“Literally, the subject is the state of souls after death taken simply. If, however, the work be accepted allegorically, the subject is man, according as by merit or demerit through freedom of choice (arbitrii libertatem) he is subject to Justice, rewarding or punitive.”
This is the positive statement emanating, in all probability, from the poet. Perhaps it is as well that he did not live to inaugurate the series of Commentaries upon his poem, which began within a few years of his death and show no signs of ceasing.[745] So it has been left to others to determine the metes and bounds and special features of the Commedia’s allegorical intent. The task has proved hazardous, because Dante was such a great poet, so realistic in his visualizing and so masterful in forcing the different phases of his many-sided thoughts to combine in concrete creations. His drama is so living that one can hardly think it an allegory.
Evidently certain matters, like the Mystic Procession and its apocalyptic appurtenances in the last cantos of the Purgatorio, are sheer allegory. Such, while suited to suggest theological tenets, are formal and lifeless, a little like the hieratic allegorical mosaics of the fourth and fifth centuries, which were composed before Christian art had become imbued with Christian feeling.[746] Indeed, doffing for an instant one’s reverence for the great poet, one may say that from the point of view of art and life, Dante’s symbolism becomes jejune, or at least ceases to draw us, according as it becomes palpable allegory.[747]
Beyond such incidents one recognizes that the general course of the poem, its more pointed occurrences, together with its chief characters and the scenes amid which they move, have commonly both literal and allegorical meaning.[748] Usually it is wise not to press either side too rigorously. The poet’s mind worked in the clearly imagined setting and dramatic action of his poem, where fact and symbolism combined in that reality which is both art and life. Surely the Commedia was completed and rendered real and beautiful through many a touch and incident which had no allegorical intent. Even as in a French cathedral, the main sculptured and painted subjects have doctrinal, that is to say, allegorical, significance, besides their literal truth; but there is also much lovely carving of scroll and flowered ornament and beast and bird, which beautifies the building.
For Dante’s purpose, to set out the state of disembodied spirits after death, allegory might prove prejudicial, because of the intensity of his artist’s vision. Much of the poem’s symbolism, especially in the Paradiso, belongs to that unavoidable imagery to which every one is driven when attempting to describe spiritual facts. Such symbolism, however, when constructed with the plastic power of a Dante, may become itself so convincing or compelling as to reduce the intended spiritual signification to the terms of its concrete embodiment in the symbol. In view of the carnality of most sin, one is not surprised to find the place of punishment a converging cavity within the earth. With Dante, as with Hildegard, the sights and torments of Hell are realistically given quite as of course. Perhaps Dante’s Mount of Purgatory begins to give us pause, and its corniced mise en scène tends to enflesh the idea of spirit and materialize its purgation. But the limiting effect of symbolism is most keenly felt in the Paradiso, notwithstanding the beauty of that cantica; for its very concrete symbolism seems sometimes to ensphere the intended truths of spirit in a sort of crystalline translucency. It is all a marvellously imagined description of the state of blessed souls. Yet in the final pure and glorious image of a white rose (candida rosa) the company of the glorified spirits is so visualized as to become, surely not theatrical, but as if assembled upon the rounding tiers of seats occupied by an audience.[749] There are topics in which the sheer ratiocination of Thomas is more completely spiritual than the poetic vision of Dante.
Dante’s most admirable symbolic creation was also his dearest reality—Beatrice. And while this being in which he has immortalized his fame and hers, is eminently the creation of his genius, the elements were drawn from the many-chambered mediaeval past. Some issued out of the vast matter of chivalric love, with its high heart of service and sense of its own worth, its science, its foolish and most wise reasoning, its preciosity of temper—Dante and his literary friends were virtuosos in everything pertaining to its understanding.[750] This love was of the fine-reasoning mind. The first canzone of the Vita Nuova does not begin “Donne, che sentite amore,” but: “Donne, ch’ avete intelletto d’ amore.” Through that book love is what it never ceases to be with Dante, intelligenza:
“Intelligenza nuova, che l’ Amore
Piangendo mette in lui....”
The piangendo, the tears, have likewise part; without them love is not had or even understood. The enormous sense of love’s supreme worth—that too is in Dante. It had all been with the Troubadours of Provence, with Chrétien de Troies, and with the great Minnesingers, and had been reasoned on, appreciated, felt and wept over, by ladies and knights who listened to their poems. From France and Provence love and its reasonings had come to Italy even before Dante’s eyes had opened to it and other matters.
This was one strain that entered the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova, of the Convito, of the Commedia. But Beatrice is something else: she is, or becomes, Theology, the God-given science of the divine and human. Long had Theologia (divina scientia) been a queen; and even before her, Philosophia, as with Boëthius, had been a queenly woman gowned with as full symbolical particularity as ever the Beatrice of Dante. Indeed from the time of the Psychomachia of Prudentius to the Roman de la Rose of De Lorris and De Meun, every human quality, and many an aspect of human circumstance, had been personified, for the most part under the forms of gracious or seductive women. Above all of these rose, sweet, gracious, and potent, the Virgin Queen of Heaven. It came as of course to Dante to symbolize his conception of divine wisdom in a woman’s form. The achievement of his genius was the transfusing combination of elements of courtly love, didactic allegory, and divina scientia, in a creature before whom the whole man Dante, heart and reason and religious faith, could stand and gaze and love and worship.
