The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

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 formulæ, 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 kenFrom 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 fonteChe spande di parlar sì 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,

sì 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 boreLong 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 Ægypto.” 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 avantePer abbracciarmi con sì 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 IInstinctively 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 Æneid, where Æneas 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 toglieMemoria o uso all’ amoroso canto,Che mi solea quetar tutte mie voglie,Di ciò ti piaccia consolare alquantoL’anima mia, che con la sua personaVenendo qui, è affannata tanto.If by new dispensation not deprivedOf the remembrance of belovëd songWherewith you used to soothe my restlessness,I pray you now a little while assuageMy spirit, which, since burdened with the bodyIn journeying here, is wearied utterly.

Quickly comes the melodious response:

“Amor che nella mente mi ragiona,”Cominciò egli allor sì dolcemente,Che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona.Lo mio Maestro, ed io, e quella genteCh’eran con lui, parevan sì contenti,Com’a nessun toccasse altro la mente.“Love that holds high discourse within mind,”With such sweet tenderness he thus beganThat still the sweetness lingers in my ear.Virgil, and I, and that uncarnal groupThat 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,Perchè assaliti son da maggior cura;Così vid’io quella masnada frescaLasciar il canto, e fuggir ver la costa,Com’uom che va, nè 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 dreadA sudden scared, forthway desert the meal,Since by more strong anxiety assailed,So saw I that new-landed companyForsake 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,Sì che remo non vuol, nè altro veloChe l’ale sue, tra liti sì 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 Cæsar and the fortunate Augustus; that he was a poet —Poeta fui– sang of the just and right-minded son of Anchises, the pious Æneas, 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 lassù 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 là, di giù, 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 lacrymæ 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: