non fu dal vel del cuor giammai disciolta.

She wore the vestal's veil within her heart.

And, as if to indicate that the conduct of each was condoned by the Virgin of Virgins, Dante concludes by saying:

... Ave
Maria, cantando; e cantando vanio,

She faded from our sight, singing Ave Maria,

and once again he concentrated his gaze on Beatrice, Beatrice whom he regarded as his highest poetic conception of Woman. Fully to grasp what that was, we must descend from Heaven to earth and recall the origin and growth of his adoration of her, as described in the Vita Nuova.

To some commentators on Dante, the narrative to be read there has suggested difficulties when, in reality, there are none, leading them to urge that a child of nine years of age could not feel what is therein described, and that, therefore, it is purely symbolic, and was written not about any human creature, but indicated Philosophy, or the desire for spiritual enlightenment and the search for heavenly wisdom, which was Dante's overpowering impulse almost from the cradle. The answer to such an interpretation of the passage is that it betrays an utter ignorance of the emotional precocity of the poetic temperament, and of the vague but intense hold Love can acquire over Poets from their earliest years.

Of the reality underlying the idealism of the Vita Nuova, we therefore need have no doubt whatever. Dante's Beatrice was Beatrice Portinari, a Florentine maid first, a Florentine bride later, whose people lived in the Corso, near the Canto de' Pazzi.

All that follows in the narrative of the Vita Nuova may be relied on just as implicitly; how, when she was eighteen years of age, he met her again walking in the streets of Florence between two noble ladies older than herself, and graciously, as Dante says, returned his salute; how, with the naïf shyness of a youth consumed with love, he tried to dissemble it by pretending to be enamoured of another damsel, which only made Beatrice look away when she met him; and how he contrived to convey to her indirectly, through a poem he wrote, that she had misjudged him; how, thereon, she looked on him graciously once more; and how, alas! in her twenty-fifth year, she was summoned from this world to the world above. Then the Vita Nuova draws mournfully to a close, ending with these significant words:--

After I had written this sonnet, there appeared to me a wonderful vision, in which I saw things that made me determine to write no more of this dear Saint until I should be able to write of her more worthily; and, of a surety, she knows that I study to attain unto this end with all my powers. So, if it shall please Him by Whom all things live, to spare my life for some more years, I hope to say that of her which never yet hath been said of any lady; and then may it please Him, who is the Father of all good, to suffer my soul to see the glory of its mistress, the sainted Beatrice, who now, abiding in glory, looketh upon the face of Him who is blessed for ever and ever.

For the fulfilment of that determination we must return to the Divina Commedia, written in the fullness of the Poet's powers. But there are three lines in the Vita Nuova about the death of Beatrice that have haunted me ever since I first read them, and whose beauty, I am sure, all will feel:

Non la ci tolse qualità di gelo,
Nè di color, siccome l'altro fece,
Ma sola fu sua gran benignitade:

lines very difficult to translate, but the meaning of which is that she died neither from chill nor from fever, which carries off other mortals, but only of her great benignness, or excess of goodness, which rendered earth an unfitting dwelling-place for her, and Paradise her only true home.

It is not necessary to comment here on the First Canto of the Divina Commedia. That, one has done already before the Dante Society, and it is not requisite for one's present theme. But in Canto the Second we meet with the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova. She it is that sends Virgil, who dwells in the neutral territory of Limbo, to the Poet, saying:

Io son Beatrice, che ti faccio andare:
Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare.

And not only does she say that she is animated by love, which has caused her, now in Heaven, to feel so compassionately towards him, but also because he loved her so while she was on earth, and continued to do so after she had quitted it, with a fidelity that has lifted him above the crowd of ordinary mortals, and made of him a Poet. Here, let it be said in passing, we get another indication of Dante's poetic conception of Woman, which is, among other qualities, to co-operate in the making and fostering of Poets, a mission in which they have never been wanting. Where, indeed, is the Poet who could not say of some woman, and, if he be fortunate, of more than one, what, in the Twenty-second Canto of the Purgatorio, Dante makes Statius say to Virgil, "Per te poeta fui," "It was through you that I became a Poet."

Throughout the remaining Cantos of the Inferno, Beatrice naturally is never mentioned, nor yet in the Purgatorio, till we reach Canto the Thirtieth, wherein occurs perhaps the most painful scene in the awe-inspiring poem. In it she descends from Heaven, an apparition of celestial light, compared by the Poet to the dazzling dawn of a glorious day. Smitten with fear, he turns for help to Virgil, but Virgil has left him. "Weep not," says Beatrice to him, "that Virgil is no longer by your side; you will need all your tears when you hear me." Then begins her terrible arraignment:

Guardaci ben: ben sem, ben sem Beatrice.

Look on me well! Yes, I am Beatrice.

Confused, Dante gazes upon the ground, and then glances at a fountain hard by; but, seeing his own image trembling in the water, he lowers his eyes to the green sward encircling it, and fixes them there, while she upbraids him for his deviation from absolute fidelity to her memory, and his disregard of her heavenly endeavours still to help and purify him. Boccaccio says that Dante was a man of strong passions, and possibly, indeed probably, he was. But Beatrice seems to reproach him with only one transgression, and, if one is to say what one thinks, she has always appeared to me a little hard on him. Nor does she rest content till she has compelled him to confess his fault. He does so, and then she tells him to lay aside his grief, and think no more of it, for he is forgiven. Perhaps, in mitigation of the feeling that her severity was in excess of the cause, one ought to remember, since it is peculiarly pertinent to my theme, that we are in the above harrowing scene presented with the crowning characteristic of Dante's poetic conception of Woman, that, be the offence against her what it may, she forgets and forgives.

It might be interesting on some other occasion to inquire how far Dante's poetic conception of Woman is shared by Poets generally, and by the greater Poets of our own land in particular. Meanwhile one may affirm that the inquiry would serve to show that it is in substance the same, though no other Poet, in whatsoever tongue, has extolled and glorified a woman as Dante did Beatrice. But Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, could all be shown, by apposite illustration, to leave on the mind a conception of woman as a being tender, devoted, faithful, helpful, "sweet, and serviceable," as Tennyson says of Elaine, quick to respond to affection, sensitive to beauty in Nature and Arts, sympathising companion alike of the hearth and of man's struggle with life--in a word, a creature of whom it is true to say, as, indeed, Byron has said, that "Love is her whole existence," meaning by Love not what is too frequently in these days falsely presented to us in novels as such, but Love through all the harmonious scale of loving, maternal, filial, conjugal, romantic, religious, and universal.

Read then the Poets. They have a nobler conception of woman and of life than the novelists. Their unobtrusive but conspicuous teaching harmonises with the conduct of the best women, and has its deep foundation in a belief in the beneficent potency of Love, from the most elementary up to an apprehension of the meaning of the last line of the Divina Commedia:

L'amor che muove il Sole e l'altre stelle.

Love that keeps the sun in its course, and journeys with the planets in their orbit.

[The end]
Alfred Austin's essay: Dante's Poetic Conception Of Woman

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