Beatrice was his and of him always; but with the visions and experience of that mature and grace-illuminated manhood, which expressed itself in the Commedia, she comes to be much that she had not been when she lived on earth or had just left it, and Dante was a maker of exquisite verses in Florence; and much too that she had scarce become while the poet was consoling himself with philosophy for his bereavement and the dulling of his early faith. Beatrice lives and moves and has her ever more uplifted being as the reality as well as symbol of Dante’s thoughts of life. With all first love’s idealism, he loved a girl; then she, having passed from earth, becomes the inspiration and object of address of the young maker of sonnets and canzoni, who with such intellectual preciosity was intent on building these verses of fine-spun sentiment. Thereafter, when he is in darker mood, she does not altogether leave him, whatever variant attitudes his thought and temper take. And at last the yearning self-fulfilments of his renewed life draw together in the Beatrice of the Commedia.
It is very beautiful, and the growth, as well as work, of genius; but it is not strange. For there is no bound to the idealizing of the love which first transfuses a youth’s nature with a mortal golden flame, and awakens it to new understanding. Out of whatever of experience of life and joy and sorrow may come to the man, this first love may still vivify itself anew—often in dreams—and become again living and beautiful, in tears, and will awaken new perceptions and disclose further vistas of the intelligenza nuova which love never ceases to impart to him who has loved.
Dante’s mind was always turning from the obvious sense-actuality of the fact to its symbolism; which held the truer reality. With such a man it is not strange that the beloved and adored woman, the love of whom was virtue and enlightenment, should, when dead to earth, become that divine wisdom which opens Heaven to the lover who would follow, for all eternity, whither his beloved has so surely gone. No, it was not strange, but only as wonderful as all the works of God, that she who while living had been the spring of virtue of all kinds and meanings in the poet’s breast, should after death become the emblem, even the reality, of that whereby man is taught how to win his heavenly salvation. Passage after passage in the Purgatorio and Paradiso show that Beatrice is this divina scientia, and yet has never ceased to be one whom the poet loves.[751]
Thus it is clear that mediaeval development converges at last in Dante. He, or his Commedia, might be the final Summa, were not he, or rather it, the final poem. Man and work include the emotions and the intellectual interests of the Middle Ages, embracing what had been known,—Physics, Astronomy, Politics, History, Pagan Mythology, Christian Theology,—all bent and moulded at last to the matter of the book. Not the contents of the Commedia is Dante’s own, but the poem itself—that is his creation.
Yet even the poem itself was a climax long led up to. The power of its feeling had been preparing in the conceptions, even in the reasonings, which through the centuries had been gaining ardour as they became part of the entire natures of men and women. Thus had mediaeval thought become emotionalized and plastic and living in poetry and art. Otherwise, even Dante’s genius could not have fused the contents of mediaeval thought into a poem. How many passages in the Commedia illustrate this—like the lovely picture of Lia moving in the flowering meadow, with her fair hands making her a garland. The twenty-third canto of the Paradiso, telling of the triumph of Christ and the Virgin, yields a larger illustration; and within it, as a very concrete lyric instance, floats that flower of angelic love, the song of Gabriel circling the Lady of Heaven with its melody, and giving quintessential utterance to the love and adoration which the Middle Ages had intoned to the Virgin. Yes, if it be Dante’s genius, it is also the gathering emotion of the centuries, which lifts the last cantos of the Paradiso from glory to glory, and makes this closing singing of the Commedia such supreme poetry. Nor is it the emotional element alone that reaches its final voice in Dante. Passage after passage of the Paradiso is the apotheosis of scholastic thought and ways of stating it, the very apotheosis, for example, of those harnessed phrases in which the line of great scholastics had endeavoured to put in words the universalities of substance and accident and the absolute qualities of God.
Yet one more feature of Dante’s typifying inclusiveness of the past. Its elements exist in him at first without conscious opposition and yet not subordinated one to another, the less worthy to those of eternal validity. Then conflict arises; the mediaeval Psychomachia awakes in Dante. Evidently he who wrote the Convito after the Vita Nuova, had not continued spiritually undisturbed. Had there come dullings of his early faith? Did his mind seek too exclusive satisfaction in knowledge? Had he possibly swerved a little from some high intention? The facts are veiled. Dante wears neither his mind nor his heart upon his sleeve. Yet a reconcilement was attained by him, though perhaps he had to fetch it out of Hell. He achieved it in his great poem, which in its long making made the poet into the likeness of itself. Fitness for salvation is the ultimate criterion with Dante respecting the elements of mortal life, as it had been through the Middle Ages. And the Commedia—truly the Divina Commedia—while it presents the scheme of salvation for universal man, is the achieved salvation of the poet.
INDEX
Note.—Of several references to the same matter the more important are shown by heavy type.