Chapter V: Part 5

Piping a simple song for thinking hearts, is all very well. But it will not do to say, or to suggest, or to allow it to be inferred, that doing this makes a man as great a poet as doing what Wordsworth did not and plainly could not do. In the last book of _The Excursion_, he says:

Life, death, eternity! momentous themes
Are they--and might demand a seraph's tongue,
Were they not equal to their own support;
And therefore no incompetence of mine
Could do them wrong....
Ye wished for art and circumstance, that make
The individual known and understood;
And such as my best judgment could select
From what the place afforded, could be given.

But _no_ subject is equal to its own support, where the poet is concerned, however it may be with the preacher and the moralist. The poet himself must support it. We _do_ wish for act and circumstance, in poetry; and when Wordsworth tells us that he has, in _The Excursion_, given us the best of these he can, we can only answer that this best is not enough, but wholly insufficient and inadequate.

That Mr. Arnold would deny all this, if put to him plainly, we do not believe. It is all the more to be regretted that he should have expressed himself in such a manner as to encourage others in forming judgments and holding opinions which imply affirmation to the contrary. When he quotes from Wordsworth the following lines,

Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love, and hope,
And melancholy fear subdued by faith,
Of blessed consolation, in distress,
Of moral strength and intellectual power,
Of joy in widest commonalty spread,

and adds that "here we have a poet intent on the best and master thing," and wishes us to infer Wordsworth's superiority from that fact, does he not perceive that he is not only misleading his readers, but flagrantly contradicting what he himself avers in the selfsame essay? Being "intent" on these subjects is not enough. A further question remains to be answered; viz. how has the poet dealt with them? Nowhere has Wordsworth dealt with them so completely, so ambitiously, so exhaustively, as in _The Excursion_. Yet what does Mr. Arnold say of it? He says that _The Excursion_ can never be a satisfactory work to the disinterested lover of poetry, and that much of it is "a tissue of elevated but abstract verbiage, alien to the very nature of poetry." It is plain, therefore, that being "intent" even on "the best and master thing" does not suffice. The passage Mr. Arnold quotes, leaving the incautious reader to infer that it _does_ suffice, is merely the

Life, death, eternity! momentous themes,

and their being "equal to their own support" over again. Wordsworth is perpetually telling us that his subject is Man, and wishes us to infer that, the subject being great, what is written on it must be great. Unfortunately, Man, with him, is like Love with the Scotch girl; it is Man "in the abstract." Shakespeare also treats of Man; but he treats of him _in men_, and Wordsworth does not. In fact, he communes. As M. Scherer says, he is a Solitary, a Contemplative. In a word, he is essentially, and before all things a subjective poet, and reader after reader has complained, and critic after critic has confessed, that to be subjective, not objective, to reflect instead of to act, to think rather than to narrate, is the bane of modern poetry, and the conclusive mark of the inferiority of so large a proportion of it.

Yet, this notwithstanding, Mr. Arnold tells us that Wordsworth "deals with that in which life really consists"; and, not content with this, he actually goes on to declare that "Wordsworth deals with more of life than they do";--"they" being every English poet since Milton, and indeed every poet of every tongue since Milton, with the exception of Goethe! We can only say that such an assertion is astounding; the most startling paradox, indeed, we ever encountered in a criticism by a critic of authority. To argue upon it against Mr. Arnold is, happily, superfluous; for Mr. Arnold has anticipated and categorically answered his own paradox. Let him open his own poems; let him turn to _Stanzas In Memory Of Obermann_, and let him read on until he comes to the following couplet:

But Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken,
From half of human fate.

Has he forgotten the passage? or would he now expunge it? Mr. Arnold the poet, and Mr. Arnold the critic, are evidently at issue. But we think no one will experience much difficulty in deciding which of two has "hit the nail on the head," and whether it be sound criticism to affirm that Wordsworth deals with that in which life really consists, or sound criticism to affirm that with one half of life he does not deal at all. At any rate, these rival criticisms are not to be reconciled, and Mr. Arnold must elect between the two.

What is the first and broad conclusion to be drawn from all that has been said? It is this: that Wordsworth, as a poet, has treated great subjects with marked and striking inadequacy, and smaller subjects with marked and striking success. Now we submit that no man deserves to be called or considered a great poet who has not treated some great subject in a great manner. This is the mark, this is the test, of a great poet; and if we once surrender this distinction, this standard, we soon lose ourselves in hopeless critical confusion and entanglement. But no great subject _can_ be greatly or adequately treated in poetry, save objectively, and with the help of action, passion, incident, of all the expedients, in fact, we have enumerated. It never can be treated adequately or greatly by merely writing _about_ it. This is all that Wordsworth has done with his great subjects, with "truth, grandeur, beauty, love," and the rest of them; and therefore, as far as great subjects are concerned, he has failed, and failed conspicuously. Where he has succeeded, and succeeded conspicuously, succeeded admirably, succeeded perfectly, is in smaller subjects, such as _The Solitary Reaper_, _The Cuckoo_, _Three Years She Grew_, and their companions. This is to have done much; but it is not to have left behind "an ample body of powerful work." Much less is it to have left behind an "ampler" body of powerful work than every English poet since Milton, Byron included.

