Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Within a century after the poet’s death lectures on his works were delivered in the churches, and, as soon as the invention of printing enabled, numerous editions were edited and circulated. The first translation was into Spanish; then into French; next into German; and a copy of a Latin translation of the _Divine Comedy_ by a bishop was made at the request of two English bishops in the early part of the fifteenth century, and was sent to England. Spenser and Milton were familiar with the poet’s works, but the first complete English translation did not appear until 1802. Of the English translations since then, the most familiar are Cary’s and Longfellow’s; and to this catalogue Mr. Lowell adds: “A translation of the _Inferno_ into quatrains by T. W. Parsons ranks with the best for spirit, truthfulness, and elegance”—praise which will be cordially endorsed by those who have profited by Mr. Parsons’ labor.

We propose to discuss Dante the man and Mr. Lowell’s estimate of him, as exhibited in his writings, and shall touch upon the latter only as they may be necessary to the clearer revelation of their author’s character. For Dante, like Milton, was not of common mould; in whatever aspect we view him he proves extraordinary to a degree which frequently becomes incomprehensible. It is natural to wish to throw the two under the same light, although the result of the experiment is only to magnify their points of difference and diminish those of comparison. The sum of the results appears to be that only in the accidents of life are they comparable; in the essentials of character, with a single exception—that of intense faith—they were radically unlike. Widely apart as their names appear—Dante dying in 1321 and Milton entering life in 1608—men were engaged during the lives of both in civil revolution, and each had his own theory of government and exercised the functions of political power. Both were men of sorrow, both were unappreciated in their day and generation, and the light and joy which each experienced emanated from within and supplied the fire of their genius. The noblest work of each was written in the gloomiest period of his life. Here the possibility of parallel ends.

There is a close relation—a much closer one than may at first be suspected—between Dante and the instant condition of American society and politics. Nearly six hundred years have passed away, and we have to go back to Dante to learn personal virtue in political life, as well as religion in social affairs. Lowell has escaped the poison of the time. He perceives the essence as well as the necessity of virtue, and fully realizes its absence in our own state.

“Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind would
have been the modern theory which deals with sin as
involuntary error, and by shifting off the fault to the
shoulders of Atavism or those of Society—personified for
purposes of excuse, but escaping into impersonality again
from the grasp of retribution—weakens that sense of personal
responsibility which is the root of self-respect and the
safeguard of character. Dante, indeed, saw clearly enough
that the divine justice did at length overtake society in
the ruin of states caused by the corruption of private, and
thence of civic, morals; but a personality so intense as his
could not be satisfied with such a tardy and generalized
penalty as this. ‘It is Thou,’ he says sternly, ‘who hast
done this thing, and Thou, not Society, shalt be damned for
it; nay, damned all the worse for this paltry subterfuge.
This is not my judgment, but that of the universal Nature,
from before the beginning of the world.’… He believed in the
righteous use of anger, and that baseness was its legitimate
quarry. He did not think the Tweeds and Fisks, the political
wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his day merely
amusing, and he certainly did think it the duty of an
upright and thoroughly-trained citizen to speak out severely
and unmistakably. He believed firmly, almost fiercely, in a
divine order of the universe, a conception whereof had been
vouchsafed him, and that whatever or whoever hindered or
jostled it, whether wilfully or blindly it mattered not, was
to be got out of the way at all hazards; because obedience
to God’s law, and not making things generally comfortable,
was the highest duty of man, as it was also his only way to
true felicity.… It would be of little consequence to show in
which of two equally selfish and short-sighted parties a man
enrolled himself six hundred years ago; but it is worth
something to know that a man of ambitious temper and violent
passions, aspiring to office in a city of factions, could
rise to a level of principle so far above them all. Dante’s
opinions have life in them still, because they were drawn
from living sources of reflection and experience, because
they were reasoned out from the astronomic laws of history
and ethics, and were not weather-guesses snatched in a
glance at the doubtful political sky of the hour.”

In this Dante strikingly differed from Milton, who was a revengeful and intensely-bigoted fanatic of his own faction, and he admitted to his companionship no man, high or low, who presumed to differ from him. Dante was a politician by principle, placing his country first, and setting a high value on himself as her servant. Milton was a politician by bigotry, placing himself first, and setting a high value on his country because he was her servant. But the manliness of Dante in demanding that the severe precepts of religion should be inflexibly applied to political administration in an age whose corruption was only less shocking than that of our own, is the particular lesson which this vigorous extract from Lowell conveys. If society in this era should esteem political wire-pullers, convention-packers, and politicians who deem patriotism the science of personal exigencies, as Dante esteemed and treated them, should we be any the worse off? Dante looked upon a thief as a thief, and the knave who conspired to defraud the government as fit only to “begone among the other dogs.” Would there not be a healthier tone in our political affairs if these classes of criminals were not met, as is usually the case, by justice daintily gloved and the bandage removed from her eyes, lest she should make a mistake as to persons?

