Read Ebook: Dante: Six Sermons by Wicksteed Philip H Philip Henry

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More than once the poet's hopes must have hung upon the fortunes of the mighty warrior Uguccione, whose prodigies of valour rivalled the fabled deeds of the knights of story. To this man Dante was bound by ties of closest friendship; to him he dedicated the Inferno, the first cantica of his Comedy, and he may possibly have been that hero ''twixt the two Feltros born' to whom Dante first looked to slay the wolf of Rome.

Henry died in 1313. This blow was followed by the fall of Uguccione when he seemed almost on the point of realising some of Dante's dearest hopes. The poet and the warrior alike found refuge at Verona now, with Can Grande della Scala, to whom Dante dedicated the third cantica of his Comedy, the Paradise. Did the exile's hopes revive again at the Court of Verona? Did the gallant and generous young soldier whose gracious and delicate hospitality called out such warm affection from his heart, seem worthy to accomplish that great mission in which Uguccione and Henry had failed? It is more than probable that such thoughts found room in Dante's sorrow-laden heart. And yet we cannot but suppose that while his certainty remained unshaken that in God's good time the deliverer would come, yet the hopes which centred in any single man must have had less and less assurance in them as disappointment after disappointment came.

Be this as it may, near the close of his life Dante was still able to make Beatrice testify of him in the courts of Heaven: 'Church militant has not a son stronger in hope than he. God knows it.' Simple as these words are, yet by him who has scanned Dante's features and pondered on his life, they may well be numbered amongst those moving and strengthening human utterances that ring like a trumpet through the ages and call the soul to arms.

But were Dante's hopes all concentrated on the advent of that political Messiah who was not to come in truth till our own day? Had it been so, the 'Divine Comedy' would never have been born.

When Dante realised his own helplessness in the struggle against the panther of Florence, the lion of France, and the wolf of Rome, when he saw that to reorganise his country and remodel the social and political conditions of life would need the strong hand and the keen sword of some great hero raised by God, he also saw that for himself another way was opened, an escape from that wild forest into which his feet had strayed, an escape which it must be the task of his life to point out to others, without which the very work of the hero for whom he looked would be in vain.

The deadly forest represented moral as well as political confusion; the sunlit mountain, moral as well as political order; and the beasts that cut off the ascent, moral as well as political foes to human progress.

From this moral chaos there was deliverance for every faithful soul, despite the lion and the wolf; and though the noble hound came not to chase the foul beasts back to Hell, yet was Dante led from the forest gloom even to the light of Heaven.

All this he saw and heard under the guidance of human and Divine philosophy, symbolised, or rather concentrated and personified, in Virgil and Beatrice.

Of Virgil, and the unique position assigned to him in the Middle Ages, it is impossible here to speak at length. Almost from the first publication of the AEneid, and down to the time when the revival of learning reopened the treasures of Greek literature to Western Europe, Virgil reigned in the Latin countries supreme and unchallenged over the domain of poetry and scholarship. Within two generations of his own lifetime, altars were raised to him, by enthusiastic disciples, as to a deity. When Christianity spread, his supposed prediction of Christ in one of the Eclogues endowed him with the character of a prophet; and a magic efficacy had already been attributed to verses taken from his works. Throughout the Middle Ages, his fame still grew as the supreme arbiter in every field of literature, and as the repositary of more than human knowledge, while fantastic legends clustered round his name as the great magician and necromancer. To Dante there must also have been a special fascination in the Imperial scope and sympathies of the AEneid; for Virgil is pre-eminently the poet of the Roman Empire. But we must not pause to follow out this subject here. Suffice it that Dante felt for Virgil a reverence so deep, an admiration so boundless, and an affection so glowing, that he became to him the very type of human wisdom and excellence, the first agent of his rescue from the maze of passion and error in which his life had been entangled.

