Chapter II: Part 2

Della molt’ anni lagrimata pace.

Many think that the _Monarchia_ was written to celebrate this advent of one to whom he is not afraid to address the sacred words: “_Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi!_”[59]

Dante’s hopes in Henry VII were doomed to disappointment. The disappointment did not shake his faith in the Holy Roman Empire as a panacea for all the temporal ills of a Christendom distracted by individual and national self-seeking and aggression.

If we turn to the First Book of the _Monarchia_, wherein Dante develops his Political Theory, we shall find that, at first reading, the actual person of the Emperor seems essential; just as, at first sight, he seems to rule out Democracy, together with Oligarchy and Tyranny, as a “perverted form of Government.”[60] Here we must remember Dante’s environment. His personal experience of the chances of freedom and justice in his native city would give him an instinctive bias against a non-monarchial form of government. Whether the system by which Florence ruled itself in the opening years of the fourteenth century is technically to be styled Democracy or Oligarchy, or a compound of the two, it was certainly, in practice, for Dante, a Hydra-headed Tyranny of the worst description. Further, it may be well to realise that _personal_ authority was the only type of Suzerainty, the only form in which a paramount and impartial Sway, or a world-wide Court of Appeal had appeared on his mental horizon.

It has been said of Mazzini’s Republicanism that it did not rule out “Imperialism” in the sense familiar to British minds, of “The White’s Man’s Burden.” He approved of the British _Raj_ in India, and pictured his own free Italy of the future as possibly destined to spread the blessings of her own historic civilisation by a similar rule over pupil-peoples. May it be claimed in like manner for Dante, whose writings so profoundly inspired Mazzini and his fellow patriots of the _Risorgimento_, that though he is in a sense a thorough-going Imperialist, yet his Imperialism is, at bottom, not inconsistent with a more modern aspiration for a “World made safe for Democracy,” and kept safe by a “League of Nations”?

Dante is Imperialist; but if we enquire of him what is the _raison-d’-être_ of Empire, he will answer: “It is the temporal well-being of mankind.” This “well-being” consists in the fulfilment of the purpose of man’s earthly life; the true and unobstructed self-expression of that personal freedom of choice—that prerogative of self-determination—which God has given to man as His divinest gift: unique and universal endowment of His intelligent creatures—that “Liberty of Will” which is so nobly hymned by Beatrice in the _Paradiso_ (v. 19-24)—

Lo maggior don che Dio per sua larghezza
Fesse creando, ed a la sua bontate
Più conformato, e quel ch’ e’ più apprezza,
Fu de la volontà la libertate,
Di che le creature intelligenti,
E tutte e sole, fuoro e son dotate.

In his Political Theory, as in his Mystic Pilgrimage, Dante is the Apostle of Liberty.

Libertà va cercando, ch ’è si cara,
Come sa chi per lei vita rifiuta.

This noble couplet, which has moved the hearts of countless heroes and martyrs of the _Risorgimento_, even as our English Poetess was moved in ’48 at the sound of a child’s voice singing beneath her window “O bella Libertà, O bella ...!”—this couplet bears with it, as we have seen, a reference which has puzzled all the commentators, because it links with Dante’s quest of spiritual liberty the deed of Cato of Utica: the suicide by which that intransigent republican escaped submission to the founder of the Empire. And not only is Cato given an honourable place at the foot of the Mountain of Purgatory, and assured that, at the Great Day, his self-slain body shall be glorified[61]; but in the _Monarchia_,[62] Dante actually quotes with approval Cicero’s dictum in the _De Officiis_ that for Cato “it was more fitting to die than to look upon the face of a _tyrant_!” There may be other reasons for this strange discrepancy in Dante’s scheme; but one is clear. Liberty ranks so high in the Poet’s mind that it over-rides all other considerations: its typical votary may win most extraordinary and exceptional treatment!

Well, an essential condition of this all-precious Liberty, this full and unobstructed self-expression and self-determination among nations, is Peace.

Such a peace must needs embrace harmony within the individual life, in the home circle, in smaller local and municipal units, and, finally, harmony between the various nations of Christendom, over all of which, ideally, the mantle of the one Empire would be spread. Such a Christendom, and such an Empire, for Dante, ideally embraces the whole of mankind. This all-embracing character is, in fact, essential to it; and it is important for our purpose to note that this complete world-wide embrace (the antidote to personal ambition) never has been, and is never likely to be, achieved by any _personal_ sovereignty.

In this teaching the Monarchic Principle is, on the surface at least, more than an abstraction. It is everywhere personified, though it claims to exclude, as far as may be, the characteristically individual element of greed and self-assertion.[63] To Dante it is self-evident that peace in any of the concentric rings of human life—family, municipal, national, international—can only be secured by the recognised dominance of a single person in each circle.[64] In illustration of this principle he quotes (from Aristotle) Homer’s verse about the Cyclops[65]: “Each of them lays down the law for his own children and wives”; but he ignores the anarchic conclusion of the sentence ... “and they take no heed of each other.”[66] Nor does he follow Aristotle[67] in characterising this as “an uncivilised form of government”; otherwise, he might have adduced the Cyclops rather as an _abuse_ of the Monarchic Principle. The fact is, that in each of the concentric circles the principle is only too liable to abuse; and Dante knows it, else he would not have strewn the realms of his _Inferno_ with the tormented shades of those who have been guilty of such abuse—have been brutal tyrants in the home, in the city, on the throne. If we would gauge the depth of indignation which such abuse can rouse in Dante, we have only to turn to Hugh Capet’s speech in _Purg._ xx. 40-96, where the denunciation of the savagely self-assertive Royal House of France, with its infamous record of oppression, fraud, treachery, murder, and sacrilege, might be applied directly, with scarce a change of phrase, to the Hohenzollerns of to-day.