For what is the "ample body of powerful work" that Byron has left? If Byron had failed as completely as Wordsworth in the treatment of his larger themes, in a word, of his great subjects, then, in spite of much fine lyrical work in Byron, the palm would have to be adjudged to Wordsworth. But what critic of authority, who means to retain it, will come forward and assert that Byron has failed in the treatment of his larger themes, of his great subjects? Is _Childe Harold_ a failure? Is _Manfred_ a failure? Is _Cain_ a failure? Is _Don Juan_ a failure? We, like Mr. Arnold, can honestly say that though we "felt the expiring wave of Byron's mighty influence," we now "regard him, and have long regarded him, without illusion"; in fact, with just as little illusion as we regard Wordsworth, which is perhaps more than Mr. Arnold can yet say. We are unable to assert, with Scott, that, in _Cain_, "Byron has matched Milton on his own ground." It would have been very wonderful if he had, as wonderful as if Virgil had matched Homer on Homer's own ground. "Sero venientibus ossa"; or, as some one put it during the controversy between the respective merits of the Ancients and the Moderns, "The Ancients have stolen all our best ideas." Besides, though Byron has not matched Milton on the ground Milton occupied first and pretty nigh exhausted, Byron has done many other things that Milton has not done. We are equally unable to say that Byron, "as various in composition as Shakespeare himself, has embraced every topic in human life"; though we strongly incline to think that a dispassionate and exhaustive survey would show him to be more various in composition, and to have embraced a greater number of topics appertaining to human life, than any poet, English or foreign, ancient or modern, except Shakespeare.[1] Equally unable are we to accept the dictum of Goethe, which Mr. Arnold vainly endeavours to explain away, by trying to prove that Goethe did not mean what he certainly said, viz. that Byron "is in the main greater than any other English poet."

Therefore, as we say, we look upon Byron without any illusion, and without any wish to extol him above his real rank, by calling on his behalf even such witnesses as Scott and Goethe. We look at his works with the same detachment and dispassionateness as we look at the Parthenon or on the Venus of Milo. But, so looking on them, looking on them not through any pet theories of our own, not with any moral, theological, or sectarian bias, but simply with the same "dispassionate-lover-of-poetry" eyes with which we look on _Antigone_, the _AEneid_, the _Fairy Queen_, or _Faust_, we find ourselves unable to resist the conclusion, that, like them, _Childe Harold_, _Manfred_, _Cain_, and _Don Juan_ are great poems, are great themes, greatly treated. This is not to say that they are perfect, that they are in every way satisfactory. Is the _Fairy Queen_ perfectly satisfactory? Is the _AEneid_ perfectly satisfactory? No critic has ever found them so. Is the _Iliad_ perfectly satisfactory? It would be very odd if it were, seeing that, as no one but Mr. Gladstone any longer doubts, it is the work, not of one poet, but of several poets. But when all has been urged against them that can be urged by the most judicial criticism, they remain great subjects greatly executed. In the same manner, so do Byron's greater poems. Roughly and broadly speaking, they _are_ satisfactory; whereas in no sense can _The Prelude_ and _The Excursion_ be said to be satisfactory. On the contrary, they are entirely unsatisfactory. In a word, of Byron's larger works, it may be said that they will "do"; of Wordsworth's, on the contrary, as Jeffrey said, and as Mr. Arnold himself allows, they "won't." That is the distinction; and it is an immense one.

Byron is not Shakespeare; for he lags considerably behind Shakespeare in Invention, Action, and Character, by dint of which, and in conjunction with which, the highest faculties of the poet are displayed. But a poet may lag considerably behind Shakespeare, and yet exhibit these in a conspicuous degree. It is in Character, no doubt, that Byron is more particularly weak, as compared with Shakespeare, though he is by no means so weak, in himself, and as compared with others, as people have come to assume, by hearing the point so superficially iterated. It is not that Byron cannot depict character; but he does not depict a sufficient number of characters. They are not numerous and various enough. When M. Scherer says that "Byron has treated hardly any subject but one--himself," he is repeating the parrot-cry of very shallow people, and is doing little justice to his own powers as a critic. Indeed, had Shakespeare never lived, it is probable that it would never have occurred to any one to urge against Byron his deficiencies in this respect. It is because he is so great a poet, because he is so great in other respects, and because some critics have therefore inadvertently attempted to place him on a level with Shakespeare, that his inferiority in this particular suggested itself to those holding a juster view. Once suggested, it was harped upon, exaggerated, and, we may fairly say, has now been done to death. We presume, however, that no one would suggest that, even in the poetic presentation of Character, Byron, however inferior to certain other writers, is not immeasurably superior to Wordsworth, who never even attempted to portray Character.

When we turn from the consideration of the power shown by Byron in the presentation of Character, to his power shown in Action, Invention, and Situation, the account becomes a very different one. In brisk and rapid narrative, in striking incident, in prompt and perpetual movement--qualities in which not only is Wordsworth deficient, but of which he is absolutely devoid--Byron exhibits his true greatness as a poet. Even in the _Tales_, in _The Giaour_, _The Bride of Abydos_, _The Corsair_, _The Siege of Corinth_, _The Prisoner of Chillon_, which it has of late been the fashion, we had almost said the affectation, to depreciate, there is a stir, a "go," a swift and swirling torrent of action, a current of animation, a full and foaming stream of narrative, a tumult and conflict of incident, which will never cease to be regarded as among the best, the highest, and the most indispensable elements of poetry, until we are all laid up in lavender, until we all take to moping and brooding over our own feelings, until we all confine ourselves to "smooth passions, smooth discourse, and joyous thought"; until we all become content

To sit without emotion, hope, or aim,
In the loved presence of the cottage-fire.
And listen to the flapping of the flame,
Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.

