How can I dismiss the comedy of that day without one word concerning its immortal tragedy,—Socrates, the divine man, compared and comparable to Christ, chained in his dungeon and condemned to die? The most blameless life could not save that sacred head. Its illumination, in which we sit here to-day, drew to it the shafts of superstition, malice, and wickedness. The comic poet might present on the stage such pictures of the popular deities as would make the welkin ring with the roar of laughter. This was not impiety. But Socrates, showing no disrespect to these idols of the current persuasion, only daring to discern beyond them God in his divineness, truth in her awful beauty,—he must die the death of the profane.
It is a bitter story, surely, but "it must needs be that offences come." Where should we be to-day if no one in human history had loved high doctrine well enough to die for it? At such cost were these great lessons given us. How can we thank God or man enough for them?
The athletics of human thought are the true Olympian games. Human error is wise and logical in its way. It confronts its antagonist with terrific weapons; it seizes and sways him with a Titanic will force. It knows where to attack, and how. It knows the spirit that would be death to it, could that spirit prevail. It closes in the death grapple; the arena is red with the blood of its victim, but from that blood immortal springs a new world, a new society.
One word, in conclusion, about the Greek language. Valuable as translations are, they can never, to the student, take the place of originals. I have stumbled through these works with the lamest knowledge of Greek, and with no one to help me. I have quoted from admirable renderings of them into English. Yet, even in such delicate handling as that of Frere, the racy quality of the Greek phrase evaporates, like some subtle perfume; while the music of the grand rhythm, which the ear seems able to get through the eye, is lost.
The Greek tongue belongs to the history of thought. The language that gives us such distinctions as nous and logos, as gy and kosmos, has been the great pedagogue of our race, has laid the foundations of modern thought. Let us, by all means, help ourselves with Frere, with Jowett, and a multitude of other literary benefactors. But let us all get a little Greek on our own account, for the sake of our Socrates and of our Christ. And as the great but intolerant Agassiz had it for his motto that "species do not transmute," let this school have among its mottoes this one: "True learning does not de-Hellenize."
THE great office of ethics and æsthetics is the reconciliation of God and man; that is, of the divine and disinterested part of human nature with its selfish and animal opposite.
This opposition exists, primarily, in the individual; secondarily, in the society formed out of individuals. Human institutions typify the two, with their mutual influence and contradictions. The church represents the one; the market, the other. The battle-field and the hospital, the school and the forum, are further terms of the same antithesis. Nature does so much for the man, and the material she furnishes is so indispensable to all the constructions which we found upon it, that the last thing a teacher can afford to do is to undervalue her gifts. When critical agencies go so far as to do this, revolution is imminent: Nature reasserts herself.
Equally impotent is Nature where institutions do not supply the help of Art. When this state of things perseveres, she dwindles instead of growing. She becomes meagre, not grandiose. Men hunt, but do not cultivate. Women drudge and bear offspring, but neither comfort nor inspire.
Let us examine a little into what Nature gives, and into what she does not give. In the domain of thought and religion, people dispute much on this head, and are mostly ranged in two parties, of which one claims for her everything, while the other allows her nothing.
In this controversy, we can begin with one point beyond dispute. Nature gives the man, but she certainly does not give the clothes. Having received his own body, he has to go far and work hard in order to cover it.
Nature again scarcely gives human food. Roots, berries, wild fruit, and raw flesh would not make a very luxurious diet for the king of creation. Even this last staple Nature does not supply gratis, and the art of killing is man's earliest discovery in the lesson of self-sustenance. So Death becomes the succursal of life. The sense of this originates, first, the art of hunting; secondly, the art of war.
Nature gives the religious impulse, originating in the further pole of primal thought. The alternation of night and day may first suggest the opposition of things seen and not seen. The world exists while the man sleeps—exists independently of him. Sleep and its dreams are mysterious to the waking man. His first theology is borrowed from this conjunction of invisible might and irrational intellection.
But Nature does not afford the church. Art does this, laboring long and finishing never,—coming to a platform of rest, but coming at the same time to a higher view, inciting to higher effort. Temple after temple is raised. Juggernaut, Jove, Jesus! India does not get beyond Juggernaut. Rome could not get beyond Jove. Christendom is far behind Jesus. In all religions, Art founds on Nature, and aspires to super-nature. In all, Art asserts the superiority of thought over unthought, of measure over excess, of conscience over confidence. The latest evangel alone supplies a method of popularizing thought, of beautifying measure, of harmonizing conscience, and is, therefore, the religion that uses most largely from the race, and returns most largely to it.
Time permits me only a partial review of this great system of gifts and deficiencies. The secret of progress seems an infinitesimal seed, dropped in some bosoms to bear harvest for all. Seed and soil together give the product which is called genius. But genius is only half of the great man. No one works so hard as he does to obtain the result corresponding to his natural dimensions and obligations. The gift and the capacity to employ it are simply boons of Nature. The resolution to do so, the patience and perseverance, the long tasks bravely undertaken and painfully carried through—these come of the individual action of the moral man, and constitute his moral life. The wonderfully clever people we all know, who fill the society toy-shop with what is needed in the society workshop, are people who have not consummated this resolution, who have not had this bravery, this perseverance. Death does not waste more of immature life than Indolence wastes of immature genius. The law of labor in ethics and æsthetics corresponds to the energetic necessities of hygiene, and is the most precious and indispensable gift of one generation to its successors.
In ethics, Nature supplies the first half, but Religion, or the law of duty, supplies the other. Nature gives the enthusiasm of love, but not the tender and persevering culture of friendship, which carries the light of that tropical summer into the winter of age, the icy recesses of death.
Art has no need to intervene in order to bring together those whom passion inspires, whom inclination couples. But in crude Nature, passion itself remains selfish, brutal, and short-lived.
The tender and grateful recollection of transient raptures, the culture and growth of generous sympathies, resulting in noble co-operation—Art brings these out of Nature by the second birth, of which Christ knew, and at which Nicodemus marvelled.
Nature gives the love of offspring. Human parents share the passionate attachment of other animals for their young. With the regulation of this attachment Art has much to do. You love the child when it delights you by day; you must also love it when it torments you at night. This latter love is not against Nature, but Conscience has to apply the whip and spur a little, or the mother will take such amusement as the child can afford, and depute to others the fatigues which are its price.
A graver omission yet Nature makes. She does not teach children to reverence and cherish their parents when the relation between them reverses itself in the progress of time, and those who once had all to give have all to ask. Moses was not obliged to say: "Parents, love your children." But he was obliged to say: "Honor thy father and thy mother," in all the thunder of the Decalogue. The gentler and finer spirits value the old for their useful council and inestimable experience.
You know to-day; but your father can show you yesterday, bright with living traditions which history neglects and which posterity loses. We do not profit as we might by this source of knowledge. Elders question the young for their instruction. Young people, in turn, should question elders on their own account, not allowing the personal values of experience to go down to the grave unrealized. But Youth is cruel and remorseless. The young, in their fulness of energy, in their desire for scope and freedom, are often in unseemly haste to see the old depart.
Here Religion comes in with strong hands to moderate the tyrannous impulse, the controversy of the green with the ripe fruit. All religions agree in this intervention. The worship of ancestors in the Confucian ethics shows this consciousness and intention. The aristocratic traditions of rank and race are an invention to the same end. Vanity, too, will often lead a man to glorify himself in the past and future, as well as in the present.
Still, the instinct to get rid of elders is a feature in unreclaimed nature. It shows the point at which the imperative suggestions of personal feeling stop,—the spot where Nature leaves a desert in order that Art may plant a garden. "Why don't you give me a carriage, now?" said an elderly wife to an elderly husband. "When we married, you would scarcely let me touch the ground with my feet. I need a conveyance now far more than I did then." "That was the period of my young enthusiasm," replied the husband. The statement is one of unusual candor, but the fact is one of not unusual occurrence.
I think that in the present study I have come upon the true and simple sense of the parable of the talents. Of every human good, the initial half is bestowed by Nature. But the value of this half is not realized until Labor shall have acquired the other half. Talents are one thing: the use of them is another. The first depend on natural conditions; the second, on moral processes. The greatest native facilities are useless to mankind without the discipline of Art. So in an undisciplined life, the good that is born with a man dwindles and decays. The sketch of childhood, never filled out, fades in the objectless vacancy of manhood; and from the man is "taken away even that which he seemeth to have." Not judicial vengeance this, but inevitable consequence.
Education should clearly formulate this problem: Given half of a man or woman, to make a whole one. This, I need not say, is to be done by development, not by addition. Kant says that knowledge grows per intus susceptionem, and not per appositionem. The knowledges that you adjoin to memory do not fill out the man unless you reach, in his own mind, the faculty that generates thought. A single reason perceived by him either in numbers or in speech will outweigh in importance all the rules which memory can be taught to supply. With little skill and much perseverance, Education hammers upon the man until somewhere she strikes a nerve, and the awakened interest leads him to think out something for himself. Otherwise, she leaves the man a polite muddle, who makes his best haste to forget facts in forms, and who cancels the enforced production of his years of pedagogy by a lifelong non-production.
What Nature is able to give, she does give with a wealth and persistence almost pathetic. The good gifts afloat in the world which never take form under the appropriate influence, the good material which does not build itself into the structures of society,—you and I grieve over these sometimes. And here I come upon a doctrine which Fourier, I think, does not state correctly. He maintains that inclinations which appear vicious and destructive in society as at present constituted would become highly useful in his ideal society. I should prefer to state the matter thus: The given talent, not receiving its appropriate education, becomes a negative instead of a positive, an evil instead of a good. Here we might paraphrase the Scripture saying, and affirm that the stone which is not built into the corner becomes a stumbling-block for the wayfarer to fall over. So great mischief lies in those uneducated, unconsecrated talents! This cordial companion becomes a sot. This could-be knight remains a prize-fighter. This incipient mathematician does not get beyond cards or billiards. This clever mechanic picks locks and robs a bank, instead of endowing one.
Modern theories of education do certainly point toward the study, by the party educating, of the party appointed to undergo education. But this education of others is a very complex matter, not to be accomplished unless the educator educates himself in the light afforded him by his pupils. The boys or girls committed to you may study what you will: be sure, first of all, that you study them to your best ability. Education in this respect is forced to a continual rectification of her processes. The greatest power and resource are needed to awaken and direct the energies of the young. No speech in Congress is so important as are the lessons in the primary school; no pulpit has so great a field of labor as the Sunday school. The Turkish government showed a cruel wisdom of instinct when it levied upon Greece the tribute of Christian children to form its corps of Janissaries. It recognized alike the Greek superiority of race, and the invaluable opportunity of training afforded by childhood.