No doubt the personal guidance—even forceful guidance—may be necessary in early stages, as we have found it necessary among the child-races of Africa. Even the Hohenzollern style of rule, in our day so monstrous an anachronism, might have had its justification in far-back ages. It would perhaps compare favourably with its true antecedents, the Nineveh and Babylon of Old Testament times. “The Mailed Fist” may have its place, ere men have learnt—

... how to fill a breach
With olive branches—how to quench a lie
With truth, and smite a foe upon the cheek
With Christ’s most conquering kiss....
...
... We needed Caesars to assist
Man’s justice, and Napoleons to explain
God’s counsel, when a point was nearly missed
Until our generations should attain
Christ’s stature nearer....

—_E. B. Browning_: “_Casa Guidi Windows._”

But now we are beginning to realise that it is a thing—

Worth a great nation’s finding, to prove weak
The “glorious arms” of military kings.

Ultimately, it is a Supreme Tribunal that Dante yearns for, albeit he conceives that Tribunal as personified—incarnate in the “Roman Prince”.[68] It is impartiality,[69] above all, that Dante looks for; an impartiality to be guaranteed by that absence of ambition which an undisputed, world-wide supremacy might carry with it, “leaving nothing to be desired.” The authority that is free from taint of greed and self-interest, and so from the temptation to use human lives as means for its own ends, will most effectually display that “charity or love which gives vigour to justice.” For “Charity, scorning all other things, seeks God and man, and, consequently, the good of man.”

Surely such impartiality and such human consideration might be looked for in a representative tribunal at least as hopefully as in a fallible individual like that Henry VII, on whom, in life, he built such soaring hopes,[70] and for whom, beyond death, he prepared so high a seat in Heaven?[71]

That it is a _Tribunal_ that Dante is really seeking, is clear from the Tenth chapter of the First Book of the _Monarchia_. And it may be permissible to adduce in this connection a note on that chapter by an eminent Dante scholar (to whom not a few of the thoughts in this Essay are indirectly due), written at least ten years before the outbreak of the World-War.

“Nothing,” says Mr. Wicksteed, (_ad loc._ p. 149), “could better help the student to distinguish between the substance and the form of the _De Monarchia_, or to free himself from slavery to words, than reflection upon this chapter. He will see that Dante’s ‘imperialism’ does not mean the supremacy of one nation over others, but the existence of a supreme law that can hold all national passions in check; so that the development of international law and the establishment of arbitration are its nearest modern equivalents; and the main difficulty is found in the want of any power of compulsion by which the nations can be made to refer their quarrels to the supreme tribunal and accept its awards, whether it sits at Rome or at the Hague.”[72]

What shape, we may ask, would Dante’s theory of the Temporal and Spiritual Authority have assumed, had it seen the light in the Twentieth Century instead of the Fourteenth? How would he shape it now?... How, perchance, _does_ he shape it now if he looks down from “an eternal place” upon this “little plot” of an earth which has so often been the cockpit of international ferocity—

L’ aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci.[73]

He would see a world that has for generations clean forgotten that Holy Roman Empire which loomed so large in his day, and is just giving the _coup-de-grace_ to two unholy Empires that were playing a _rôle_ exactly the opposite of that of Dante’s ideal Roman Prince, whose chief care is to see that “in areola ista mortalium libere cum pace vivatur;”[74] a world in which a bastard Roman Empire, seeking not peace and freedom for the nations, but living for war, has striven for four long years with all its might to crush the rest of the world under an iron heel.

He would see a world in which the Papacy is no longer paramount in Western Christendom; in which its spiritual claims are largely challenged, and its temporal pretensions reduced to the shadow of a sham. A world in which industrialism and the fruits of applied science have transfigured at once the material and the social landscape. With the passing of German Military Autocracy, the last traces of Feudalism are like to disappear.... A world in which the development of national self-consciousness, in its infancy during his lifetime, has increased and multiplied. He would see a world, in short, both inwardly and outwardly utterly different from that for which he legislated in the _Monarchia_, save for the two permanent factors—the identity of human nature, and the continuity of Divine guidance, by Him “qui est omnium spiritualium et temporalium gubernator” (_loc. cit._)

Would he not acclaim the passion for justice and freedom which has inspired the nations of the _Entente_ to pile up their enormous sacrifices in a five years’ struggle? Had he compared the conduct of each side—had he compared merely their treatment of prisoners of war—could he have doubted for a moment which side exhibited the princely spirit of Charity “which gives vigour to justice:” _caritas maxime justitiam vigorabit_.[75]

Would he not see in the actions and aims of Italy—“Redeemed Italy”—and her victorious allies, a surer hope for the stable peace of mankind than ever his “Romanus Princeps” could have furnished? Would he not have found his own aspirations for a just and impartial and supra-national Tribunal embodied in that arbitrament which the “League of Nations” carries with it?

Would he not turn to individual nations (in the spirit of _Mon._ i. 5) and say: “See to it that this principle of freedom and justice rules throughout; that the spirit which looks ‘only to God and the good of man’[76] inspires all your life-circles: the Home, the City, the Province, the entire Nation. See to it that the brotherly, unselfish, co-operating spirit has sway not only between the members of the various classes and groups and interests of which your nation is composed, but that it dominates also the relations of class to class and group to group? What can better guarantee internal peace in a composite, democratic community, than that each of the elements of which it is composed shall be dominated by a single spirit—the spirit of free fellowship, which is the surest antidote[77] to the anti-social poison of greed and self-assertion?”

Would he not also see that the maintenance of such a spirit demands also a Spiritual Authority, one and forceful?