Under the guidance of Virgil and Beatrice, then, Dante had seen Hell and Purgatory and Heaven. This had snatched his soul from death, had taught him, even in the midst of the moral and political chaos of his age, how to live and after what to strive. Could he show others what he himself had seen? Could he save them, as he was saved, from the meanness, from the blindness, from the delusions of the life they led? He could. Though it should be the toil of long and painful years, yet in the passionate conviction of his own experience he felt the power in him of making real to others what was so intensely real to him. But what did this involve? The truth if wholesome was yet hard. He had dear and honoured friends whose lives had been stained by unrepented sin, and whose souls he had seen in Hell. Was he to cry aloud to all the world that these loved ones were amongst the damned, instead of tenderly hiding their infirmities? Again, he was poor and an exile, he had lost 'all things most dear,' and was dependent for his very bread on the grace and favour of the great; yet if he told the world what he had seen, a storm of resentful hatred would crash upon him from every region of Italy. How would proud dames and lords brook to be told of their dead associates in sin and shame cursing their names from the very depths of Hell, and looking for their speedy advent there? How would pope and cardinal and monarch brook to be told by the powerless exile what he had heard from souls in Heaven, in Purgatory, and in Hell? E'en let them brook it as they might. His cry should be like the tempest that sweeps down upon the loftiest forest trees, but leaves the brushwood undisturbed. The mightiest in the land should hear his voice, and henceforth none should think that loftiness of place or birth could shield the criminal. He would tell in utter truth what he had seen. He knew that power was in him to brand the infamous with infamy that none could wash away, to rescue the fair memory of those the world had wrongfully condemned, to say what none but he dare say, in verse which none but he could forge, and bring all those who hearkened through Hell and Purgatory into Heaven.

To deliver this message was the work of his life, the end to which all his studies were directed, from the time of his exile to that of his death. Hence his studious labours came to have a representative and vicarious character in his mind. He was proudly conscious that he lived and worked for mankind, and that his toil deserved the grateful recognition of his city and his country.

Many of the exiles accepted the terms, but Dante's proud and indignant refusal shows us a spirit unbroken by disappointment and disaster, scorning to purchase ease by degradation. 'Is this,' he cries to the friend who communicated to him the conditions upon which he might return, 'is this the glorious recall by which Dante Alighieri is summoned back to his country after well-nigh fifteen years of exile? Is this what innocence well known to all, is this what the heavy toil of unbroken study, has deserved? Far be it from him who walks as her familiar with Philosophy to stoop to the base grovelling of a soul of clay and suffer himself thus to be treated like a vile malefactor. Far be it from the preacher of justice, when suffering outrage, to pay the acknowledgment of fair desert to the outrageous.

'Not by this path can I return. But let a way be found that hurts not Dante's honour and fair fame, and I will tread it with no tardy feet. If no such road leads back to Florence, then will I never enter Florence more. What! can I not gaze, wherever I may be, upon the spectacle of sun and stars? Can I not ponder on the sweetest truths in any region under heaven, but I must first make myself base and vile before the people of the State of Florence?'

Such was the answer of Dante Alighieri to that cruel insult which makes our cheeks glow even now with indignation. Such was the temper of the man who had seen Hell and Purgatory and Heaven, and who shrank not from the utterance of all that he had seen.

Dante must now have been engaged in writing the Paradise. Amongst the sufferings and burdens which were fast drawing him to the grave, amongst the agonies of indignation, of regret, of hope, of disappointment which still wracked his soul, the deep peace of God had come upon him; beneath a storm of passion at which our hearts quail was a calm of trustful self-surrender which no earthly power could disturb; for the harmonies of Paradise swelled in the poet's heart and sought for utterance in these last years.

But though his spirit was thus rapt to Heaven, he never lost his hold upon the earth; never disdained to toil as best he might for the immediate instruction or well-being of his kind. More than once his eloquence and skill enabled him to render signal service to his protectors in conducting delicate negotiations, and at the same time to further that cause of Italian unity which was ever near his heart. Nor did the progress of his great work, the Comedy, withhold him from a varied subsidiary activity as a poet, a moralist, and a student of language and science.

One characteristic example of this by-work must suffice. In the last year but one of his life when he must have been meditating the last, perhaps the sublimest, cantos of the Paradise, when he might well have been excused if he had ceased to concern himself with any of the lower grades of truth, he heard a certain question of physics discussed and re-discussed, and never decided because of the specious but sophistical arguments which were allowed to veil it in doubt. The question was whether some portions of the sea are or are not at a higher level than some portions of the land; and Dante, 'nursed from his boyhood in the love of truth,' as he says, 'could not endure to leave the question unresolved, and determined to demonstrate the facts and to refute the arguments alleged against them.' Accordingly he defended his thesis on a Sunday in one of the churches of Verona under the presidency of Can Grande.