Even if one confined oneself merely to Byron's _Tales_, the assertion that Wordsworth "deals with more of life" than Byron, would be startling. Love, hatred, revenge, ambition, the rivalry of creeds, travel, fighting, fighting by land and fighting by sea, almost every passion, and every form of adventure, these are the "life" they deal with; and we submit that it is to deal with a considerable portion of it; with far more of life at any rate than Wordsworth deals with in the whole of his poems. Listen to his own confession:

And thus from day to day my little boat
Rocks in its harbour, lodging peaceably.

Now turn to Byron:

O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Survey our empire, and behold our home.
These are our realms, no limit to their sway!

That is precisely the difference. The horizon of Byron is so much larger. Far from it being true that Wordsworth deals with more of life than Byron does, the precise opposite is the truth, that Byron deals with far more of life than Wordsworth does, if by life we mean the life of men, of men of action, of men of the world, and not the life, as M. Scherer says, of Solitaries, Contemplatives, and Recluses.

If we turn to Byron's Dramas, to _Sardanapalus_, to _The Two Foscari_, to _The Doge of Venice_, no doubt we crave for yet more action, more incident, more situation, than Byron gives us. But we do so because Shakespeare has accustomed us to crave for more; and the craving has been intensified by the sensational character of modern novels and modern stage-plays. Nevertheless these are present, in no small amount, in the plays we have named; and whether people choose to consider the amount great or small, surely it is immeasurably greater than the amount of action, invention, and situation Wordsworth exhibits in any and every poem, of any and every kind, he ever wrote.

We have more than once mentioned _Childe Harold_, but we must refer to it once more and finally, in support and illustration of what we have been urging. The persons who are of opinion that Byron never treated any subject but himself, will perhaps likewise be of opinion that, in _Childe Harold_, Byron treats only of himself, and that it is a purely contemplative and subjective poem. A more superficial opinion could not well be held. In form contemplative, it is in substance a poem full of action, situation, and incident; in a word, it is a poem essentially and notably objective. It is the only poem, ostensibly contemplative, of which this can be said; and it assumes this complexion and character by dint of Byron's own character, which was above all things active, and could not be content without action. In _Childe Harold_, Byron summons dead men and dead nations from their sepulchres, and makes them live and act again. He revivifies Athens, he resuscitates Rome. He makes Cicero breathe and burn; he makes the fallen columns and shattered pillars of the Forum as eloquent as Tully. Petrarch once more waters the tree that bears his lady's name. The mountains find a tongue. Jura answers from her misty shroud. The lightning becomes a word. Rousseau tortures himself afresh; Gibbon afresh saps solemn creeds with solemn sneer; afresh Egeria visits Numa in the silence of the night, his breast to hers replying. Lake Leman woos, and kisses away the cries of the Rhone, as they awake. Then she reproves like a sister's voice. The boats upon the lake are wings to waft us from distraction. The stars become the poetry of Heaven. Waterloo is fought before our very eyes. The defiles fatal to Roman rashness are again crowded with Numidian horse, and Hannibal and Thrasymene flash before our eyes. A soul is infused into the dead; a spirit is instilled into the mountains. The torrents talk; the sepulchres act. Movement never ceases, and the situation is perpetually shifting. Its incidents are almost the whole of History. In it we have--what M. Scherer justly says Wordsworth has not--the knowledge of the human heart which worldly experience gives, the interior drama of the passions which a man can describe well only on condition of having been their victim, and those general views upon History and society which are formed partly by study, partly by the practice of affairs. All this, too, we have, in the third and fourth cantos--for the first and second are very inferior--presented, in language, imagery, and music, of the noblest and most elevated kind; till, swelling, as an organ swells, before it closes, the poem concludes with that magnificent address to the Ocean, which rounds it off and completes it, even as the physical ocean rounds off and completes the physical earth. In no other poem that was ever written are Nature and man--not Man in the abstract, but men as they act, strive, feel, and suffer--so thoroughly interfused and interwoven; and they are interwoven and interfused as they are interwoven and interfused in actual life, not by men contemplating and talking, but by men doing and acting, in a word, by living. And if the reference be to men in general and life in general, and not to a particular sort of man living a particular sort of life away from other men, then we make bold to say, though in doing so we contradict Mr. Arnold roundly, that in _Childe Harold_ alone there is "an ampler body of powerful work," and that _Childe Harold_ alone "deals with more of life," than all Wordsworth's poems, not even selected from, but taken in their integrity, without the diminution of a single passage or the omission of a single line.

At this point, Mr. Arnold steps in with a notable plea. It may be that much of what Wordsworth has written is trivial, and that still more of it is abstract verbiage, or doctrine we hear in church, perfectly true, but wanting in the sort of truth we require, poetic truth. It may also be that Wordsworth has written no one great poem, and that the poem he fancied to be great will not do, and can never be satisfactory to the disinterested lover of poetry. It may furthermore be the case that in Wordsworth's poems we have to lament a deficiency, if not indeed a total absence of Action, Invention, Situation, and Character, and that he is only a Contemplative, a Recluse, a Solitary, analysing the sensations produced upon himself by dwelling upon mountains, woods, and waters. All this may be so. But, says Mr. Arnold, "Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life," the greatness of a poet depends upon his criticism of life, and Wordsworth's criticism of life is more complete, more powerful, and more sound, than that of any English poet since Milton, indeed than that of any poet since Milton, with the one exception of Goethe.

The great and the justly acquired authority of Mr. Arnold must not deter us from saying that to no canon of criticism upon poetry with which we are acquainted do so many objections present themselves. We suspect Mr. Arnold himself has discerned some of these since he first propounded it; for while in his Prefatory Essay upon Wordsworth he urges it with absolute confidence, in his Prefatory Essay on Byron he does so more hesitatingly, and exhibits more anxiety to explain it. But does he not explain it away, when he says, "We are not brought much on our way, I admit, towards an adequate definition of poetry as distinguished from prose by that truth"? Upon this point M. Scherer, an admirer, like ourselves, of both Wordsworth and Mr. Arnold, has some just observations:

Wordsworth seems to Mr. Arnold to have the qualities of poetic
greatness, and Mr. Arnold accordingly defines these qualities. The
great poet, in his opinion, is the one that expresses the most noble
and the most profound idea, upon the nature of man, the one who has a
philosophy of life, and who impresses it powerfully on the subjects
which he treats. The definition, it will be perceived, is a little
vague.

Mr. Arnold, we all know, is rather partial to vagueness, being of opinion that it is of the essence of Culture to be more or less vague, and that without a certain amount of vagueness there can be no sweetness and no light. We should be sorry to seem to say anything against those delightful characteristics, lest we should be supposed to be without them; and we hereby declare ourselves all in favour of our "consciousness playing about our stock notions," even if those stock notions be sweetness and light themselves, with their accompanying charm of vagueness. But though, in all seriousness, what Swift calls sweetness and light are invaluable qualities, despite the partial vagueness they entail, yet when two poets are compared, and a definition of the main business and main essence of poetry is offered, in order that by it the relative greatness of the two may be tested, it is just as well that the definition should not be too vague, should be at any rate precise enough to afford the test desired. But what is the use of it if it does not "bring us much on our way"?

Unfortunately, Mr. Arnold's theory of poetry being a criticism of life not only does not help us along our road, it tends to take us off our road. We regret we have not left ourselves space to deal with his theory at length, and can only hope we may have an opportunity of returning to it. But lest Mr. Arnold should be tempted to raise it to the dignity of a "stock notion," and to bestow upon it the privilege of that faithful iteration which is bestowed upon "culture," "sweetness and light," "Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace," which have a good deal more to say for themselves, we think it well to point out to him that, by averring poetry to be "a criticism of life," he is giving a handle to the Philistines of criticism, and to the enemies of sweetness and light, which they may turn against him in a notable manner.

For _whose_ "criticism of life"? Does he not perceive that he is enabling people to maintain, which unfortunately they are already only too disposed to do, that this poet is a great poet because they consider his criticism of life to be right and true, and that other poet to be not a great poet, or a much smaller poet, because they consider his criticism of life to be wrong and false? Why, this is the very pest and bane of English criticism upon poetry, and upon art generally; the criticism which in reality resolves itself into "I agree with this; I like that." This is the criticism of sheer and unadulterated Philistinism, against which Mr. Arnold has been waging such excellent and needed war for several years. Nor, in spite of much vagueness, will it be possible for Mr. Arnold to escape from this consequence of his dictum that poetry is a criticism of life. For at last, after much that seems to us like beating about the bush, he goes straight to the point, and makes the fatal confession in plain words.

As compared with Leopardi, Wordsworth, though at many points less
lucid, though far less a master of style, far less of an artist,
gains so much by his criticism of life being, in certain matters of
profound importance, healthful and true, whereas Leopardi's pessimism
is not, that the value of Wordsworth's poetry, on the whole, stands
higher for us, I think, than that of Leopardi's, as it stands higher
for us, I think, than that of any modern poetry except Goethe's.

Higher, because it is more healthful! That any critic, not an abject Philistine, should say such a thing, amazes us beyond words. Surely Mr. Arnold is aware that there are persons whose opinion on that subject carries much weight, who consider that Goethe's criticism of life is neither healthful nor true, but on the contrary false or mischievous, yet who do not on that account deny to Goethe the title of a great poet. Is Mr. Arnold really serious when he asserts that, other things being equal, one poet is less great than another poet because the first is a pessimist, and the other is an optimist? If he is, let us have two more volumes of Selections; one containing all the best optimist poetry, and the other containing all the best pessimist poetry, that was ever written. Which collection would be the more true, we do not undertake to know, and, as critics and disinterested lovers of poetry, we do not care. But we entertain no doubt whatever which Selection would contain the finest poetry. It would not be the optimist one. Some of the finest poetry ever written upon life is to be found surely in the Old Testament. What might be taken as its motto? "Vanity of Vanities. All is Vanity." As far as this life, and any criticism of it are concerned, it is a very Gospel of Pessimism.

Is the conclusion then that a pessimistic criticism of life necessarily makes a poet greater than another poet who criticises it from an optimistic point of view? Not in the least. The consideration--we do not say to the positive philosopher, to the historian, to the moralist, but--to the disinterested lover of poetry, is simply irrelevant.