The work, then, of education demands an investigation of the elements which Nature has granted to the individual, with the view of matching that in which he is wanting with that which he has. I have heard of lovers who, in plighting their faith, broke a coin in halves, whose matching could only take place with their meeting. In true education as in the love, these halves should correspond.
"What hast thou?" is, then, the first question of the educator. His second is, "What hast thou not?" The third is, "How can I help thee to this last?"
To my view, the man remains incomplete his whole life long. Most incomplete is he, however, in the isolations of selfishness and of solitude. Study is not necessarily solitude, but ideal society in the highest grade in which human beings can enjoy it. It is, nevertheless, dangerous to suffer the ideal to distance the real too largely. Desk-dreamers end by being mental cripples. Divorce of this sort is not wholesome, nor holy. Life is a perpetual marriage of real and ideal, of endeavor and result. The solitary departure of physical death is hateful, as putting asunder what God has joined together.
Must I go hence as lonely as I was born? My mother brought me into the infinite society: I go into the absolute dissociation. I go many steps further back than I came,—to the ur mother, the common matrix which bears plants, animals, and human creatures. Where, oh where, shall I find that infinite companionship which my life should have earned for me? My friendship has been hundred-handed. My love has consumed the cities of the plain, and built the heavenly Jerusalem. And I go, without lover or friend, in a box, into an earth vault, from which I cannot even turn into violets and primroses in any recognizable and conscious way.
The completeness of our severance or deficiency may be, after all, the determining circumstance of our achievement. What I would have is cut so clean off from what I have as to leave no sense of wholeness in my continuing as I am. Something of mine is mislaid or lost. It is more mine than anything that I have, but where to find it? Who has it? I reach for it under this bundle and under that. After my life's trial, I find that I have pursued, but not possessed it. What I have gained of it in the pursuit, others must realize. I bequeath, and cannot take it with me. Did Dante regard the parchments of his "Divina Commedia" with a sigh, foreseeing the long future of commentators and booksellers, he himself absolving them beforehand by the quitclaim of death? You and I may also grieve to part from certain unsold volumes, from certain manuscripts of doubtful fate and eventuality. Oh! out of this pang of death has come the scheme and achievement of immortality. "Non omnis moriar." "I am the resurrection and the life." "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body."
This tremendous leap and feat of the human soul across the bridge of dark negativity would never have been made without the sharp spur and bitter pang of death. "My life food for worms? No; never. I will build and bestow it in arts and charities, spin it in roads and replicate it in systems; but to be lopped from the great body of humanity, and decay like a black, amputated limb? My manhood refuses. The infinite hope within me generates another life, realizable in every moment of my natural existence, whose moments are not in time, whose perfect joys are not measured by variable duration. Thus every day can be to me full of immortality, and the matter of my corporeal decease full of indifference, as sure to be unconscious."
I think this attainment the first, fundamental to all the others. We console the child with a simple word about heaven. He is satisfied, and feels its truth. How to attain this deathlessness is the next problem whose solution he will ask of us. We point him to the plane on which he will roll; for our life is a series of revolutions,—no straight-forward sledding, but an acceleration by ideal weight and propulsion, through which our line becomes a circle, and our circle itself a living wheel of action, creating out of its mobile necessity a past and a future.
The halfness of the individual is literally shown in the division of sex. The Platonic fancy runs into an anterior process, by which what was originally one has been made two. We will say that the two halves were never historically, though always ideally, one. Here Art comes to the assistance of Nature. The mere contrast of sex does not lift society out of what is animal and slavish. The integrity of sex relation is not to be found in a succession or simultaneity of mates, easily taken and as easily discarded. This great value of a perfected life is to be had only through an abiding and complete investment,—the relations of sex lifted up to the communion of the divine, unified by the good faith of a lifetime, enriched by a true sharing of all experience. This august partnership is Marriage, one of the most difficult and delicate achievements of society. Too sadly does its mockery afflict us in these and other days. Either party, striving to dwarf the other, dwarfs itself. This mystic selfhood, inexpressible in literal phrases, is at once the supreme of Nature and the sublime of institutions. The ideal human being is man and woman united on the ideal plane. The church long presented and represented this plane. The state is hereafter to second and carry out its suggestions. The ideal assembly, which we figure by the communion of the saints, is a coming together of men and women in the highest aims and views to which Humanity can be a party.
Passing from immediate to projected consciousness, I can imagine expression itself to spring from want. The sense of the incompleteness of life in itself and in each of its acts calls for this effort to show, at least, what life should be,—to vindicate the shortcoming of action out of the fulness of speech. This that eats and sleeps is so little of the man! These processes are so little what he understands by life! Listen; let him tell you what life means to him.
And so sound is differentiated into speech, and hammered into grammar, and built up into literature—all of whose creations are acoustic palaces of imagination. For the eye in reading is only the secondary sense: the written images the spoken word.
How the rhythm of the blood comes to be embodied in verse is more difficult to trace. But the justification of Poetry is obvious. When you have told the thing in prose, you have made it false by making it literal. Poesy lies a little to complete the truth which Honesty lacks skill to embody. Her artifices are subtle and wonderful. You glance sideways at the image, and you see it. You look it full in the face, and it disappears.
The plastic arts, too. This beautiful face commands me to paint from it a picture twice as beautiful. Its charm of Nature I cannot attain. My painting must not try for the edge of its flesh and blood forms, the evanescence of its color, the light and shadow of its play of feature. But something which the beautiful face could not know of itself the artist knows of it. That deep interpretation of its ideal significance marks the true master, who is never a Chinese copyist. Some of the portraits that look down upon you from the walls of Rome and of Florence calmly explain to you a whole eternity. Their eyes seem to have seized it all, and to hold it beyond decay. This is what Art gives in the picture,—not simply what appears and disappears, but that which, being interpreted, abides with us.