The “Sun and Moon” of Spiritual and Temporal Authority of the _Monarchia_,[78] which in the _Purgatorio_ have become “two Suns,” to light men on the earthly and the heavenly path, he would find still essential in a “World made safe for Democracy.” In 1300, he found the Spiritual Sun usurping the powers of the Temporal, and so putting them out of gear.[79] The Roman Prelate had annexed the Roman Prince’s sword and united it incongruously with his own pastoral staff—

Soleva Roma, che ’l buon mondo feo
Due soli aver, che l’ una e l’ altra strada
Facean vedere, e del mondo e di Deo:
L’ un l’ altro ha spento; ed è giunta la spada
Col pasturale, e l’ un con l’ altro insieme
Per viva forza mal convien che vada;
Pero che, giunti, l’ un l’ altro non teme.

To-day he might rather see the Spiritual Sun eclipsed by the Temporal. Religious sanctions will be needed to inspire and elevate the democratic and multi-personal successor of the “Roman Prince” as the guardian of the world’s Justice and Freedom. God Himself is the “Living Justice,”[80] and He alone can wean human hearts from envy and that to which envy leads—

... Addolcisce la viva giustizia
In noi l’ affetto sì che non si puote
Torcer già mai ad alcuna nequizia.

And “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty.”[81] For Freedom’s sake and Justice’s sake, Dante would demand some independence still, of the Sword and the Pastoral Staff. He would demand (to modify Cavour’s famous phrase) “a free Church in a league of free States”—a unified Church to match the union of Peoples; a democratic Church to inspire a democratic World, no longer an Ecclesiastical Autocracy, but a Federation (shall we say?) of free National Churches, parallel to the Temporal Authority of the future—the United States of the World.

A democratic world, indeed, yet an “Empire” too, after all; gladly submissive to the perfect sway, over Church and State alike, of the King of Kings[82]—

... Quello imperador che là su regna:

A God whose influence, though more resplendently manifest in some spheres than in others, interpenetrates the whole of His universe, as in the magnificent opening words of the _Paradiso_—

La gloria di colui che tutto move
Per l’ universo penetra, e risplende
In una parte più, e meno altrove;

A human world which reflects the peace of that wider creation which “works like a giant and sleeps like a picture”—a peace built on the only sure foundation, namely, the harmonious co-operation of mighty, God-given forces, working together under the hand of God Himself.[83]

With his last breath, as it were, the great Poet reminds us, to look up to the Eternal Love that sways the constellations ... and the hearts of men[84]—

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

III

WIT AND HUMOUR IN DANTE

Che è ridere, se non una corruscazione della dilettazione
dell’ anima, cioè un lume apparente di fuori secondo che sta
dentro?—_Conv._ iii. 8.[85]

Freedom of spirit—that freedom wherewith the Truth can make us free—is man’s rightful heritage indeed; but a heritage into the full enjoyment of which he often needs must pass through suffering and strenuous struggle. It is not a light, trivial, superficial thing. As Tasso sings—

... In cima all’ erto e faticoso colle
Della virtù riposto è nostro bene.[86]

There is an easy shallowness that apes freedom, and looks like tolerance which is the full recognition of other men’s right to Freedom. But the Freedom which Dante “goes seeking” through “an eternal place”—through the horror and murk of Hell, and by the steep ascent of the Mountain of Hope, “l’erto e faticoso colle”—is a stern and noble guerdon, and can only be enjoyed in its fulness by one who has attained to the fulness of an ordered and disciplined humanity. It is deep conviction alone, as Bishop Creighton taught us, that can beget true tolerance; the conviction that the Truth is so sacred and so precious that it were impious to try to force any soul to accept it (even were such a thing conceivable) by external pressure.

The spirit of “Education by Frightfulness” which devastated the civilised world for five long years cannot, however, be accused of want of conviction. The mission of Teutonic _Kultur_ was taken only too seriously. It is no burst of shallow lightheartedness that has driven a whole people—nay, a group of peoples—forth upon this gruesome and devilish crusade. They have shewn themselves, throughout, in deadly earnest.[87]

What is it, then, that has brought forth from the womb of an earnestness that breathes incredible industry and ingenuity and unsurpassed readiness for individual sacrifice, this misbegotten offspring of a cruelly narrow outlook and a ludicrous intolerance?

The answer proposed by one of our brilliant essayists in the first months of the war was nothing more or less than “the lack of a saving sense of humour.” It is only a partial answer, perhaps, but it is surely true as far as it goes. The want of “the power to see ourselves as others see us,” the power to put ourselves in another’s place and see how our actions would look to him, would affect him, is very close to that tragic blindness—blindness to the fact that others have a like claim with ourselves to just and reverent treatment, a like right to peace and prosperity, to self-government and self-determination. These, who would set the world right by violently upsetting it and forcibly conforming it to their own pattern, have not the grace to see how ugly and ungainly that pattern looks to other eyes. Indeed, self looms so large with them that it fills the entire foreground, and even obliterates all trace of background and middle distance.

Life, as its Creator clearly intended it to be, with all the rich variety and diversity in which alone its unity can find adequate expression, is impossible on such terms. Freedom of self-development and self-expression, which is of the essence of true life, is as likely to flourish in such an atmosphere as is an “open-air” English girl in the atmosphere of a stuffy German Wohnzimmer. Civilisation, under such hegemony, would lose all the beauty of its spontaneity, all the romance and mystery of its movement; its expansive forces would be imprisoned in a minute and deadening code of regulations.

It would be like a “corrected” river flowing evenly between straight banks of enforced concrete, with nothing except its sober, serious, and self-concentrated current to speak of the sinuous, sparkling, effervescent charm, the “careless rapture” of its native motion.

If we are to substantiate our claim for Dante as the many-sided Apostle of Liberty, we must satisfy ourselves that he is at least not devoid of that foundation of the sense of humour which takes a man outside himself, makes possible to him something of a detached and external point of view, enables him, if need be, even to see the ridiculous side of his own earnest efforts.

That Dante is in earnest, no one doubts. But does he, in his earnestness, “take himself so seriously” as to incapacitate himself from doing justice to other points of view?

Prof. Sannia’s work on the humorous element in the _Divine Comedy_[88] marks in some respects an epoch in the study of Dante. Its title may seem audacious, to the verge of irreverence; but if this is so, the fault lies partly in an age-long neglect of one aspect of the great poet’s nature, partly in a difficulty (common to both the Italian language and our own) confronting the critic who would define in appropriate language that subtle element—now gently playful, now fiercely ironical—which redeems Dante’s work as a whole from dulness, and makes the _Divine Comedy_ in particular one of the most human books ever written.

Whether or not Prof. Sannia has fallen deep into the pit that ensnares most critics who have a hobby and a mission, his pioneer movement is certainly far from futile. We believe that he has largely proved his point, and given us, in consequence, a living Dante in place of the traditional wooden effigy. At any rate his work will have justified itself if it turns the attention of all-too-serious Dante students to a new field, and emphasizes those qualities in the Divine Poet which the sheer sublimity of his work has hitherto tended to obscure.

In the following study we shall not confine ourselves to the limits of the _Divina Commedia_, but gather all we can in so short a space from his other works, and especially from the _Convivio_ and the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_.

As a preliminary we shall do well to bestow a glance at least upon Dante’s environment from this particular point of view—the temper of the generation in which he lived, and that of his immediate circle, not neglecting such inferences as may be suggested by the tradition of his physiognomy and the evidence of his earliest biographers. For a provisional definition of the subject we may turn to “The Philosopher” from whom Dante and his contemporaries drew directly and indirectly. “Melancholy men of all others are most witty.” So said the “Maestro di color che sanno,” according to the author of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_; and Boccaccio,[89] describing the habitual expression of Dante’s face, says it was “always melancholy and thoughtful.”

Before we draw the enticing inference that Dante was a paragon of wit, we shall, however, do well to verify our quotation from Aristotle, and to bear in mind the fact that the words “wit” and “witty,” like their companions “humour,” “humorous,” have changed their meaning since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By “Wit and Humour,” as applied to Dante, we mean something vague and general, yet sufficiently definite to make our quest practicable. The phrase is intended to cover the playful and fanciful use of the intellect upon literary material, in the broadest sense: from the simplest and most elementary puns and word-plays to the subtlest and most surprising analogies; from the most discursive description of a laughably incongruous situation, to the swift agility of brilliant paradox; from the quiet, genial sally of the man who laughs _with_ you; while he laughs _at_ you, to the biting sarcasm of the satirist, whose keen and often envenomed darts are winged with wrath and indignation. It is this last phase that we shall naturally expect to find most prominent in Dante.

In so far as it is to be expressed by a single Aristotelian word, our subject corresponds most nearly in connotation to the Greek εὐτραπελία, that intellectual elasticity and adroitness which seizes instinctively upon the right subjects on which to vent its fun, and handles them with a sure, artistic touch. It stands midway between the vulgarity of the buffoon (βωμολόχος) and the insensibility to humour of the downright boor (ἄγροικος). Indeed, in one place (_Mag. Mor_, i. 31, 1193) this quality of εὐτραπελία is described by the Philosopher in terms which practically identify it with our own useful phrase, “A sense of humour.” “The vulgar buffoon,” he says, “deems everybody and everything a legitimate mark for a jest, while the boor has no will to jest himself, and to be jested upon makes him angry. The witty man”—the true humorist, as we may say—“avoids both extremes. He selects his subjects—and is not a boor. On the one hand he has the capacity of jesting with decency and decorum”—his jokes do not jar on our good taste—“and on the other, he can bear good humouredly jests of which he is himself the butt.”[90]

How far Dante would satisfy the second part of this canon, may perhaps be open to discussion. But this is to anticipate. For the moment it behoves us to observe that a somewhat tedious search in the Berlin Index volume for the passage cited in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_ reveals the fact that Burton’s “witty man” is not εὐτράπελος but εὔστοχος.[91] In other words, what Aristotle attributes to the melancholy temperament is inductive acumen, the qualification of the scientific discoverer, rather than a sense of humour. The two qualities have, however, something in common: the gift of seeing and grasping analogies not obvious to the plain man in his plain moments.[92] So this crumb of comfort may hearten us in our quest, although the path be at first sight as unpromising as were certain stages of the Poet’s mystical journey.

If then we elect to follow Aristotle, as Dante followed Virgil (and I feel sure the Divine Poet would approve our choice of guide), we may draw one more drop of comfort from a passage in the _Endemian Ethics_,[93] in which the Philosopher, discoursing of friendship, notes how unlike characters often pair off together, “as austere people with witty ones (εὐτράπελοι).” May we look for this friendly union of playfulness and austerity within a single personality? in the redoubtable person of Dante Alighieri?

Is it not almost as incongruous, it may be asked, to look for humour in the _Divina Commedia_ as it would be to search for jokes in the Bible? We are prepared to maintain that even the intense seriousness of Dante—that sublime and solemn earnestness which can only be compared to the temper of Holy Writ, is not merely compatible with a playful use of the intellect, artistically restrained, but is rendered more complete and effective thereby. And what about Holy Scripture itself? I speak with all reverence.