The inspiration of Dante was strictly religious. So was Milton’s; but with this distinction: that Dante’s religiousness was real and beneficent, while Milton’s was unreal and malignant—as Lowell says, Milton’s “God was a Calvinistic Zeus.”

A brief and succinct analysis of the _Divine Comedy_ will be found serviceable by those who have not analyzed it for themselves, and at the same time will make manifest the dependence of Dante’s inspiration upon Catholic doctrine:

“The poem consists of three parts—Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.
Each part is divided into thirty-three cantos, in allusion to the
years of the Saviour’s life; for although the Hell contains
thirty-four, the first canto is merely introductory. In the form
of the verse (triple rhyme) we may find an emblem of the Trinity,
and in the three divisions of the threefold state of man, sin,
grace, and beatitude.… Lapse through sin, mediation, and
redemption—these are the subjects of the three parts of the poem;
or, otherwise stated, intellectual conviction of the result of
sin, typified in Virgil; … moral conversion after repentance, by
divine grace, typified in Beatrice; reconciliation with God, and
actual, blinding vision of him—‘The pure in heart shall see
God.’… The poem is also, in a very intimate sense, an apotheosis
of woman.… Nothing is more wonderful than the power of absorption
and assimilation in this man, who could take up into himself the
world that then was, and reproduce it with such cosmopolitan
truth, to human nature and to his own individuality as to reduce
all contemporary history to a mere comment on his vision. We
protest, therefore, against the parochial criticism which would
degrade Dante to a mere partisan; which sees in him a Luther
before his time, and would clap the _bonnet rouge_ upon his
heavenly muse.”

Dante proved himself a reformer of the most aggressive kind. The difference between him and Luther was that Dante endeavored to reform men by means of the church; Luther endeavored to destroy the church rather than reform himself. Evils existed within the church, as a part of society, during the periods of both. Dante helped to correct them as a conservative; Luther chose, as a radical, to tear the edifice down. Unlike the temple of Philistia, the church stood, and the Samson of the sixteenth century fell beneath the ruins of a single column.

No fact in the history of poetry is more striking than the necessity of religion as a source of inspiration. The _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ acquire their epic quality from the religion of Greece; gods stalk about, and Minerva’s shield resounds in the clangor with that of Achilles. The _Æneid_ would be beautiful without the association of mythology; but it is mythology which enhances its grace into grandeur. The Vedas are an expression of the religious aspirations of the Hindoos. The verse of Boccaccio is pleasing only in proportion as religion cleansed his pen. Petrarch’s sonnets would never have been written had not Laura taught him the distinction between pure love, as the church knows it, and the passions which carried Byron into hysterics. The Italian epic of the sixteenth century, _Jerusalem Delivered_, which is held by Hallam to be equal in grace to the _Æneid_, had the First Crusade for its theme. Would it have been possible for Milton to have written any poem equal to _Paradise Lost_ out of other than Scriptural materials? Aside from the literary characteristics and dramatic strength of the plays of Shakspeare, does not their chief value lie in their correct morality—the morality which is found nowhere outside Catholic teaching? This is not the place to discuss the modern decline of poetry. Matthew Arnold’s theory—it is a general favorite—is that history and boldly-outlined epochs make poetry; and Lowell says, in his essay on Milton, “It is a high inspiration to be the neighbor of great events.” But the last two centuries have been crowded with history; boldly-outlined epochs have lifted their awful summits in England, in France, in Italy, in the United States, in Spain. Where are the great poets among the verse-makers who have been neighbors of these great events, and might have caught high inspiration from them? Since the Reformation the moral world has been growing iconoclastic, and there is no poetry in iconoclasm.

Next to religion, woman has been the great inspiration of poets; but the modern idea of marriage has shattered the sanctuary walls which Christianity erected around it; the sacredness of home is invaded, the oneness of love destroyed—there is no poetry in divorce.

Is not the decline of poetry a very curious, if not a fatal, reply to the hypothesis of evolution, carried logically into the moral and intellectual world?

