and spiritual law that are essential elements in all modern conduct and modern thinking, and that lurk in the very conceptions and arguments of those who would be rid of them. "Its crowning dogma," says a recent writer, "is written even now between the lines in many a dainty volume, that evil has a secret holiness, and sin a consecrating magnificence."1 Now, of this spirit must we divest ourselves in entering upon a study of Dante's masterpiece. There we will find no doubt. All is intense earnestness. The light of Faith guides the poet's steps through the hopeless chambers of Hell with a firmness of conviction that knows no wavering; it bears him through the sufferings of Purgatory, believing strongly in its reality; it raises him on the wings of love and contemplation into Heaven's empyrean, where he really hopes to enjoy bliss far beyond aught he sings. If we would understand the animating principle of the poem, it behooves us to cast aside all idea that these divisions of it were a mere barbarous and cumbersome machinery. Not in this fashion are epoch-making works constructed. Dante believed in the existence of these places and in the reality of their woes and their joys as firmly as he held his own. The simple faith pervading this poem contrasts strikingly with the spirit animating Faust. The latter is designed to represent the innate conflict of the savage in man against established law and order in the moral, social and physical world. Mephistopheles is the evil genius of the hero. He impersonates the negation of truth and goodness. But much as the spirit-world figures in Goethe's masterpiece, it does so not as a living reality, but as a mere scaffolding whereby Goethe builds up the artistic structure of the experiences gathered from study and observation, or found in the recesses of his own large worldly heart. And what is the uppermost lesson that one may read on every page of that wonderful panorama of modern life? As we understand it we read simply the dark lesson, that only through the experiences that come of all manner of self-indulgence and self-gratification may one reach the broader view of life and attain perfection. This is making one's own way out of the wood of error and wrong-doing at the risk of being devoured by the beasts of predominant sin and passion. The hero is guilty of crime the most atrocious; he brings ruin in his wake; up to his last hour he is sensual and covetous; he deserts not his sins; rather his sins desert him. There are regrets; in one instance there is remorse; but there is no conversion. And yet, as though in mockery of the Christian ideal of personal purity and holiness, this sinful soul is triumphantly borne to heaven amid the song of Angels. He is saved by the only saving princi 1 Rev. William Barry, in The Fortnightly Review, March, 1886, Article, “The Church and the World." 2 ple on, or above, or under the earth-the principle of Love: "Whoever striving exerts himself, him can we redeem, and if he also participates in the love from on high, the Blessed Host will meet him with heartiest welcome." Here as in Dante the hero is the special object of womanly love. She whose heart he broke pleads in his behalf before the Mater Gloriosa, and her prayer is heard. But surely the perfection of heaven is not the satiety of self-gratification. The will must be turned towards the good. It has been truly said "that not until the Ethiopian changes his skin and the leopard his spots, can he do good that is accustomed to do evil." " And this has been still more forcibly emphasized by St. Paul: “And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and if I should deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it availeth nothing." Now, where in the heart of Faust is that charity that St. Paul insists upon? What charity did he extend toward his neighbor except in so far as it gratified himself and was in accordance with his conception of things? He seeks regeneration, not in repentance, but in oblivion and communion with Nature. Faust is a poem of selfishness. Beatrice, after upbraiding Dante for his sins, says: "God's high destiny would be broken if Lethe were passed and such food were tasted without the repentance that breaks forth in tears." Such is the womanly love in Dante's conception spiritual, elevating, ennobling, strengthening, ideal. These characteristics we fail to see in Goethe's conception. But Faust is the world-poem of this century, even as the Divina Commedia is of the thirteenth. Goethe is the mouthpiece of the modern world; the Middle Ages sing through Dante. And as each was a child of his age, the personality of each is a determining element written into the fibre of both great poems. IV. Dante, as revealed to us by time and his writings, stands out in bold relief as a man proud, fiery, irascible, the bitterness of exile and poverty corroding his soul and dropping gall from his pen, and withal humble and gentle and tender; a man strong to hate and strong to love Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 1 Faust, Part II., Act V. Chorus of Angels bearing the soul of Faust. 