Hebraists assure us that puns and plays on words are far from rare in the Old Testament; and there are, in the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah,[94] and elsewhere, passages of which the irony, at once keen and sublime, cannot fail to strike the English reader. Would it not be possible also to quote even from the New Testament—from the Gospels—phrases and metaphors in which the deepest and most solemn truths are cast into a form which, for want of a better word, must be described as playful or witty? The picture of the children in the market place discontented with their games; the ironical description of the “blind guides of the blind”; and of the pedants who “strain at a gnat and swallow a camel,” the still more terrible irony of the “whited sepulchres”—instances like these show that Truth and Wisdom incarnate did not disdain to use the whip wherewith the old Hebrew Prophets had scourged the idolatrous follies of their contemporaries.[95]

In the light of what has just been said, we may perhaps be justified in doubting whether the most perfect presentation of ideas—or at any rate the most surely effective—does not involve of necessity the use of those faculties with which we are at present concerned. “Without a sense of humour,” it is often said, “no man can be a perfect Saint.” Surely it is equally true to say that the same quality is essential for a really great man of letters, be he Essayist, Historian or Poet.

One more question before we come to Dante himself. What about the age and place in which the Poet lived? Were the Italians of Dante’s time devoid of the spirit of mirth and of the power to express it? Boccaccio and Sacchetti, the _Novellino_, nay, even the Franciscan Legend with its _Jaculatores Domini_, and not least the charming _Fioretti_, cry out with one voice against the unjust imputation. But one single name would be enough to vindicate for the Italy of Dante’s elder contemporaries, and for the men who figure largely in Dante’s writings, the possession of the sense of humour and the gift of wit. Fra Salimbene of Parma, the immortal gossip, who so dearly loves a joke, and is so ready to pardon other failings in the man who has “a pretty wit.” He peoples the world into which Dante Alighieri was born with folk whose joy of laughter and rollicking sense of fun match in their intensity the sternness, cruelty, savagery of those strange days. And to Florence he accords the palm for wit and humour,[96] though not in the strict Aristotelian sense; for Salimbene’s Florentines are far from being always seemly and decorous in their jests.

The mirthful spirit that pervades the pages of Salimbene recalls indeed most forcibly a passage of Aristotle to which we have not yet referred, and a definition of _urbanitas_ (εὐτραπελία) which, if slightly mysterious, is the most epigrammatic and the most suggestive of all his utterances on the subject.

“The young,” he says in the second book of the _Rhetoric_, “are laughter-loving, and therefore witty, for wittiness is πεπαιδευμένη ὕβρις....[97]” How shall we render it? “A disciplined ‘cheek,’” an “educated insolence!” The riotous, effervescent self-assertion of the Middle Ages, outcome of abundant vitality, offered splendid raw material for the manufacture of _urbanitas_. The uncontrollable vivacity which vented itself in the field of life sometimes in horseplay or in huge practical jokes; too often in fighting and bloodshed; which vented itself in the field of Art in the fantastically contorted and quaintly humorous subjects of the illuminations with which even sacred MSS. were adorned, and in the carving of grotesque figures in wood or stone—

Come, per sostentar solaio o tetto
Per mensola tal volta una figura
Si vede giugner le ginocchia al petto;[98]

and in the field of literature ranged from sheer profanity and lewdness to the edifying if amusing hagiological tales which meet us everywhere in the pages of Tammassia’s work upon St. Francis.[99]

That Dante’s own literary circle was not innocent of this πεπαιδευμένη ὕβρις—ὕβρις, that is, more or less πεπαιδευμένη—a glance at the dainty little collection in Rossetti’s volume will show at once.[100] Not to speak of the famous _Tenzone_ or “literary wrangle” between Dante and Forese Donati, of which the Poet, it would seem, was afterwards ashamed[101]; a group which included the extravagantly humorous Cecco Angiolieri cannot be described as wanting in the “playful use of the intellect.”

“Del resto,” says Prof. Sannia, “Dante era un toscano, un fiorentino; che è tutto dire ... nella facoltà comica e satirica ei fu degno rappresentante della sua stirpe, il più degno e il più alto: il genio comico e satirico fu in lui impronta, eredità etnica.”[102]

And though he fails to cross-examine the Friar of Parma—perhaps the most telling of all witnesses on this point—he has much to adduce to the same effect. Most pertinent is his quotation of D’Ancona’s remark that the gay songs with which the streets of old Florence rang were not all love-ditties. Popular poetry was one of the forces which ruled the city, “Firenze fu un Comune nel quale la poesia era uno dei pubblici poteri.” It cannot fail to be significant that Dante spent the most impressionable years of his life where the _poesia popolare_, by the inspiration of its eulogy and the stimulus of its satire, took the place of our modern newspapers in the formation, guidance and control of effective public opinion. And if the lessons of Florence were not fully learned at the time—if the _Vita Nuova_ may be said by the unsympathetic to reveal something of the prig—the rough and tumble of an exiled life in fourteenth century Italy had no mean share of teaching to offer.

We have thus narrowed the field of observation to Dante himself, and are justified in claiming to have established at the outset at least so much as this: that if Dante was humourless, it was not for want of inspiration in his environment, or of material in the human—the _very_ human—spirits among whom he moved.

It is not unnatural to ask first of all, whether Dante’s physiognomy has anything to tell us on the subject. Two features act emphatically as index of the movements of the unseen spirit—as the Author himself points out in the _Convivio_[103]—the eyes and the mouth, those “Balconi della donna che nello edificio del corpo abita.” And though the spirit of pleasantry and humour is apt to reveal itself through these windows chiefly in momentary flashes, the genial temper will usually leave some prominent tokens of its influence more especially about the corners of the mouth. As regards the eye, that most expressive of all our features, no fourteenth century portraiture, however faithful, could hope to reproduce its living flesh. Moreover, the most authentic portrait of Dante is blind, alas, or rather worse than blind: fitted with an execrable false eye by the much-abused Marini. The pose of Dante’s mouth might teach us something, if only we could be sure of it. Mr. Holbrook in his recent monograph[104] has confirmed our suspicions about the famous “Death Mask,” which at best would naturally have furnished nothing more significant than the smile of peace which so often graces our poor clay, a parting gift from the spirit as it leaves.