Who shall say by what responsive depths the heights of architecture measure themselves? The uplifted arches mirror the introspective soul. So profoundly did I think, and plot, and contrive! So loftily must my stone climax balance my cogitations! To such an amount of prayer allow so many aisles and altars. The pillars of cloisters image the brotherhood who walked in the narrow passages; straight, slender, paired in steadfastness and beauty, there they stand, fair records of amity. Columns of retrospect, let us hope that the souls they image did not look back with longing upon the scenes which they were called upon to forsake.
Critical belief asks roomy enclosures and windows unmasked by artificial impediments. It comes also to desire limits within which the voice of the speaker can reach all present. Men must look each other in the face, and construct prayer or sermon with the human alphabet. We are glad to see the noble structures of older times maintained and renewed; but we regret to see them imitated in our later day. (St. Peter's is, in all save dimension, a church of Protestant architecture—so is St. Paul's, of London.) The present has its own trials and agonies, its martyrdoms and deliverances. With it, the old litanies must sink to sleep; the more Christian of to-day efface the most Christian of yesterday. The very attitude of saintship is changed. The practical piety of our time looks neither up nor down, but straight before it, at the men and women to be relieved, at the work to be done. Religion to-day is not "height nor depth nor any other creature," but God with us.
There is a mystic birth and Providence in the succession of the Arts; yet are they designed to dwell together, each needing the aid of all. People often speak of sculpture as of an art purely and distinctively Grecian. But the Greeks possessed all the Arts, and more, too,—the substratum of democracy and the sublime of philosophy. No natural jealousy prevails in this happy household. The Arts are not wives, of whom one must die before another has proper place. They are sisters, whose close communion heightens the charm of all by the excellence of each. The Christian unanimity is as favorable to Art as to human society.
We may say that the Greeks attained a great perfection in sculpture, and have continued in this art to offer the models of the world.
When the great period of Italian art attained its full splendor, it seemed as if the frozen crystals of Greek sculpture had melted before the fire of Christian inspiration. But this transformation, like the transfiguration of Hindoo deities, did not destroy the anterior in its issue.
The soul of sculpture ripened into painting, but Sculpture, the beautiful mother, still lived and smiled upon her glowing daughter. See Michael Angelo studying the torso! See the silent galleries of the Vatican, where Form holds you in one room, Color presently detaining you in another! And what are our Raphaels, Angelos, making to-day? Be sure they are in the world, for the divine spirit of Art never leaves itself without a witness. But what is their noble task? They are moulding character, embodying the divine in human culture and in human institutions. The Greek sculptures indicate and continue a fitting reverence for the dignity and beauty of the human form; but the reverence for the human soul which fills the world to-day is a holier and happier basis of Art. From it must come records in comparison with which obelisk and pyramid, triumphal arch and ghostly cathedral, shall seem the toys and school appliances of the childhood of the race.
To return to our original problem,—how shall we attain the proper human stature, how add the wanting half to the half which is given?
I answer: By labor and by faith, in which there is nothing accidental or arbitrary. The very world in which we live is but a form, whose spirit, breathing through Nature and Experience, slowly creates its own interpretation, adding a new testament to an old testament, lifting the veil between Truth and Mercy, clasping the mailed hand of Righteousness in the velvet glove of Peace.
The spirit of Religion is the immanence of the divine in the human, the image of the eternal in the transitory, of things infinite in things limited. I have heard endless discussions and vexed statements of how the world came out of chaos. From the Mosaic version to the last rationalistic theory, I have been willing to give ear to these. It is a subject upon which human ingenuity may exercise itself in its allowable leisure. One thing concerns all of us much more; viz., how to get heaven out of earth, good out of evil, instruction out of opportunity.
This is our true life work. When we have done all in this that life allows us, we have not done more than half, the other half lying beyond the pale struggle and the silent rest. Oh! when we shall reach that bound, whatever may be wanting, let not courage and hope forsake us.
DANTE and Beatrice—names linked together by holy affection and high art. Ary Scheffer has shown them to us as in a beatific vision,—the stern spirit which did not fear to confront the horrors of Hell held in a silken leash of meekness by the gracious one through whose intervention he passed unscathed through fire and torment, bequeathing to posterity a record unique in the annals alike of literature and of humanity.
My first studies of the great poet are in the time long past, antedating even that middle term of life which was for him the starting-point of a new inspiration. Yet it seems to me that no part of my life, since that reading, has been without some echo of the "Divine Comedy" in my mind. In the walk through Hell, I strangely believe. Its warnings still admonish me. I see the boat of Charon, with its mournful freight. I pass before the judgment seat of Midas. I see the souls tormented in hopeless flame. I feel the weight of the leaden cloaks. I shrink from the jar of the flying rocks, hurled as weapons. For me, dark Ugolino still feeds upon his enemy. Francesca still mates with her sad lover.
From this hopeless abyss, I emerge to the kindlier pain of Purgatory, whose end is almost Heaven. And of that blessed realm, my soul still holds remembrance—of its solemn joy, of its unfolding revelation. The vision of that mighty cross in which all the stars of the highest heaven range themselves is before me, on each fair cluster the word "Cristo" outshining all besides.
Among my dearest recollections is that of an Easter sermon devised by me for an ignorant black congregation in a far-off West Indian isle, in which I told of this vision of the cross, and tried to make it present to them. But this grateful remembrance which I have carried through so many years does not regard the poet alone. In the world's great goods, as in its great evils, a woman has her part. And this poem, which has been such a boon to humanity, has for its central inspiration the memory of a woman.
In the prologue, already we hear of her. It is she who sends her poet his poet-guide. When he shrinks from the painful progress which lies before him, and deems the companionship even of Virgil an insufficient pledge of safety, the words of his lady, repeated to him by his guide, restore his sinking courage, and give him strength for his immortal journey.
Here are those words of Beatrice, spoken to Virgil, and by him brought to Dante:—
| O courteous shade of Mantua! thou whose fame |
| Yet lives and shall live long as Nature lasts! |
| A friend, not of my fortune, but myself, |
| On the wide desert in his road has met |
| Hindrance so great that he through fear has turned. |
| Assist him: so to me will comfort spring. |
| I who now bid thee on this errand forth |
| Am Beatrice. |
Who and what was Beatrice, whose message gave Dante strength to explore the fearful depths of evil and its punishment? This we may learn elsewhere.
Dante, passionate poet in his youth, has left to posterity a work unique of its sort,—the romance of a childish love which grew with the growth of the lover. In his adolescence, its intensity at times overpowers his bodily senses. The years that built up his towering manhood built up along with it this ideal womanhood, which, whether realized or realizable, or neither, was the highest and holiest essence which his imagination could infuse into a human form. The sweet shyness of that first peep at the Beautiful, of that first thrill of the master chord of being, is rendered immortal for us by the candor of this great master. We can see the shamefaced boy, taken captive by the dazzling vision of Beatrice, veiling the features of his unreasonable passion, and retiring to his own closet, there to hide his joy at having found on earth a thing so beautiful.
Dante's love for Beatrice dates from the completion of his own ninth year, and the beginning of hers. He first sees her at a May party, at the house of her father, Folco Polinari. Her apparel, he says, "was of a most noble tincture, a subdued and becoming crimson; and she wore a girdle and ornaments becoming her childish years." At the sight of her, his heart began to beat with painful violence. A master thought had taken possession of him, and that master's name was well known to him, as how should it not have been in that day when, if ever in this world, Love was crowned lord of all? Urged by this tyrant, from time to time, to go in search of Beatrice, he beheld in her, he says, a demeanor so praiseworthy and so noble as to remind him of a line of Homer, regarding Helen of Troy:—
"From heaven she had her birth, and not from mortal clay."
These glimpses of her must have been transient ones, for the poet tells us that his second meeting, face to face, with Beatrice occurred nine years after their first encounter. Her childish charm had now ripened into maidenly loveliness. He beholds her arrayed in purest white, walking between two noble ladies older than herself. "As she passed along the street, she turned her eyes toward the spot where I, thrilled through and through with awe, was standing; and in her ineffable courtesy, which now hath its guerdon in everlasting life, she saluted me in such gracious wise that I seemed in that moment to behold the utmost bounds of bliss."
He now begins to dream of her in his sleeping moments, and to rhyme of her in his waking hours. In his first vision, Love appears with Beatrice in his arms. In one hand he holds Dante's flaming heart, upon which he constrains her to feed; after which, weeping, he gathers up his fair burthen and ascends with her to Heaven. This dream seemed to Dante fit to be communicated to the many famous poets of the time. He embodies it in a sonnet, which opens thus:—
| To every captive soul and gentle heart |
| Into whose sight shall come this song of mine, |
| That they to me its matter may divine, |
| Be greeting in Love's name, our master's, sent. |
And now begins for him a season of love-lorn pining and heart-sickness. The intensity of the attraction paralyzes in him the power of approaching its object. His friends notice his altered looks, and ask the cause of this great change in him. He confesses that it is the master passion, but so misleads them as to the person beloved, as to bring upon another a scandal by his feigning. For this he is punished by the displeasure of Beatrice, who, passing him in the street, refuses him that salutation the very hope of which, he says, kindled such a flame of charity within him as to make him forget and forgive every offence and injury.
Love now visits him in his sleep, in the guise of a youth arrayed in garments of exceeding whiteness, and desires him to indite certain words in rhyme, which, though not openly addressed to Beatrice, shall yet assure her of what she partly knows,—that the poet's heart has been hers from boyhood. The ballad which he composes in obedience to his love's command is not a very literal rendering of his story.
He now begins to have many conflicting thoughts about Love, two of which constitute a very respectable antinomy. One of these tells him that the empire of Love is good, because it turns the inclinations of its vassal from all that is base. The opposite thought is: "The empire of Love is not good, since the more absolute the allegiance of his vassal, the more severe and woful are the straits through which he must perforce pass."
These conflicting thoughts sought expression in a sonnet, of which I will quote a part:—
While these uncertainties still possess him, Dante is persuaded by a friend to attend a bridal festivity, where it is hoped that the sight of much beauty may give him great pleasure.
"Why have you brought me among these ladies?" he asks. "In order that they may be properly attended," is the answer.
Small attendance can Dante give upon these noble beauties. A fatal tremor seizes him; he looks up and, beholding Beatrice, can see nothing else. Nay, even of her his vision is marred by the intensity of his feeling. The ladies first wonder at his agitation, and then make merry over it, Beatrice apparently joining in their merriment. His friend, chagrined at his embarrassment, now asks the cause of it; to which question Dante replies: "I have set my foot in that part of life to pass beyond which, with purpose to return, is impossible."