Mr. Lowell completes his essay by a minute examination of Dante’s thought and style, as exhibited in the _Divine Comedy_; and we can find space only for the closing period:

“At the Round Table of King Arthur there was left always one
seat empty for him who should accomplish the adventure of
the Holy Grail. It was called the perilous seat, because of
the dangers he would encounter who would win it. In the
company of the epic poets there was a place left for whoever
should embody the Christian idea of a triumphant life,
outwardly all defeat, inwardly victorious; who should make
us partakers in that cup of sorrow in which all are
communicants with Christ. He who should do this would
achieve indeed the perilous seat; for he must combine poesy
with doctrine in such cunning wise that the one lose not its
beauty nor the other its severity—and Dante has done it. As
he takes possession of it we seem to hear the cry he himself
heard when Virgil rejoined the company of great singers:

‘All honor to the loftiest of poets!’”

Mr. Lowell’s Dante is a man divinely inspired and overshadowed by divinity to the grave itself—a character austere, devoid of humor, unflinchingly faithful to his conceptions of right whether moral or political, self-respecting, and believing in his own commission from God; a mind logical, systematic, and illuminated by Heaven, consciously developing its marvellous genius in the midst of contumely; a heart consumed first by human love for Beatrice, and by it purged and refined out of personality into the love of God and the proper relative appreciation of all creatures; a sublime human soul, in brief, transformed from the individual into the universal, and teaching all men, as it was taught in sorrow and in love, to seek eternity as the sole object worthy of human effort; and teaching in a lofty splendor of phrase and successions of exquisite imagery which continue to astonish posterity and will for ever adorn general literature.

The essay on Milton is devoted rather to Mr. David Masson than to the poet. There is nothing to indicate that the critic is in love with either the poems or the personality of the sublime Puritan who officiated in the capacity of Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell, and who devoted himself to epic verse after his services ceased to be available for the oppression of his fellow-men. Still less is he enamored of Mr. David Masson as a biographer of Milton, and the jovial though thoroughly effective manner in which he demonstrates the Scotch professor’s unfitness for this office adds to his volume a flavor of pungency which brings back happy recollections of the “Table for Critics.” Masson is very voluminous and exasperatingly given to remote and often irrelevant detail; and Macaulay, in extinguishing some of the literary pretenders of his time, was never more dextrous than Lowell in this grotesque joust at the Edinburgh professor’s faults, nor half so witty. Referring to the length of the biography—there are eight volumes octavo of the _Life_ and _Works_—Lowell says with perfect gravity: “We envy the secular leisures of Methuselah, and are thankful that _his_ biography, at least (if written in the same longeval proportion), is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject that would have been for a person of Mr. Masson’s spacious predilections!” And he goes on to say: “It is plain, from the preface to the second volume, that Mr. Masson himself has an uneasy consciousness that something is wrong, and that Milton ought to be more than a mere incident of his own biography.” Masson, on the other hand, is of opinion “that, whatever may be thought by a hasty person looking in on the subject from the outside,” no one can study Milton without being obliged to study also the history of England, Scotland, and Ireland; whereupon Lowell retorts that, even for a hasty person, eleven years is “rather long to have his button held by a biographer ere he begins his next sentence.”

Masson’s rambling history of the seventeenth century “is interrupted now and then,” says Lowell, “by an unexpected apparition of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just pops in and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us what _he_ has been doing in the meanwhile.” Blinded by the dust of old papers which Masson ransacks, to discover that they have no relation to his hero, the critic compares the ponderous biography to Allston’s picture of Elijah in the wilderness, “where a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape, where the very ravens could scarce have found him out.” This characterization of Edinburgh by Harvard will certainly inspire suggestion, if it does not awaken hope; but Lowell’s right to criticise the sedate and prolix gentleman who occupies in the Scottish metropolis the chair which he himself fills at Cambridge does not rest, as we have already seen in the essay on Dante, on Susarion’s faculty of turning the serious and dull into actual comedy.

Like all who have recently written of Milton—with the exception of Masson—Lowell looks upon him as a being “set apart.” To idealize the author of _Paradise Lost_ is quite as natural as to idealize Dante, notwithstanding their relative distances from us; but in the former case, with Lowell, it is the idealization of admiring awe; in the latter, of tender and exquisitely appreciative love. He does not appear to hold Milton in any degree of the personal affection which he feels for the inspired Florentine, but is constrained to insist that Masson is disrespectful toward his subject, and that “Milton is the last man in the world to be slapped on the back with impunity.”