But there is an attitude towards life which does give a poet the chance at least of being greater than either a poet who criticises life as a pessimist, or than a poet who criticises it as an optimist. That attitude is one neither of pessimism nor of optimism; indeed, not a criticism of life at all, or at least not such a criticism of life as to leave it open to any one to declare that it is healthful and true, or that it is insalubrious and false. Will Mr. Arnold tell us what is Shakespeare's criticism of life? Is it pessimistic or optimistic? We are almost alarmed at asking the question; for who knows that, in doing so, we may not be sowing the seeds of a controversy as long and as interminable as the controversy respecting the moral purpose, the criticism of life in _Hamlet_? Once started, the controversy will go on for ever, precisely because there is no way of ending it. What constitutes, not the superiority, but the comparative inferiority, of Byron and Wordsworth alike, is their excessive criticism of life. They criticise life overmuch. It is the foible of each of them. What constitutes the superiority of Shakespeare is, that he does not so much criticise life, as present it. He holds the mirror up to nature, and is content to do so, showing it with all its beautiful and all its ugly features, and with perfect dispassionateness. Hence his unequalled greatness.

We regret we have not space to set this forth more at length. But Mr. Arnold will scarcely misunderstand us; and we would venture to ask him to ponder these objections, and to let his consciousness play freely about them. If he does so, we have little doubt that the theory about poetry being a criticism of life, with its appalling consequences to the critic, to the disinterested lover of poetry, to the adherent of culture, to the friend of sweetness and light, and in fact to every one but the Philistine with his stock ideas, will silently be dropped.

But if Mr. Arnold sees insuperable objections to this course, and the canon about poetry being a criticism of life is to be added to that list of delightful formulae, which, during the last decade, have shed so much light on our condition, then we can only once more appeal from Mr. Arnold to Mr. Arnold, and ask how it is that Wordsworth can be considered to have criticised life, and to "deal with that in which life really consists," if it be true, as Mr. Arnold tells us it is true, that

Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken
From half of human fate.

How, we shall still have to ask, can a poet be said to have criticised life of whom such an ardent admirer as M. Scherer can observe, "As for cities, Wordsworth seeks to ignore them. He takes them for a discordant note which it is only just and right to drown and get rid of in the general harmony of creation."

But we must end; and we submit that we have established our case. Wordsworth can be made to figure as the greatest poet since Milton, only by canons of criticism that would make him not only a greater poet than Milton, but a greater poet than any poet that preceded Milton. If this be so, let us know it. But if not, it is vain work, trying to extol him, as a poet, above Byron. Mr. Arnold has done Byron injustice by making selections from his works, and asserting that selections are better than the whole of the works from which they are selected. You might as well select from a mountain. What should we think of the process that said, "Here is an edelweiss, here some heather, here a lump of quartz, here a bit of ice from a glacier, here some water from a torrent, here some pine-cones, here some eggs from an eagle's nest; and now you know all about Mont Blanc"? Byron is no more to be known in that fashion than the Matterhorn is. You must make acquaintances with pastoral valleys, with yawning precipices, with roaring cataracts, with tinkling cattle-bells, with the rumble of avalanches, with the growl of thunder, with the zigzag lightning, with storm, and mists, and sudden burst of tenderest sunshine, with these, with more, in fact with all, if Alp or Byron is to be really known. But Mr. Arnold has rendered Byron one service at least. When he says that Byron and Wordsworth stand first and pre-eminent among the English poets of this century, he relieves Byron of danger of rivalry.

DANTE'S REALISTIC TREATMENT OF THE IDEAL

READ AT THE TWENTIETH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE DANTE SOCIETY ON JUNE 13, 1900.

To discourse of Dante, concerning whom, ever since Boccaccio lectured on the _Divina Commedia_ in the _Duomo_ of Florence, more than five hundred years ago, there has been an unbroken procession of loving commentators, must always be a difficult undertaking; and the difficulty is increased when the audience addressed, as I believe is the case this evening, is composed, for the most part, of serious students of the austere Florentine. The only claim I can have on your attention is that I am, in that respect at least, in a more or less degree, one of yourselves. It is now close on forty years since, in Rome, as Rome then was, one repaired, day after day, to the Baths of Caracalla--not, as now, denuded of the sylvan growth of successive centuries, but cloaked, from shattered base to ruined summit, in tangled greenery--and in the silent sunshine of an Imperial Past surrendered oneself to

quella fonte
Che spande di parlar si largo fiume,

that unfailing stream of spacious speech which Dante, you remember, ascribes to Virgil, which Dante equally shares with him, and to each alike of whom one can sincerely say:

Vagliami il lungo studio e il grande amore,
Che m'han fatto cercar lo tuo volume.

But love and study of Dante will not of themselves suffice to make discourse concerning him interesting or adequate; and I am deeply impressed with the disadvantages under which I labour this evening. But my task has been made even exceptionally perilous, since it has been preceded by the entrancing influence of music, and music that borrowed an added charm from the melodious words of the poet himself. May it not be with you as it was with him when the musician Casella--"Casella mio"--acceded to his request in the Purgatorial Realm, and sang to him, he says,

si dolcemente,
Che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona--

sang to him so sweetly that the sweetness of it still sounded in his ears; words that strangely recall the couplet in Wordsworth, though I scarcely think Wordsworth was a Dante scholar:

The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more.