With these words the poet departs, and in his chamber of tears persuades himself that Beatrice would not have joined in the laughter of her friends if she had really known his state of mind. Then follows, naturally, a sonnet:—
| With other ladies thou dost flaunt at me, |
| Nor thinkest, lady, whence doth come the change, |
| What fills mine aspect with a trouble strange |
| When I the wonder of thy beauty see. |
| If thou didst know, thou must, for charity, |
| Forswear the wonted rigor of thine eye. |
With this poetic utterance comes the plain prose question: "Seeing thou dost present an aspect so ridiculous whenever thou art near this lady, wherefore dost thou seek to come into her presence?"
It takes two sonnets to answer this question. He is not the only person who asks it. Meeting with some merry dames, he is thus questioned by her of them who seems "most gay and pleasant of discourse:" "Unto what end lovest thou this lady, seeing that her near presence overwhelms thee?" In reply, he professes himself happy in having words wherewith to speak the praises of his lady, and going thence, determines in his heart to devote his powers of expression to that high theme. He leaves the cramping sonnet now, and expands his thought in the canzone, of which I need only repeat the first line:—
Ladies who have the intellect of Love.
Why the course of this true love never did run smooth, we know not. Beatrice, at the proper age, was given in marriage to Messer Simone dei Bardi. It is thought that she was wedded to him before the occasion on which Dante's love-lorn appearance moved her to a mirth which may have been feigned. Still, the thought of her continues to be his greatest possession, and he and his master, Love, hold many arguments together concerning the bliss and bane of this high fancy. He has great comfort in the general esteem in which his lady is held, and is proud and glad when those who see her passing in the street hasten to get a better view of her. He sees the controlling power of her loveliness in its influence on those around her, who are not thrown into the shade, but brightened, by her radiance.
| Such virtue rare her beauty hath, in sooth |
| No envy stirs in other ladies' breast; |
| But in its light they walk beside her, dressed |
| In gentleness, and love, and noble truth. |
| Her looks whate'er they light on seem to bless; |
| Nor her alone make lovely to the view, |
| But all her peers through her have honor, too. |
Dante was still engaged in interpreting the merits of Beatrice to the world when that most gentle being met the final conflict, and received the crown of immortality. His first feeling is that Florence is made desolate by her loss. He can think of no words but those with which the prophet Jeremiah bewailed the spoiling of Jerusalem: "How doth the city sit desolate!" The princes of the earth, he thinks, should learn the loss of this more than princess. He speaks of her in sonnet and canzone.
The passing of a band of pilgrims in the street suggests to him the thought that they do not know of his sweet saint, nor of her death, and that if they did, they would perforce stop to weep with him:—
| Tell me, ye pilgrims, who so thoughtful go, |
| Musing, mayhap, on what is far away, |
| Come ye from climes so far, as your array |
| And look of foreign nurture seem to shew, |
| That from your eyes no tears of pity flow, |
| As ye along our mourning city stray, |
| Serene of countenance and free, as they |
| Who of her deep disaster nothing know? |
| Oh! she hath lost her Beatrice, her saint, |
| And what of her her co-mates can reveal |
| Must drown with tears even strangers' hearts, perforce. |
On the first anniversary of his lady's death, as he sits absorbed in thoughts of her, he sketches the figure of an angel upon his tablets. Turning presently from his work, he sees near him some gentlemen of his acquaintance, who are watching the movements of his pencil. He answers the interruption thus:
| Into my lonely thoughts that noble dame |
| Whom Love bewails, had entered in the hour |
| When you, my friends, attracted by his power, |
| To see the task that did employ me came. |
Many a sigh of dole escapes his heart, he says,
| But they which came with sharpest pang were those |
| Which said: "O intellect of noble mould, |
| A year to-day it is since thou didst seek the skies." |
We may find, perhaps, a more wonderful proof of his constancy in his stout-hearted resistance to the charms of a beautiful lady who regards him with that intense pity which is akin to love. To her he says:
| Never was Pity's semblance, or Love's hue |
| So wondrously in face of lady shown, |
| That tenderly gave ear to Sorrow's moan |
| Or looked on woful eyes, as shows in you. |
To this new attraction he is on the point of surrendering, when the vision of Beatrice rises before him, as he first saw her,—robed in crimson, and bright with the angelic beauty of childhood. All other thoughts are put to flight by this, and with renewed faith he devotes himself to the memory of Beatrice, hoping to say of her some day "that which hath never yet been said of any lady."
All who have been lovers—and who has not?—must feel, I think, that the "Vita Nuova" is the romance of a true love. The Beatrice of the "Divina Commedia" is this love, and much more. Dante has had a deep and availing experience of life. Statesman and scholar, he has laid his fiery soul upon the world's great anvil, where Fate, with heavy hammering and fiery blowing, has wrought out of him a stern, sad man, so hunted and exiled that the ways of Imagination alone are open to him. In its domain, he calls around him the majestic shadows of those with whom his life has made him familiar. For him, the way to Heaven lies through Hell and Purgatory. Into these regions, the blessed Beatrice cannot come. She sends, however, the poet shade, who seems to her most fit to be his guide. The classic refinement makes evident to him the vulgarity of sin and the logic of its consequences. He surveys the eternal, hopeless punishment, and passes through the cleansing fires of Purgatory, at whose outer verge, a fair vision comes to bless him. Beatrice, in a mystical car, her beauty at first concealed by a veil of flowers which drop from the hands of attendant angels, speaks to him in tones which move his penitential grief.