The magnificent Naples Bust is seemingly, like the so-called “Death Mask” itself, the creation of some abnormally gifted artist, who derived his inspiration, perhaps indirectly, through the Palatine Miniature (No. 320)[105] from the Bargello portrait to which we have already referred. In vain, therefore, does its splendid physiognomy, completely human, give such promise of a sense of humour as a face in repose can be expected to give. Nor does it matter for our purpose that the “Ritratto brutto” (as the Riccardian picture—attached to MS. 1040—is justly styled by some distinguished Florentines) would suggest the bare possibility rather than the probability of a sense of humour; for that work of Art (if it may be so called), is probably derived, like the famous Torrigiani Mask, from the Naples Bust.

The one probably genuine contemporary portrait, the Bargello Fresco, which a merciful criticism still allows us to attribute to Giotto, is only preserved in the drawings of Kirkup and Faltoni. In these, one window of the soul, the eye, is wanting, and there is considerable difference between the two reproductions of that most essential feature, the mouth; where Kirkup has much more of the conventional “Cupid’s Bow.”[106] The most that can be said here is what we said of the Naples Bust, that it certainly leaves room for a play of humour, restrained and dignified.

When we pass from portraiture to written record, we have but little material that is really _à propos_ in the early biographers of Dante. Boccaccio, after pourtraying his character and features says, “his expression was ever melancholy and thoughtful”—“nella faccia sempre malinconico e pensoso” (_Vita_, § 8), but goes on to describe him as “smiling a little”—“sorridendo alquanto” (_ib._), when he overheard the gossips of Verona commenting on the crisped hair and darkened complexion of the man who “goes down to Hell and returns at will to bring back word of those below.” Later on in his biography he draws out with evident relish the power of the poet’s sarcastic satire: “with a fine resourcefulness of invention,” says Boccaccio (§ 17), “he fixes his fangs on the vices of many yet alive and lashes the vices of many that have passed away”—“con invenzione acerbissima morde le colpe di molti viventi e quelle de’ preteriti castiga.” And speaking, in an earlier passage, of his courtesy in intercourse with others[107]—“più che alcun altro cortese e civile”—he takes something of the edge off Giovanni Villani’s description of a man “somewhat haughty, reserved and disdainful, and after the fashion of a philosopher, careless of graces and not easy in his intercourse with laymen.”[108] Yet we feel all the time that Villani’s description is, speaking broadly, the more convincing; and are relieved when we realise that it is the outwardly and obviously genial temperament rather than the saving sense of humour that the Florentine historian would deny to his great contemporary.

Next, before we turn to the testimony of Dante’s own works, we may refer briefly to the stories told of him; for if none of these be incontrovertibly authentic, and not a few of them be comparatively late in origin, their cumulative evidence should be of some value, at any rate in suggesting what his own countrymen of succeeding generations regarded as compatible with the Poet’s temperament.[109]

We may dismiss, if we will, as apocryphal, the tale of Dante’s conversation with the fish at the Venetian Doge’s banquet, and of the smearing of his court dress at King Robert’s feast, we may reject, perhaps, with more hesitation and regret, Sacchetti’s stories of the harmonious but offending blacksmith and the donkey-driver who farced Dante’s songs with an interpolated _Arrhi!_ We may relinquish the pun on Can Grande’s name, while retaining Petrarca’s story (of which Michele Savonarola’s is possibly a “doublet”) wherein Dante administers a deserved rebuke to Can Grande and his court for their preference of a buffoon to a poet. But even the rejected legends add their quota of testimony to the general and traditional belief that the Divino Poeta could unbend, and was capable of making a joke.

And there is a certain residuum—some would say larger, some smaller—of anecdotes that may be believed to contain a nucleus of truth.

There is to me a convincing ring about the comment of the _Anonimo Fiorentino_ on _Purg._ iv. 106. When Belacqua makes excuses for his laziness on the ground of the Aristotelian dictum that “by repose and quiet mind the mind attains to wisdom,” Dante retorts: “Certainly, if repose will make a man wise, you ought to be the wisest man on earth!”

A like readiness of wit, in a moment where all depended on readiness, is evinced in the story of his reply to the Florentine envoy who was sent to Porciano to demand his extradition. “Is Dante Alighieri still at Porciano?” asked the messenger who met the fore-warned exile on the road, in the act of escaping. “When I was there, he was there,” was the non-self-committing response: “quand io era, v’ era’.”[110] The stories told of Dante, if they do not suggest a genial and convivial temperament, do suggest a ready and caustic wit. But it is time to turn to Dante’s own works, and taste for ourselves.

The _Divina Commedia_ is the criterion by which most would judge him, and on this we shall spend the bulk of the space at our disposal; but no discussion of this or any other aspect of Dante’s literary genius can afford to neglect the field of his minor works, which are, in this particular case, of not a little importance. The _Convivio_ (if we may anticipate) supplies us, among other things, with Dante’s own idea of what laughter should be; and the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_ furnishes a practical illustration of his treatment of a subject like _patois_ which lends itself to humorous handling even in a serious treatise.

These three works not only cover a large proportion of Dante’s total literary remains, but they are also representative of his three chief styles of writing: Poetry, Italian Prose, and Latin Prose.

In opening the _Divina Commedia_ one would venture to issue a further warning on the mistake of limiting the field of observation to the _Inferno_, or of allowing its temper and atmosphere too great a place in our estimate of the characteristics of Dante. Whatever he was to the women of Verona, Alighieri is to us much more than “the man who goes down to Hell and comes up again at will.” Yet now and then even educated Italians, if you mention Dante’s name, are apt to make it clear that they knew him mainly as the creator of two episodes—_Paolo and Francesca_ and _Conte Ugolino_; and there is a real danger among Englishmen—amply illustrated in Dr. Paget Toynbee’s _Dante in English Literature_—of laying too much stress on the _Inferno_, even if they do not confine themselves to it.