Many of you remember, I am sure, the entire passage in the second canto of the _Purgatorio_. But, since there may be some who have forgotten it--and the best passages in the _Divina Commedia_ can never be recalled too often--and since, moreover, it will serve as a fitting introduction to the theme on which I propose for a brief while to descant this evening, let me recall it to your remembrance. Companioned by Virgil, and newly arrived on the shores of Purgatory, Dante perceives a barque approaching, so swift and light that it causes no ripple on the water, driven and steered only by the wings of an Angel of the Lord, and carrying a hundred disembodied spirits, singing "_In exitu Israel de AEgypto_." As they disembark, one of them recognises Dante, and stretches out his arms to embrace the Poet. The passage is too beautiful to be shorn of its loveliness either by curtailment or by mere translation:

Io vidi uno di lor trarresi avante
Per abbracciarmi con si grande affetto,
Che mosse me a far lo somigliante.
O ombre vane, fuor che nell' aspetto!
Tre volte dietro a lei le mani avvinsi,
E tante mi tornai con esse al petto.

Among them was there one who forward pressed,
So keen to fold me to his heart, that I
Instinctively was moved to do the like.
O shades intangible, save in your seeming!
Toward him did I thrice outstretch my arms,
And thrice they fell back empty to my side.[2]

Words that will recall to many of you the lines in the second book of the _AEneid_, where AEneas describes to Dido how the phantom of his perished wife appeared to him as he was seeking for her through the flames and smoke of Troy, and how in vain he strove to fold her in one farewell embrace.

Ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum,
Ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago.

Similarly, the incorporeal figure in the _Divine Comedy_ bids Dante desist from the attempt to embrace him, since it is useless; and then Dante discerns it is that of Casella, who used oftentimes in Florence to sing to him, and now assures the poet that, as he loved him upon earth, so here he loves him still. Encouraged by the tender words, Dante calls him "Casella mio," and addresses to him the following request:

Se nuova legge non ti toglie
Memoria o uso all' amoroso canto,
Che mi solea quetar tutte mie voglie,
Di cio ti piaccia consolare alquanto
L'anima mia, che con la sua persona
Venendo qui, e affannata tanto.

If by new dispensation not deprived
Of the remembrance of beloved song
Wherewith you used to soothe my restlessness,
I pray you now a little while assuage
My spirit, which, since burdened with the body
In journeying here, is wearied utterly.

Quickly comes the melodious response:

"Amor che nella mente mi ragiona,"
Comincio egli allor si dolcemente,
Che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona.
Lo mio Maestro, ed io, e quella gente
Ch'eran con lui, parevan si contenti,
Com'a nessun toccasse altro la mente.

"Love that holds high discourse within mind,"
With such sweet tenderness he thus began
That still the sweetness lingers in my ear.
Virgil, and I, and that uncarnal group
That with him were, so captivated seemed,
That in our hearts was room for naught beside.

Not so, however, the guide of the spirits newly arrived in Purgatory. Seeing them "_fissi ed attenti alle sue note_," enthralled by Casella's singing, he begins to rate them soundly as "_spiriti lenti_," lazy, loitering spirits, asks them what they mean by thus halting on the way, and bids them hasten to the spot where they will be gradually purged of their earthly offences, and be admitted to the face of God. The canto closes with the following exquisite lines:

Come quando, cogliendo biada o loglio,
Gli colombi adunati alla pastura,
Queti, senza mostrar l'usato orgoglio,
Se cosa appare ond' elli abbian paura,
Subitamente lasciano star l'esca,
Perche assaliti son da maggior cura;
Cosi vid'io quella masnada fresca
Lasciar il canto, e fuggir ver la costa,
Com'uom che va, ne sa dove riesca.

As when a flight of doves, in quest of food,
Have settled on a field of wheat or tares,
And there still feed in silent quietude,
If by some apparition that they dread
A sudden scared, forthway desert the meal,
Since by more strong anxiety assailed,
So saw I that new-landed company
Forsake the song and seek the mountain side,
Like one who flees, but flies he knows not whither.

Now, if we consider this episode in its integrity, do we not find ourselves, from first to last, essentially in the region of the Ideal? Whether you believe in the existence of a local habitation named Purgatory, or you do not, none of us, not even Dante himself, has seen it, save with the mind's eye. It was said of his austere countenance by his contemporaries that it was the face of the man who had seen Hell. But the phrase, after all, was figurative, and not even the divine poet had, with the bodily vision, seen what Virgil, in one of the most pathetic of his lines, calls the further ashore. Moreover, for awhile, and in what may be termed the exordium of the episode, Dante surrenders himself wholly to this Ideal, and treats it idealistically. First he discerns only two wings of pure white light, which, when he has grown more accustomed to their brightness, he perceives to be the Angel of the Lord, the steersman of the purgatorial bark:

Vedi che sdegna gli argomenti umani,
Si che remo non vuol, ne altro velo
Che l'ale sue, tra liti si lontani