The high love of his youth thus appears to him as accusing Conscience, which stands to question him with the offended majesty of a loving mother. Through her rebukes, precious in their bitterness, he attains to that view of his own errors without which it would have been impossible for him to forsake them. It is a real orthodox "repentance and conviction of sin" with which the religious renewal of his life begins. Tormented by this cruel retrospect, the poet is mercifully bathed in the waters of forgetfulness, and then, being made a new creature, regains the society of Beatrice.
Seated at the root of the great Tree of Humanity, she bids him take note of the prophetic vision which symbolizes the history of the church. Of the sanctity of the tree, she thus admonishes him:
| This whoso robs, |
| This whoso plucks, with blasphemy of deed |
| Sins against God, who for His use alone |
| Creating, hallowed it. |
Dante drinks now of a stream whose sweetness can never satiate, and from that holy wave returns,
| Regenerate, |
| Pure, and made apt for mounting to the stars. |
It appears to me quite simple and natural that the image of the poet's earthly love, long lost from physical sense, should prompt the awakening of his higher nature, which, obscured, as he confesses, by the disorders of his mortal life, asserts itself with availing authority when Beatrice, the beloved, becomes present to his mind. All progress, all heavenly learning, is thenceforth associated with her. High as he may climb, she always leads him. Where he passes as a stranger, she is at home. Where he poorly guesses, she wholly knows. Nor does he part from her until he has attained the highest point of spiritual vision, where he sees her throned and crowned in immortal glory, and above her, the lovely one of Heaven,—the Virgin Mother of Christ. What he sees after this, he says, cannot be told with mortal tongue.
| Here vigor failed the towering fantasy, |
| But yet the will rolled onward, like a wheel, |
| In even motion, by the love impelled |
| That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars. |
Two opposite points in great authors give us pleasure; viz., the originality of their talent or genius, and the catholicity of their sentiments and interest,—in other words, their likeness and their unlikeness to the average of humanity. We are delighted to find Plato at once so modern and so ancient, his prevision and prophecy needing so little adaptation to make them germane to the wants of our own or of any other time, his grasp of apprehension and comparison so peculiar to himself, so unrivalled by any thinker of any time. In like manner, the mediæval pictures drawn by Dante delight us, and the bold daring of his imagination. At the same time, the perfectly sound and rational common sense of many of his utterances seems familiar from its accordance with the soundest criticism of our own time:—
| Florence within her ancient circle set, |
| Remained in sober, modest quietness. |
| Nor chains had she, nor crowns, nor women decked |
| In gay attire, with splendid cincture bound, |
| More to be gazed at than the form itself. |
| Not yet the daughter to the father brought |
| Fear from her birth, the marriage time and dower |
| Not yet departing from their fitting measure. |
| Nor houses had she, void of household life. |
| Sardanapalus had not haply shown |
| The deeds which may be hid by chamber walls. |
| I saw Bellincion Berti go his way |
| With bone and leather belted. From the glass |
| His lady moved, no paint upon her face. |
| I saw the Lords of Norti and del Vecchio content, |
| Their household dames engaged with spool and spindle. |
The theory of the good old time, we see, is not a modern invention.
Dante inherits the great heart of chivalry, wise before its time in the uplifting of Woman. The wonderful worship of the Virgin Mother, in which are united the two poles of womanhood, completed the ideal of the Divine Human, and cast a new glory upon the sex. Can we doubt that knight and minstrel found a true inspiration in the lady of their heart? A mere pretence or affection is a poor thing to fight for or to sing for. Men will not imperil their lives for what they know to be a lie.
This newly awakened reverence for woman—shall we call it a race characteristic? It was a golden gift to any race. Plato's deep doctrine that all learning is a reminiscence may avail us in questioning this. The human race does not carry the bulk of its knowledge in its hand. Busy with its tools and toys, it forgets its ancestral heirlooms, and leaves unexplored the legacy of the past. But in some mystical way, the treasures lost from remembrance turn up and come to sight again. In the far Caucasus, from which we came, there were glimpses of this ideal wife and mother.
This history, whether real or imaginary, or both, suggests to me the question whether the love which brings together and binds together men and women can in any way typify the supreme affections of the soul? That it was supposed to do so in mediæval times is certain. The sentimental agonies of troubadours and minstrels make it evident. Even the latest seedy sprout of chivalry, Don Quixote, shows us this. Wishing to start upon a noble errand, the succor of oppressed humanity, his almost first requisite is a "lady of his heart," who, in his case, is a mere lay figure upon which he drapes the fantastic weaving of his imagination.
Another question, like unto the first, is this,—whether the heroic mode of loving is or is not a lost art in our days.
That Plato and Socrates should busy themselves with it, that mystics and philosophers should find such a depth of interest in the attraction which one nature exerts upon another, and that, per contra, in our time, this mystical attraction should flatten, or, as singers say, flat out into a decorous observance of rules, assisting a mutual endurance—what does it mean? Is Pan dead, and are the other gods dead with him?