2 A Study of Dante. Susan Blow, p. 39. 3 I. Corinthians, chap. xiii., 3. 4 Purgatorio, xxx., 142–145. Witness the tenderness with which the poet always speaks of the relations of mother and child (Inferno, xxiii., 38-42). a man sincere in all he says and does, truth-loving and truth-telling, sparing no one, neither himself nor his friends, nor his enemies. His was a varied career. He imbibed at his mother's breast the traditionary feuds and traditionary hates of his family; he nurtured them and fought for them. He was acquainted with the ease and comfort of wealth; he tasted the pleasure of having had honors thrust upon him; he was wise in council and prudent in diplomacy; he felt the shock of battle and witnessed the carnage of war. He travelled from land to land studying men and things, his keen eye penetrating beneath the surface, finding naught too small to be unworthy of note, naught too grand for his expansive intellect to compass. He strayed from the paths of virtue and drank the cup of vice to its nauseous dregs,' and in his own soul he experienced the hell of remorse. He repented, gave himself to prayer and meditation, and even in all probability to the austerities of religious life;" he relapsed, recovered himself again, and died an edifying death, clad in the habit of St. Francis. He was exiled; he wandered from place to place, an outcast upon the earth, tasting the insipidity of another's salt and the weariness of going up and down another's stairs; yearning to return to his beloved Florence, which he loved with all the love of a son for a mother; always yearning, but never returning, and hating his enemies all the more fiercely for keeping him out. How insatiable was his thirst for knowledge through all his troubles we have already seen. There was no subject taught that he did not master: medicine, law, letters, music, mathematics, painting, physics, philosophy, and with great breadth and depth, his favorite, theology. He absorbed in all of these whatever was worth knowing. In some subjects he even went beyond his teachers and anticipated modern theories." Such is the man as we see him walk among men: silent, reserved, haughty, taking no liberties and allowing none to be taken. Can Grande wonder why the poet with all his learning cannot amuse half as well as his buffoon. And Dante retorts with all the scorn of his soul that he supposes it to be because like is pleased with like. Not after this fashion does he seek amusement. 1 Purgatorio, xxx., xxxi. Paradiso, xv., 121–123. Par., xxiii., 121–123. 2 Balbo, Vita. Lib. I., Cap. vii., pp. 94-98. The poet's familiarity with spiritual life could not have been well acquired outside of a noviciate. 3 Paradiso, xxii., 107–108. Balbo, Vita. Lib. II., Cap. xvi., p. 422. Pelli, p. 144. Paradiso, xvii., 55–66. • Il notar solamenti i luoghi degli scritti danteschi, e segnatamente del poema, in cui l'autore fa prova di singolar virtù filosofica e anticipa talvolta i pensieri e i trovati piu recenti, vorrebbe un lungo discorso. Chi crederebbe, per esempio, che Dante abbia divinato il sistema dinamico? Gioberti. Del Bello, Cap. x., p. 238. See Opere. Ed. Lombardi vol. v. p. 89. See also Tiraboschi. Vita. in Opere., vol. v. 7 Similis simili gaudet. Hettinger, Die Göttliche Komödie, p. 55. Not every man is a companion for him; and so we find him restless and wandering, writing his soul into his great poem.1 That is a characteristic picture left of him by the prior of a monastery which he visited: "Dante has been here," writes Brother Hilary; "as neither I nor any of the Brothers recognized him, I asked him what he wished. He made no answer, but gazed silently upon the columns and galleries of the cloister. Again I asked him what he wished and whom he sought; and slowly turning his head, and looking around upon the Brothers and me, he answered, 'Peace!'"'