This essay is a model of close reasoning and sound scientific method, and the average nineteenth century reader, with the average contempt for fourteenth century science, would find much to reflect upon should he read and understand it. The vague and inconclusive style of reasoning against which Dante contends is still rampant everywhere, though its forms have changed; while the firm grasp of scientific method and the incisive reasoning of Dante himself are still the exception in spite of all our modern training in research.

Thus Dante was engaged to the last upon the whole field of human thought. Such was the scope and power of his mind that he could embrace at the same moment the very opposite poles of speculation; and such was his passion for truth that, when gazing upon the very presence of God, he could not bear to leave men in error when he could set them right, though it were but as to the level of the land and sea.

But we must hasten to a close. Let us turn from the consideration of Dante's work to a picture of personal character drawn by his own hand. It is his ideal of a life inspired by that 'gentleness' for which, since the days of chivalry, we have had no precise equivalent in language, and which is itself too rare in every age.

The soul that this celestial grace adorns In secret holds it not; For from the first, when she the body weds, She shows it, until death: Gentle, obedient, and alive to shame, Is seen in her first age, Adding a comely beauty to the frame, With all accomplishments: In youth is temperate and resolute, Replete with love and praise of courtesy, Placing in loyalty her sole delight: And in declining age Is prudent, just, and for her bounty known; And joys within herself To listen and discourse for others' good: Then in the fourth remaining part of life To God is re-espoused, Contemplating the end that draws a-nigh, And blesseth all the seasons that are past: --Reflect now, how the many are deceived!

Cherishing such an ideal, Dante wandered from court to court of Italy, finding here and there a heart of gold, but for the most part moving amongst those to whom grace and purity and justice were but names. Can we wonder that sometimes the lonely exile felt as if his own sorrow-laden heart were the sole refuge upon earth of love and temperance?

Three noble dames, he tells us--noble in themselves but in nought else, for their garments were tattered, their feet unshod, their hair dishevelled, and their faces stained with tears--came and flung themselves at the portal of his heart, for they knew that Love was there. Moved with deep pity, Love came forth to ask them of their state. They were Rectitude, Temperance, and Generosity, once honoured by the world, now driven out in want and shame, and they came there for refuge in their woe. Then Love, with moistened eyes, bade them lift up their heads. If they were driven begging through the world, it was for men to weep and wail whose lives had fallen in such evil times; but not for them, hewn from the eternal rock--it was not for them to grieve. A race of men would surely rise at last whose hearts would turn to them again. And hearing thus how exiles great as these were grieved and comforted, the lonely poet thought his banishment his glory.

Yet when he looked for his sweet home and found it not, the agony that could not break his spirit fast destroyed his flesh, and he knew that death had laid the key upon his bosom.

When this sublime and touching poem was composed we have no means of knowing, but it can hardly have been long before the end. When that end came, Dante can barely have completed his great life work, he can barely have written the last lines of the 'Divine Comedy.' He had been on an unsuccessful mission in the service of his last protector, Guido da Polenta of Ravenna. On his return he was seized with a fatal illness, and died at Ravenna in 1321, at the age of fifty-six.

Who can grudge him his rest? As we read the four tracts of the 'Convito,' which were to have been the first of fourteen, but must now remain alone, as we are brought to a sudden stand at the abrupt termination of his unfinished work on the dialects and poetry of Italy, as we ponder on the unexhausted treasures that still lay in the soul of him who could write as Dante wrote even to the end, we can hardly suppress a sigh to think that our loss purchased his rest so soon. But his great work was done; he had told his vision, that men might go with him to Hell, to Purgatory, and to Heaven, and be saved from all things base. Then his weary head was laid down in peace, and his exile was at an end. 'That fair fold in which, a lamb, he lay' was never opened to him again, but he went home, and the blessings of the pure in heart and strong in love go with him.

The thoughts with which we turn from the contemplation of Dante's life and work find utterance in the lines of Michael Angelo. 'The works of Dante were unrecognised, and his high purpose, by the ungrateful folk whose blessing rests on all--except the just. Yet would his fate were mine! For his drear exile, with his virtue linked, glad would I change the fairest state on earth.'