When Lowell writes of Milton’s literary style, although he does it sparingly, every stroke is a master’s. His estimate of Milton as a man is calm, judicial, and courageous. “He stands out,” he says, “in marked and solitary individuality, apart from the great movement of the civil war, apart from the supine acquiescence of the Restoration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man.” It is the habit of hurried teachers of our day, who have to teach so many more things than they know, to exalt Milton

“High on a throne of royal state,”

and swing before him the incense of a senseless and absurd homage. In our school-days most of us were led to look upon the sightless poet as a being more than man, if a little less than God. Virtues, as he understood them, he certainly possessed; but many more virtuous than he suffered ignominy and death for presuming to exercise the very liberty which he grandly claimed for himself, but which, we find on examining his prose, he was dilatory in awarding to others, even in the abstract. These prose writings are at once curious and monstrous, and exhibit the real Milton in a true and natural light, even as _Samson Agonistes_, _Lycidas_, and _Paradise Lost_ manifest his superb and supreme characteristics as a poet. In prose he wrote as he thought; in verse he wrote as he could. He was always the rhetorician, making an art of what men of less genius can display only as the artificial; but while his poetry is the complete manifestation of his art, his prose, always written with an obvious and acknowledged personal purpose, manifests himself. His prose works are already scarce; the day is not distant when nothing will remain of them but their ashes, for the types will plead release from perpetuating the hard, angular, stony reality of a man whom taste, if not instinct, yearns to withdraw from our painful knowledge of what he was, and veil him in a radiant mistiness of what we wish he might have been. Nothing better illustrates the idealism with which the pencil of youth paints Milton than Macaulay’s essay, written while he was still a boy, but included with the mature expressions of his manhood. Nothing could more completely pulverize this roseate estimate than Milton’s own works in the days when he wrote for time and not for immortality. No matter what the theme, his prose is always ponderous and polysyllabic, abounding in magnificent metaphor, violent epithets, arrogant dogmatism, and personal abuse of those who differed from him, of which no trace, happily, remains in our day. The higher the man, the coarser the missile which he hurled at him with a giant’s force. In his reply to Salmasius he addresses that eminent scholar as “a vain, flashy man,” and, in the progress of his argument, reminds him that he is also a knave, a pragmatical coxcomb, a bribed beggar, a whipped dog, an impotent slave, a renegade, a sacrilegious wretch, a mongrel cur, an obscure scoundrel, a fearful liar, and a mass of corruption.

He seems to have lacked both consistency and clearness of conviction. He was apparently incapable of loving woman; he scarcely respected her; and, in his social theory, awarded the sex a place somewhat below that which it occupied under the patriarchs, and considerably lower than that described by Homer as peculiar to the heroic age of Greece. He obtained coy and pretty Mary Powell from her father in consideration of so many pounds of the coin of the realm, at a time when a mortgage had become embarrassing and a daughter was the only available means of extinguishing it. When that volatile young woman, shivering in the shadows of a Puritan despot, found courage enough to leave his roof, Milton was undoubtedly more impressed by her audacity than grieved by her absence. It was his pride that was hurt; and notwithstanding that he had previously advocated social views of the straitest and most conservative kind, he then published his essay on divorce, which, in amazing egotism, in wealth of classical and Scriptural allusion, in looseness of morals, and in equality of social privileges as between man and woman, is as veritable a curiosity as antiquarians have yet rescued from the monumental mysteries of old Assyria. In politics and religion he was as unsound and wavering as in his laws for society. An aristocrat of the most despotic type, he enthroned learning, and yet permitted his daughters to acquire only the alphabets, that he might use their senses as his slaves. He despised them as human beings, and they, in turn, hated and deceived him, and almost his last words on earth were terrible denunciations of those whom God intended to illumine his home, soothe his life, and deliver his whitened head, already aureoled, to

“Dear, beauteous Death.”

For many years—the very best of his life—he lent himself to the political schemes of Oliver Cromwell, and the violence and coarseness of his pamphlets made him one of the most conspicuous figures of a long series of civil storms; yet Lowell is constrained to admit that “neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics did Milton leave any distinguishable trace on the thought of his time or in the history of opinion.” He considered his ideas and inclinations correct and above appeal, simply because they were John Milton’s. The harshest word which Lowell says of his prose style is his comparison of a man of Milton’s personal character, which was without taint, to Martin Luther, whose writings were a true reflection of their author. Lowell is very gentle in saying of so noted a plagiarist as Milton: “A true Attic bee, he made boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly classic honey.” He did indeed, not in prose only, but in his verse. But we easily forgive him. There are thieves whom stolen garments more become than their owners.

[2] _Among my Books._ Second Series.

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.