* Brother Hilary takes him apart and speaks a kind word to him, and the reticence and reserve melt away, and beneath the haughty crust, hardened by adversity, is found the gentleness of woman. The kind word and the kind treatment draw from his bosom the precious fragment of his great poem lying there, and he hands it to the prior with the words, “Here, Brother, is a portion of my work which you may not have seen; this remembrance I leave with you; forget me not." In this manner do we catch glimpses of the circumstances under which the great poem was written. The author suffered. much; but his sufferings purified his soul and raised him out of the transitory into the sphere of the permanent and the ideal. They were his purgatorial fire. Nor should we judge him rashly. We should be lenient towards the gall his pen has dropped, for it has been distilled in his soul by the exile, poverty, persecution and degradation to which he was subjected. "If," says one who reveres him," from the dearest illusions of youth, wrapped in the halo of a benevolent imagination, the wickedness of men has thrown you out of the circle of your activity, your affection, your early hopes and aspirations, into the midst of cruel deceptions; if you have been deeply sensitive like Dante, and like Dante have suffered the persecutions of an age that never pardons one raising himself above it; then, and then only have you the right to condemn his explosions of wrath." V. But if the Divina Commedia contained only the ventings of private spleen—if it were simply the effect of a mind seeking selfglorification; or were it merely an esoteric expression of some unor 1 Mais ce qu'il raconte, c'est sa propre conversion. Edmond Scherer, Litt. conemp, p. 60. 2 It is the same peace the poet sought from world to world: Di mondo in mondo cercar mi si face." Purgatorio, V., 61-63. Balbo, Vita., p. 290; Cantù. Histoire des Italiens, t.v., p. 484. 4 Cæsar Cantù, l.c., p. 516. thodox clique1-it would not live as it has lived, nor would it deserve to rank among the great world-poems. These outbursts are the least portions of it. The poet's soul was too great to be tied down by any party or a slave to any transitory bond. Raised a Guelf,' circumstances and his convictions throw him into the Ghibelline party, but he finds words of rebuke for both Guelf and Ghibelline. Both have run into extremes; he knows not which to censure most;' so, raising himself above both, he finds the path of honor in making a party for himself." In like manner did he burst the bonds of passion that held him to earth. And so he walks through exile and suffering, his soul dwelling apart from and far above the fleeting and transitory; reading in all things the ideal beyond sign and symbol; treading this earth as though it were a mere shell whose mysterious murmurings bring him tidings of the sea of eternity and infinitude far beyond; bearing in his heart a love pure and bright and elevating, that raises him up when he has fallen and bears him triumphantly through trial and temptation. At a tender age-in his ninth year-when the bloom of innocence is still upon his youth, a glance at a child, younger than himself by some months, awakens in him consciousness and enkindles in him a spark of love sweet and pure and ideal; and the spark grows into a flame, and the flame burns clear and steady, a beacon directing his whole career. He has risen to a New Life. The child grows to womanhood, marries another and dies young, all unconscious of the love that consumes her poet-lover. And the poet-lover also marries other than his first love, and has children born to him, and grows in greatness and influence, and becomes a leader of men in his beloved Florence, one to be relied on by his friends and feared by his enemies. Still the passion of his boyhood becomes the cherished ideal of his bosom. He goes astray, but the thought of the loved one reclaims him; another demands his care and attention, but he communes with this one in his dreams and has visions of her in glory. He sings of her in his waking hours. Her image is the talisman whereby to banish all unworthy thoughts and desires. He extols her; he idealizes her; he embalms her forever in his immortal poem. He identifies her with, and makes her the impersonation of, his favorite study, Theology; and henceforth the name 1 Such were the opinions of Ugo Foscolo, Rossetti, Aroux. See Cæsar Cantù's reply to Aroux in Histoire des Italiéns, t. vii., p. 531. Balbo, Vita. p. 229. 5 Vita Nuova, ii. 3 L'uno al pubblico segno i gigli giallo, Oppone, e l'altro appropria quello a parte, Si ch'è forte a veder qual piu si falli.—Paradiso, vi., 100–102. 4 Di sua bestialitate il suo processo, Farà la pruova, si ch'a te fia bello, Averti fatta parte per te stesso.—Ibid., xvii., 67–69. |