The humour of the _Inferno_ is, of necessity, prevailingly grim; sometimes almost coarsely grotesque. Here we may see the hand of the subtle artist, and detect a deliberate purpose on Dante’s part to pour (as I have said elsewhere) “a disdainful and indignant ridicule upon the futile, monstrous, hideousness of sin.”[111] “His fine scorn of sin tempts him to heap upon it all the ... burden of loathsome grotesqueness that the resources of his imagination can furnish.”

Typical of this method is the fierce sport of the scene described in _Inf._ xxii-xxiii, which culminates in the “nuovo ludo”[112] (puzzlingly compared by Dante to the apocryphal Aesopian Fable of the “Frog and the Mouse”)[113] in which Ciampolo outwits the Demons and brings them to confusion.[114] We are in mid-Hell, in the fifth _Bolgia_ of the eighth circle, _Malebolge_, the place of the _Barattieri_, of those, that is, who have made traffic of justice or of public interests. Dante, who had been falsely accused of this crime, expends all the resources at his command to express his detestation of it, and holds it up at once to ridicule and loathing.

In Purgatory, on the terrace where pride is purged, he seems to acknowledge his appropriate place; but far different is his attitude towards the spot in Hell where his political enemies would fain have placed him.

The whole of these two Cantos and a half is pervaded by an unholy reek of boiling pitch; the appropriate similes are those of frogs immersed to the muzzle in stagnant ditch water[115]; of clawings, flayings, proddings of raw flesh.[116] Here, if anywhere, Dante verges on the vulgar. The names of the Demons are fantastically ridiculous and unpleasantly suggestive; their actions and their gestures, their badinage and their horseplay all remind one that the stately pageant of the Middle Ages had its unspeakable and unpresentable side. The Cantos are only redeemed from unreadableness by the fine similes, the lofty poetical touches which Dante, because he was Dante, could not but introduce here and there.

The graphic picture of the Venetian arsenal in full activity,[117] the swiftly drawn but masterly sketches of the wild duck’s dive to escape the swooping falcon,[118] of the mother’s rescue of her child by night from a flaming house[119]; the vivid reminiscences of Dante’s own campaigning days, at Caprona and before Arezzo: these play, like sunlit irridescence on the surface of a noisome pool, where foul creatures sport and gambol in a nightmare fashion.

We must note, however, one point; that Dante never represents himself here as moved to mirth by the fiendish antics he so conscientiously describes. Rather he is pictured as consistently consumed by fear and loathing.[120]

More reprehensible from the point of view of good taste is the Poet’s eager attention attracted to the vulgar harlequinade between Master Adam the false-coiner and the Greek Sinon, where the latter strikes the former on his “inflated paunch” till it resounds—

Come fosse un tamburo.[121]

But Dante is careful to put things right in the sequel, and makes his own blush of shame respond at once to Virgil’s chiding—

... Or pur mira
Ch’ è per poco che teco non mi risso![122]

Less broad in its grim playfulness is the taunt which the spendthrift Jacomo da Sant’ Andrea, hunted and breathless, gasps out at his fellow-sufferer: “Lano, at Toppo’s jousts thy legs were not so nimble”—

Lano, sì non furo accorte
Le gambe tue a le giostre dal Toppo![123]

Exquisite in the irony of its situation is in _Inf._ xix, in which Dante, in order to find a place for solemn invective against Boniface VIII,[124] and to assign him, while still alive, his place in Hell, makes Nicholas III mistake the Poet’s voice for that of the Pontiff, and exclaim—

Se’ tu già costì ritto,
Se’ tu già costì ritto, Bonifazio?

Whereat Dante represents himself as quite non-plussed and unable to grasp the speaker’s meaning!

Nor is the scene itself without a picturesque absurdity that evinces a subtle sense of humour, especially when we remember the over-weening pretensions of Boniface to unearthly dignity. The flaming legs of Simonists kicking to and fro above the surface of the ground wherein the rest of them is buried headforemost; and the neat epigram in which Pope Nicholas describes his plight—

Su l’ avere, e qui me misi in borsa—

“I pursed wealth above, and here—myself.”[125]

Bearing in mind the Poet’s solemn and deliberate purpose, as we conceive it, to pour scathing ridicule upon that which qualifies man for a place in Hell, we may fairly aver that even in the most critical scenes and episodes he does not transgress the canons of the Master whom he revered. If there is βωμολοχία—unseemly and unrestrained jesting—in his Inferno, it is not Dante’s, but the Demons’. Dante, as we have seen, deliberately dissociates himself from it; and the absence of all such extravagance from his description of Paradise and even of Purgatory confirms our inference that the humorous element, even at its grimmest and coarsest, is carefully proportioned to the environment with which he is dealing.

The _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_ are marked (like the scene with Nicholas III) by occasional outbursts of political or quasi-political invective, seasoned with stinging satire. In these tirades against Florence or the Papacy Dante is sometimes his own spokesman; sometimes they are put into another mouth.

The concluding verses of _Purg._ vi. will at once come to mind: the famous invective in which he ironically congratulates his native city on her “feverish” energy,[126] shown in the disinterested eagerness of her citizens to take up the lucrative burdens of public office, and in the amazing agility of her legislative activity, beside which the democratic traditions of Ancient Athens—

Fecero al viver ben un picciol cenno—[127]

the laws passed in October being superseded by the middle of November—

... Che fai tanto sotili
Provedimenti, che a mezzo novembre
Non giugne quel che tu d’ ottobre fili.

Then there is the scarcely less famous passage in _Par._ xxi,[128] where St. Peter Damian, inveighing against the Roman Curia, describes the fat Cardinals as supported on every side as they go—held up to right and left, and pushed and pulled along—

Or voglion quinci e quindi chi i rincalzi
Li moderni pastori, e chi gli meni
Tanto son gravi! e chi di rietro gli alzi.