* * * * *

Trattando l'aere con l'eterne penne--

lines that for ethereal beauty, are, I think unmatched; and I will not presume to render them into verse. But what they say is that the Angel had no need of mortal expedients, of sail, or oar, or anything beside, save his own wings, that fanned the air with their eternal breath. The barque, thus driven and thus steered, is equally unsubstantial and ideal, for it makes no ripple in the wave through which it glides. But at length--not, you may be quite sure, of purpose prepense, but guided by that unerring instinct which is the great poet's supreme gift--Dante gradually passes from idealistic to realistic treatment of the episode, thereby compelling you, by what Shakespeare, in _The Tempest_, through the mouth of Prospero, calls "my so potent art," to believe implicitly in its occurrence, even if your incapacity to linger too long in the rarefied atmosphere of the Ideal has begun to render you incredulous concerning it. For all at once he introduces Casella, Florence, his own past cares and labours there, the weariness of the spirit that comes over all of us, even from our very spiritual efforts, and the soothing power of tender music. Then, with a passing touch of happy egotism, which has such a charm for us in poets that are dead, but which, I am told, is resented, though perhaps not by the gracious or the wise, in living ones, Dante enforces our belief by representing Casella as forthwith chanting a line of the poet's own that occurs in a _Canzone_ of the _Convito_:

Amor che nella mente mi ragiona.

Love that holds high discourse within my mind.

For a moment we seem to be again transported into the pure realm of the Ideal, as not Dante and Virgil alone, but the souls just landed on the shores of Purgatory, are described as being so enthralled by the song--_tutti fissi ed attenti_--that they can think of and heed nothing else. But quickly comes another realistic touch in the reproof to the spellbound spirits not there to loiter listening to the strain, but to hurry forward to their destined bourne. Finally, as if to confirm the impression of absolute reality, while not removing us from the world, or withdrawing from us the charm, of the Ideal, the poet ends with the exquisite but familiar simile of the startled doves already recited to you.

What is the impression left, what the result produced, by the entire canto? Surely it is that the poet's imagination, operating through the poet's realistic treatment of the Ideal, and his idealistic treatment of the Real, has taken us all captive, so that we feel nothing of the _Incredulus odi_ disposition, the unwillingness to believe, and the mental antipathy engendered by that unwillingness, so tersely and so truly described by Horace, but yield credence wholly and absolutely to the existence of a place called Purgatory, with its circles, its denizens, its hopes, its aspirations, and purifying power. But, read where you will in the pages of the _Divina Commedia_, you will find this is one of the main causes of its permanent hold on the attention of the world. Its theology may to many seem open to question, to some obsolete and out of date; its astronomy necessarily labours under the disadvantage of having been prior to the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, not to speak of the great astronomers of later date, including our own times; and its erudition, weighty and wonderful as it is, can occasionally be shown by more recent and more advantageously circumstanced scholarship to be faulty and inaccurate. But so long as these are presented to us nimbused by the wizard light that fuses the Real and the Ideal, we believe while we read and listen, and that is enough. The very first line of the _Divina Commedia_, so familiar to every one, though it is to introduce us to the horrors of the _Inferno_, is so realistic, so within the range of the experience of all who have reached the meridian of life or even looked on that period in others, that we are at once predisposed to yield our imagination passively to what follows. But I must allow that the passage which does immediately follow, and which discourses of the panther, the lion, and the wolf, is so symbolic, and has lent itself to so many suggestions and interpretations, that, had the poem generally been conceived and composed in that fashion, it would not only have fallen short of immortality, it would long since have been buried in the pool of Lethe, which is the predestined resting-place of all untempered and unredeemed symbolism in verse. I smile, and I have no doubt you will smile also, when I say that I, too, have my own interpretation of the inner meaning of those three menacing beasts. But be assured I have not the smallest intention of communicating it to you. I gladly pass on, gladly and quickly, as Dante himself passes on, to a more welcome and less disputable apparition, who answers, when questioned as to who and what he is, that man he is not, but man he was; that his parents were of Lombardy, and all his folk of Mantuan stock; that he lived in the age of the great Caesar and the fortunate Augustus; that he was a poet--_Poeta fui_--sang of the just and right-minded son of Anchises, the pious AEneas, who came to Italy and founded a greater city even than Troy, when proud Ilium was levelled to the dust. In the presence of Virgil we forget the embarrassing symbolism of the preceding passage, and believe once more; and, when Dante addresses him in lines of affectionate awe, that you all know by heart, and with repeating which all lovers of poets and poetry console themselves when the prosaic world passes on the other side, every doubt, every misgiving, every lingering remnant of incredulity is dismissed, and we are prepared, nay, we are eager, to take the triple journey, along two-thirds of which Virgil tells Dante he has been sent by the _Imperador che lassu regna_, the Ruler of the Universe, to conduct him. Prepared we are, nay, eager, I say, to hear the _disperate strida_ of the _spiriti dolenti_, the wailings of despair of the eternally lost, and the yearning sighs of those _che son contenti nel fuoco_, who are resigned to purgatorial pain, and scarce suffer from it, since they are buoyed up by the hope of finally joining the _beate genti_, and, along with the blessed, seeing the face of God.

Allor si mosse, ed io gli tenni dietro,

says Dante in the closing line of this, the First Canto of the _Divina Commedia_.

Then moved he on, and I paced after him.

Could you have a more realistic touch? So realistic, so real is it, in the Realm of the Ideal, that, just as Dante followed Virgil, so we follow both, humble and unquestioning believers in whatever may be told us.