In an age widely, if not deeply, critical, we lose sight of the primitive affections and temperament of our race. Affection's self becomes merged in opinion. We contemplate, we compare, we are not able to covet any but surface distinctions, surface attractions. Even the poets who give us the expression of a lively participation in human instincts are disowned by us. Wordsworth is chosen, and Byron is discarded. We are not too rich with both of them. Inspired Browning—for the man who wrote "Pippa" and "Saul" was inspired—loses himself and his music in the dismal swamp of metaphysical speculation. Just at present, it seems to me that the world has lost one of its noblest leadings; viz., the desire for true companionship. Arid love of pleasure, more arid worship of wealth, paralyze those higher powers of the soul which take hold on friendship and on love. To know those only who can advance your personal objects, be these amusement or ambition; to marry at auction, going, going, for so much,—how can we who have but one human life to live so cheat ourselves out of its real rights and privileges?
Is this a pathological symptom in the body social, produced by a surfeit in the direction of inclination? One might think so, since asceticism has no joylessness comparable to that of the blasted roué or utter worldling. In France, where the bent of romantic literature has been the following of inclination,—from George Sand, who consecrates it, down to the latest scrofulous scribbler, who outrages it,—on the banks of this turbid stream of literature, one constantly meets with the apples of Sodom. "There is no other fruit," say the venders. "You cultivate none other," is the fitting reply.
The world of thought is ever full of problems as contradictory of each other as the antinomies of which I just now made a passing mention. The right interpretation of these riddles is of great moment in our spiritual and intellectual life. The ages and æons of human experience tend, on the whole, to a gradual unification of persuasion and conviction on the part of thinking beings, and much that a prophet breathes into a hopeless blank acquires meaning in the light of succeeding centuries.
This great problem of love continues to be full of contradictory aspects to those who would explore it. We distinguish between divine love and human love, but have yet to decide whether Love absolute is divine or human; for this deity is known to us from all time in two opposite shapes,—as a destructive and as a constructive god. He unmakes the man, he unmakes the woman, sucks up precious years of human life like a sponge, sets Troy ablaze, maddens harmless Io with a stinging gad-fly.
On the other hand, where Love is not, nothing is. Luxurious Solomon praises a dinner of herbs enriched by his presence. All poetry, all doctrine, is founded upon human affection assumed as essential to life, nay, as life itself; for when love of life and its objects exists not, the vital flame flickers feebly, and expires early. In ethics, social and religious, what contradictions do we encounter under this head! From all inordinate and sinful affections, good Lord, deliver us! is a good prayer. But how shall we treat the case when there are no affections at all? We might add a clause to our litany,—From lovelessness and all manner of indifference, good Lord, deliver us! What more direful sentence than to say that a person has no heart? What sin more severely punished than any extravagant action of this same heart?
These wonders of lofty sentiment and high imagination are precious subjects of study. The construction of a great poem, of which the interest is at once intense, various, and sustained, seems to us a work more appropriate to other days than to our own. I remember in my youth a fluent critic who was fond of saying that if Milton had lived in this day of the world, he would not have thought of writing an epic poem. To which another of the same stripe would reply: "If he did write such a poem in these days, nobody would read it." I wonder how long the frisky impatience of our youth will think it worth while to follow even Homer in his long narratives.
More than this sustained power of the imagination, does the heroic in sentiment seem to decrease and to be wanting among us. Those lofty views of human affection and relation which we find in the great poets seem almost foreign to the civilization of to-day. I find in modern scepticism this same impatience of weighty thoughts. He who believes only in the phenomenal universe does not follow a conviction. A fatal indolence of mind prevents him from following any lead which threatens fatigue and difficult labor. Instead of a temple for the Divine, our man of to-day builds a commodious house for himself,—at best, a club-house for his set or circle. And the worst of it is, that he teaches his son to do the same thing.
The social change which I notice to-day as a decline in attachments simply personal is partly the result of a political change which I, for one, cannot deplore. The idea of the state and of society as bodies in which each individual has a direct interest gives to men and women of to-day an enlarged sphere of action and of instruction. The absolutely universal coincidence of the real advantage of the individual with that of the community, always true in itself, and neither now nor at any time fully comprehended, gives the fundamental tone to thought and education to-day. The result is a tendency to generality, to publicity, and a neglect of those relations into which external power and influence do not enter. The action of mind upon mind, of character upon character, outside of public life, is intense, intimate, insensible. Temperament is most valued nowadays for its effect upon multitudes. We wish to be recognized as moving in a wide and exalted sphere. The belle in the ball-room is glad to have it reported that the Prince of Wales admires her. The lady who should grace a lady's sphere pines for the stage and the footlights. Actions and appearances are calculated to be seen of men.
I say no harm of this tendency, which has enfranchised me and many others from the cruel fetters of a narrow and personal judgment. It is safe and happy to have the public for a final court of appeal, and to be able, when an issue is misjudged or distorted, to call upon its great heart to say where the right is, and where the wrong. But let us, in our panorama of wide activities, keep with all the more care these pictures of spirits that have been so finely touched within the limits of Nature's deepest reserve and modesty. This mediæval did not go to dancing-school nor to Harvard College. He could not talk of the fellows and the girls. But from his early childhood, he holds fast the tender remembrance of a beautiful and gracious face. The thought of it, and of the high type of woman which it images, is to him more fruitful of joy and satisfaction than the amusements of youth or the gaieties of the great world. Death removes this beloved object from his sight, but not from his thoughts. Years pass. His genius reaches its sublime maturity. He becomes acquainted with camps and courts, with the learning and the world of his day. But when, with all his powers, he would build a perfect monument to Truth, he takes her perfect measure from the hand of his child-love. The world keeps that work, and will keep it while literature shall last. It has many a subtle passage, many a wonderful picture, but at its height, crowned with all names divine, he has written, as worthy to be remembered with these, the name of Beatrice.
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