And when they ride, covering their palfreys with their ample robes, “so that two beasts are moving ’neath one hide”—

Sì che due bestie van sott’ una pelle.[129]

Or again, there is Beatrice’s tirade in _Par._ xxix.[130] against the farce of unauthorised indulgences, and against the fashions of the contemporary pulpit: the fashion of neglecting the Gospel, and straining after originality, as though Christ’s mandate had been: “Go ye into all the world, and preach—frivolities!”

Andate, e predicate al mondo ciance.[131]

The modern preacher’s “head is swelled” (if we may so translate _Gonfia il cappuccio_), and he is perfectly content if by his jests and gibes he can raise a laugh, while the fiend sits unseen in the corner of his hood.

This passage is as perennially applicable as any in Dante, and combines the satire of Alexander Pope with the stern earnestness of the author of the _Task_, so aptly compared to it by W. W. Vernon.

Dante no doubt felt a certain appropriateness which justified him in putting these invectives into the mouths of his august _dramatis personae_: but we are apt to hear the ring of _his_ voice in each of them. There are, however, other passages in the _Purgatorio_ and the _Paradiso_ of which the playfulness belongs to the characters themselves.

In _Purg._ xx. we have two instances given to show that the risible faculties are not extinguished by the pains of purification.

Greedy Midas’ dismal surprise when, in answer to his ill-advised prayer, his very food turned to gold and became uneatable, is a legitimate and unfailing cause of laughter—

Per la qual sempre convien che si rida—[132]

to those who lie fettered face downwards[133] in the terrace of the avaricious. And it is with evident relish that the same souls repeat their last lesson: “Tell us, Crassus, for thou knowest, what is the flavour of gold?”

Crasso,
Dilci, che ’l sai: di che sapore è l’ oro?[134]

In the next Cantos, xxi. and xxii., the Poet delights us with scenes of a graceful and most appropriate playfulness. First there is the charming episode, _Purg._ xxi. 100 _sqq._, where Statius, addressing Virgil, whom he does not recognise, says: “What would I have given to have been on earth when the author of the _Aeneid_ was alive!” and Dante, in spite of Virgil’s unspoken but unmistakable “_Taci!_” betrays the situation by an uncontrollable smile. Then in the next Canto (xxii.), when the puzzled Virgil mistakes the guilt for which Statius is suffering for _avarice_, it is Statius’ turn to laugh. The gentle, mirthful grace of the whole scene is enhanced by the pathetic sequel, when Statius explains that it was Virgil who converted him, by his famous fourth Eclogue, to Christianity, like one who, walking himself in darkness, carries a lantern behind his back to illumine the path of those who follow—

Facesti come quei che va di notte
Che porta il lume dietro, e sè non giova
Ma dopo sè fa le persone dotte.[135]

Charming too is the playful irony of the scene in the Earthly Paradise where Matelda gravely discourses to Dante, in presence of Virgil and Statius, about the poets who in days of yore sang of the Golden Age—

Quelli ch’ anticamente poetaro
L’ età del’ oro e suo stato felice—[136]

and Dante looks round on them and sees them smiling.

Io mi volsi in dietro allora tutto
A’ miei poeti, e vidi che con riso
Udito avevan l’ ultimo costrutto.[137]

The smiles which wreathe the lips of the denizens of the Heavenly Paradise, like that which gleams in Beatrice’s eyes,[138] are something ineffably solemn and sublime: like the _Gloria_ chanted in the Starry Heaven, of which the Poet exclaims—

... mi sembiava
Un riso de l’ universo.[139]

But there is a touch of the more distinctively human in the suggestion thrown out in the following Canto that St. Gregory woke up in heaven to the true facts about the Angelic Hierarchy, and “smiled at his own mistake” in departing from the Dionysian scheme.

Onde, sì tosto come li occhi aperse
In questo ciel, di sè medesmo rise.[140]

The passages we have touched upon in the _Divina Commedia_ are those most obviously to the point. Prof. Sannia’s Italian mind can discern subtleties of humour in places where the foreigner cannot always hope to follow. But there is one point on which he lays much stress, namely the importance, for our purpose, of observing Dante’s attitude towards himself throughout the mystical journey, and especially as he passes through the dismal regions of the First Kingdom. The Dante so graphically depicted to us in the _Divine Comedy_ is altogether different from the cold, abstract Dante of tradition. He is an impatiently curious child, in whom the passion of curiosity even conquers fear. And while the pilgrim is depicted to us in very human guise, and his motions and his attributes described in terms which presuppose not only a remarkable degree of self-knowledge, and a striking power of psychological analysis, but also a very real sense of humour; the poet who sings of the pilgrim, reveals to us by the way, a whole group of characteristics which claim the humorous gift as their inevitable associate. Such are his broad humanity, his sympathy, his reverence even for the noble damned, his very modern type of tenderness shown by interest in the ways of children, animals, birds, insects, from whose life he loves to draw his similes. “True humour,” says Carlyle, “is sensibility in the most catholic and deepest sense.” Virgil—the Virgil of history—had this in a pre-eminent degree—and so has his mystic companion of the Eternal World.[141]

Popular tradition has imagined him as a heartless, unfeeling judge, without that indulgence towards human frailty which the gift of humour presupposes: but the entire _Purgatorio_ belies this calumny, and not a few episodes in the _Inferno_ itself.

To pass from the _Divina Commedia_ to the _Convivio_ is in any case a drop down. If it is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, the sublimity of the _Divina Commedia_ should bring us very close to the regions where laughter is generated. The _Convivio_, with all its manifold interest is obviously far below the level on which thought and feeling habitually move in the _Divine Comedy_. Has it therefore less promise in the matter of our quest?