I am not unaware that, in an age in which the approval of inflexibly avenging justice consequent on wrongdoing is less marked and less frequent than sentimental compassion for the wrongdoer, the punishments inflicted in the _Inferno_ for the infraction of the Divine Law, as Dante understood it, are found repellent by many persons, and agreeable to few. I grant that they are appalling in their sternness; nor was Dante himself unconscious of this, for he does describe Minos as "scowling horribly" as the souls of the damned came before him for judgment, and for discriminating consignment to their allotted circle of torture. Always terse, and therefore all the more terrible, he nevertheless exhausts the vocabulary of torment in describing the _doloroso ospizio_, the dolorous home from which they will never return. As Milton speaks of the "darkness visible" of Hell, so Dante, before him, writes of it as _loco d'ogni luce muto_, a place silent of light, but that wails and moans like a tempestuous sea, battered and buffeted by jarring winds, finally designated

La bufera infernal, che mai non resta.

The infernal hurricane that ceases never.

Of those who are whirled about by it, _di qua, di la, di giu, di su_, hither and thither, upward and downward, he writes the awful line:

Nulla speranza li conforta mai,
Non che di posa, ma di minor pena.

They have no hope of consolation ever,
Or even mitigation of their woe.

I could not bring myself, and I am sure you would not wish me to cite more minutely, the magnificently merciless phrases--all of them thoroughly realistic touches concerning ideal torment--wherewith Dante here makes his _terza rima_ an instrument or organ on which to sound the very diapason of the damned; and, did he dwell overlong on those deep, distressing octaves of endless suffering, without passing by easy and natural gradations into the pathetic minor, he would end by alienating all but the austerer natures. But he is too great an artist, too human, too congenitally and rootedly a poet, to make that mistake. I am sure you all know in which canto of the _Inferno_ occur the terrific phrases I have been citing, and need no telling that they are immediately followed by the most tender and tearful passage in the wide range of poetic literature. While even yet the sound of _la bufera infernal_ seems howling in our ears, suddenly it all subsides, and we hear instead a musically plaintive voice saying:

Siede la terra, dove nata fui,
Sulla marina dove il Po discende,
Per aver pace co' seguaci sui.

The land where I was born sits by the sea,
Unto whose shore a restless river rolls,
To be at peace with all its followers.

Then comes the love-story of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, told in such exquisite accents, so veiled in music, so transfigured by verse, that even the sternest moralist, I imagine, can hardly bring himself to call it illicit. I confess I think it the loveliest single passage in poetry ever written; yes, lovelier even than anything in Shakespeare, for it has all Shakespeare's genius, and more than Shakespeare's art; and I compassionate the man or woman who, having had the gift of birth, goes down to the grave without having read it. There is no such other love-story, no such other example of the _lacrymae rerum_, the deep abiding tearfulness of things. Nothing should be taken from, nothing can be added to it. To me it seems sacred, like the Ark of the Covenant, that no one must presume to touch; and I own I tremble as I presume, here and there, to attempt, unavailingly, to translate it. It was my good fortune to be in Florence in the month of May 1865, when the City of Flowers, the City of Dante, which then seemed peopled with nightingales and roses, was celebrating the six-hundredth anniversary of the birth of her exiled poet; and those of us who loved him assembled in the Pagliano Theatre to hear Ristori, Salvini, and Rossi repeat, to the accompaniment of living pictures, the best-known passages of the _Divina Commedia_. One of those supreme elocutionists, who still lives, recited the story of Paolo and Francesca; and from her gifted voice we heard of the _tempo de' dolci sospiri_ and _i dubbiosi aesiri_, the season of sweet sighs and hesitating desires, the _disiato riso_, the longed-for smile, the trembling kiss, the closing of the volume, and then the final lines of the canto:

Mentre che l'uno spirto questo disse,
L'altro piangeva si, che di pietade
Io venni men cosi com'io morisse:
E caddi, come corpo morto cade.

While the one told to us this dolorous tale,
The other wept so bitterly, that I
Out of sheer pity felt as like to die;
And down I fell, even as a dead body falls.

This unmatched tale of tender transgression and vainly penitential tears almost reconciles us to the more abstract description of punishment that precedes it, and the detailed account of pitiless penalty that follows it, in succeeding cantos; and the absolute fusion of the ideal and the real in the woeful story imparts to it a verisimilitude irresistible even by the most unimaginative and incredulous. Rimini, Ravenna, Malatesta, are names so familiar to us all that any story concerning them would have to be to the last degree improbable to move our incredulity. But who is it that is not prepared to believe in the sorrows of a love-tale?

Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.

It is the greatest of all masters of the human heart, the greatest and wisest teacher concerning human life, who tells us that; and Dante, who in this respect is to be almost as much trusted as Shakespeare himself, makes Francesca, with her truly feminine temperament, say:

Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona,
Mi prese del costui piacer si forte,
Che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona.

Love that compels all who are loved to love,
Entangled both in such abiding charm,
That, as you see, he still deserts me not.

As we hear those words, it is no longer Rimini, Ravenna, Malatesta, Paolo, Francesca, that arrest our attention and rivet it by their reality. We are enthralled by the ideal realism, or realistic idealism, call it which you will, of the larger and wider world we all inhabit, of this vast and universal theatre, of whose stage Love remains to-day, as it was yesterday, and will remain for ever, the central figure, the dominant protagonist.