FOOTNOTES:

HELL

The first cantica of the 'Divine Comedy'--the Inferno or Hell--is the best known of all Dante's works in prose or verse, in Latin or Italian; and though students of Dante may sometimes regret this fact, yet no one can be at a moment's loss to understand it.

For the attributes of heart and brain requisite for some kind of appreciation of the Inferno are by many degrees more common than those to which the other works of Dante appeal. It is easy to imagine a reader who has not even begun truly to understand either the poet or the poem nevertheless rendering a sincere tribute of admiration to the colossal force of the Inferno, and feeling the weird spell of fascination and horror ever tightening its grasp on him as he descends from circle to circle of that starless realm.

There is no mystery in the inveterate tendency to regard Dante as pre-eminently the poet of Hell. Nor is it a new phenomenon. Tradition tells of the women who shrank aside as Dante passed them by, and said one to another, shuddering as they spoke, 'See how his black hair crisped in the fire as he passed through Hell!' But no tradition tells of awe-struck passers-by who noted that the stains had been wiped from that clear brow in Purgatory, that the gleam of that pure and dauntless eye had been kindled in Heaven.

The machinery of the Inferno, then, is moderately familiar to almost all. Dante, lost in the darksome forest, scared from the sunlit heights by the wild beasts that guard the mountain side, meets the shade of Virgil, sent to rescue him by Beatrice, and suffered by Omnipotence to leave for a time his abode in the limbo of the unbaptised, on this mission of redeeming love. Virgil guides Dante through the open gate of Hell, down through circle after circle of contracting span and increasing misery and sin, down to the central depth where the arch-rebel Satan champs in his triple jaws the arch-traitors against Church and State, Judas Iscariot, and Brutus and Cassius.

Through all these circles Dante passes under Virgil's guidance. He sees and minutely describes the varying tortures apportioned to the varying guilt of the damned, and converses with the souls of many illustrious dead in torment.

And is this the poem that has enthralled and still enthrals so many a heart? Are we to look for the strengthening, purifying, and uplifting of our lives, are we to look for the very soul of poetry in an almost unbroken series of descriptions, unequalled in their terrible vividness, of ghastly tortures, interspersed with tales of shame, of guilt, of misery? Even so. And we shall not look in vain.

But let us listen first to Dante's own account of the subject-matter of his poem. Five words of his are better than a volume of the commentators. 'The subject of the whole work, literally accepted,' he says, 'is the state of souls after death.... But if the work is taken allegorically the subject is MAN, as rendering himself liable, by good or ill desert in the exercise of his free will, to rewarding or punishing justice.'

According to Dante, then, the real subject of the Inferno is 'Man, as rendered liable, by ill desert in the exercise of his free will, to punishing justice.' Surely a subject fraught with unutterable sadness, compassed by impenetrable mystery, but one which in the hands of a prophet may well be made to yield the bread of life; a subject fitly introduced by those few pregnant words, 'The day was going, and the dusky air gave respite to the animals that are on earth from all their toils; and I alone girt me in solitude to bear the strain both of the journey and the piteous sight, which memory that errs not shall retrace.'

Now if this be the true subject of the poem, it follows that all those physical horrors of which it seems almost to consist must be strictly subordinate to something else, must be part of the machinery or means by which the end of the poet is reached, but in no way the end itself.

If the subject of the poem is a moral one, then the descriptions of physical torment and horror must never even for a moment overbalance or overwhelm the true 'motive' of the work, must never even for a moment so crush or deaden the feelings as to render them incapable of moral impressions, must never in a single instance leave a prevailingly physical impression upon the mind.

And it is just herein that the transcendent power of the Inferno is displayed. Horrors which rise and ever rise in intensity till they culminate in some of the ghastliest scenes ever conceived by mortal brain are from first to last held under absolute control, are forced to support and intensify moral conceptions which in less mighty hands they would have numbed and deadened.

Oh, the pity of this sin, the unutterable, indelible pity of it! Its wail can never be stilled in our hearts while thought and memory remain. The misery of some forms of sin, the foul shame of others, the vileness, the hatefulness, the hideous deformity of others yet--this, and not horror at the punishment of sin, is what Dante stamps and brands upon our hearts as we descend with him towards the central depths, stamps and brands upon our hearts till the pity, the loathing, the horror can endure no more;--then in the very depth of Hell, at the core of the Universe, with one mighty strain that leaves us well-nigh spent, we turn upon that central point, and, leaving Hell beneath our feet, ascend by the narrow path at the antipodes.

With the horror and the burden of the starless land far off, we lift up our eyes again to see the stars, and our souls are ready for the purifying sufferings of Purgatory.

In other cases a transparent metaphor or allegory dictates the form of punishment; as when the hypocrites crawl in utter weariness under the crushing weight of leaden garments, shaped like monkish cloaks and cowls, and all covered with shining gold outside. Or when the flatterers and sycophants wallow in filth which fitly symbolises their foul life on earth.

It is probable that some special significance and appropriateness might be traced in almost all the forms of punishment in Dante's Hell, though it is not always obvious. But one thing at least is obvious: the uniform congruousness of the impression which the physical and moral factors of each description combine to produce. In fact, the Inferno is an account of 'man, as deserving ill by the exercise of his free will,' in which all the external surroundings are brought into precise accord with the central conception. The tortures are only the background; and as in the picture of a great artist, whether we can trace any special significance and appropriateness in the background or not, we always feel that it supports the true subject of the picture and never overpowers it, so it is here. Man as misusing his free will. This is the real subject of the Inferno. All else is accessory and subordinate.

But if this be so, we should expect to find an endless variety and gradation, alike of guilt and punishment, as we pass through the circles of Hell. And so we do. At one moment indignation and reproof are all swallowed up in pity, and the suffering of the exiled soul only serves to quicken an infinite compassion in our hearts, a compassion not so much for the punishment of sin as for sin itself with its woeful loss and waste of the blessings and the holiness of life. At another moment we are brought face to face with a wretch whose tortures only serve to throw his vileness into sharper relief; and when we think of him and of his deeds, of him and of his victims, we can understand those awful words of Virgil's when Dante weeps, 'Art thou too like the other fools? The death of pity is true pity here.' Infinite pity would indeed embrace the most abandoned, but it is only weak and misdirected pity that wakes or slumbers at the dictate of mere suffering.

And as there is infinite variety of guilt and woe, so is there infinite variety of character in Dante's Hell. Though the poet condemns with sternest impartiality all who have died in unrepented sin, yet he recognises and honours the moral distinctions amongst them. What a difference, for instance, between the wild blaspheming robber Vanni Fucci, and the defiant Capaneus, a prototype of Milton's Satan, the one incited by the bestial rage of reckless self-abandonment, the other by the proud self-reliance of a spirit that eternity cannot break--alike in their defiance of the Almighty, but how widely severed in the sources whence it springs.

Look again where Jason strides. The wrongs he did Medea and Hypsipyle have condemned him to the fierce lash under which his base companions shriek and fly; but he, still kingly in his mien, without a tear or cry bears his eternal pain.

See Farinata, the great Florentine--in his ever burning tomb he stands erect and proud, 'as holding Hell in great disdain;' tortured less by the flames than by the thought that the faction he opposed is now triumphant in his city; proud, even in Hell, to remember how once he stood alone between his country and destruction.

See again where Pietro delle Vigne, in the ghastly forest of suicides, longs with a passionate longing that his fidelity at that time when he 'held both the keys of the great Frederick's heart' should be vindicated upon earth from the unjust calumnies that drove him to self-slaughter.

And see where statesmen and soldiers of Florence, themselves condemned for foul and unrepented sin, still love the city in which they lived, still long to hear some good of her. As the flakes of fire fall 'like snow upon a windless day' on their defenceless bodies, see with what dismay they gaze into one another's eyes when Dante brings ill news to them of Florence.

In a word, the souls in Hell are what they were on earth, no better and no worse. This is the key-note to the comprehension of the poem. No change has taken place; none are made rebels to God's will, and none are brought into submission to it, by their punishment; but all are as they were. Even amongst the vilest there is only the rejection of a thin disguise, no real increase of shamelessness. Many souls desire to escape notice and to conceal their crimes, just as they would have done on earth; many condemn their evil deeds and are ashamed of them, just as they would have been on earth; but there is no change of character, no infusion of a new spirit either for good or ill; with all their variety and complexity of character, the unrepentant sinners wake in Hell as they would wake on earth our mingled pity and horror, our mingled loathing and admiration. Man as misusing his free will, in all the scope and variety of the infinite theme, is the subject of the poem.

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