CROCE ON DANTE.*

Tam first sensation of the reasonable lover of poetry on receiving another book on Dante is one of oppression ; he feels that yet another foot has been added to the wall of learning which excludes the plain and honest reader from the garden of Dante's poetry, But in the case of the present contribution to Dante-literature his fears are groundless, for as regards learned commentary Signor Croce's book is a destruction of old barriers and not an

addition to them.

One of the most striking characteristics of Croce, both as philosopher and critic, is a passion for order and precision. He is perpetually defining and disentangling confused meanings and methods, tidying and straightening the paths of the mind. For this reason, even if there were no other, Dante is for him an especially appropriate subject, for no poet has been so muffled and swaddled and entombed in inessentials. " Philosophical, ethical, andreligious interpretation of Dante's work," writesCroce, " began in his own time with the notaries, friars, and pro- fessors of the university, and with the sons themselves of the

Poet . .

Laborious and largely useless commentaries accumulated during • The Poetry of Dante. By Benedetto Croce. London : Allen and Unwin. 1108. 64. net.] the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and solemn exegesis from scholars of all nations from the seventeenth cen- Aury down to the present day. A lull occurred from early in the sixteenth to late in the seventeenth century, but the last ten years have made up for this by a redoubled torrent of Dante- literature—the largest yet known. It is hardly to be wondered at if, in reaction against this surfeit, certain Dante lovers should nowadays recommend that we should read not the commen- taries but—Dante himself, and the fact that this should be put forward as a bright idea is a comical indication of the pass to which things have come. This suggestion, however, is the result of pardonable irritation rather. than of perfect common sense, for Dante cannot be read entirely without interpretation ; but the advice to throw away the commentaries, says Croce, " is good whenever (and the case frequently presents itself) instead of supplying only the data useful towards the historico- aesthetic interpretation, they exhibit things that are inopportune and have no connexion with the subject. No one can read Dante without adequate preparation and culture, without the necessary mediation of philology. But the mediation should lead to our finding ourselves with Dante as man to man, or to placing us in immediate relation with the poetry."

Dante's greatness as a poet has resulted in two classes of error : the deification of Dante himself as an original genius in every department of art or science which he approached, and the application to his poetry of a mass of criticism not appropriate to poetry as such. Examples of the first are the claims that Dante is a great poet in his most youthful verses, a great political scientist in the "De Monarchia," a great philologist in the "De Vulgari Eloquentia," and elsewhere a great metaphysician and paoralist. Assertions of this kind are the result simply of ignorance of the contemporary thought and writings in those fields. " In his early poetry," says Croce, " Dante is moving with the themes and tendencies common to the literature of his time, which he does not greatly alter or Subvert by the introduction of anything new and original. He is lovingly occupied with details, and only here and there brings in an idea of his own, or an image that is wholly fresh and direct. What is marvellous in this ? Dante, too, was once young and cultivated the literature of youth ; Dante, too, sought his way, and Dante, too, may have thought he had found it and rejoiced in the fact, when in reality he had only followed an agreeable footpath or byway, which did not lead to his appointed goal . . ."

And Croce goes on to deal with the school of poets to which the young Dante had attached himself and with the antecedents of that school. Of the other works just mentioned, beginning with the "De Monarchia," Croce writes ;— " The much praised conception of a world monarchy with universal peace proves to have been a pious hope entertained in ages. The other original idea believed to be discoverable in it, the idea of a lay state, proves to be only a dualism of the spiritual and temporal powers, implying due reverence for the former by the latter, and ultimately a certain subordination in fact the ` De Monarchia ' is rather the work of a publicist that: of a political scientist, although it reveals in its very contra- dictions the difficulties and the expedients in which the mind of the Middle Ages was engaged, and which paved the way for the future political science of Machiavelli. Approximately the same is to be said of the De Vulgari Eloquentia,' which did not inaugurate modem philology, though it is a work of great importance for the account of the various dialects of Italy which it contains. Modem philology is due, on the contrary, to modern historical sentiment. The 'De Eloquentia' contains nothing of a revolutionary character or even of importance for the philosophy of language. It is to be looked upon as a docu- ment of value for the study of the artistic formation of Dante. . . ."

The other kind of error which has accumulated round the poetry of Dante is what Croce calls " allotrious " criticism, criticism, that is, which discovers in Dante's poetry aspects which, from the poetical point of view, are without significance. Dante does not differ from other poets except as regards quantity, in having a mass of interesting unpoetioal details in his poetry— philosophical, ethical, religious and other, each of which is, of course, a legitimate hunting-ground in itself but not as an aspect of poetry. It is when criticism which purports to be poetry- criticism encumbers itself with these foreign elements that confusion and misrepresentation result. Those who have read Croce's Aesthetic are familiar with the swift, dissecting logic with which he separates and removes accretions of this sort. The following passage deals with the function of philosophy in poetry : " In the history of philosophy the doctrines of Dante must be rethought in their logic and dialectic and linked with anterior and posterior doctrines, in such a way as to cause their truth and error to become apparent and to make clear the place they held and the function they exercised in the general development of thought. But in the history of poetry, as in the simple reading and enjoyment of poetry, this does not matter. Were it introduced it would cause disturbance, because these doctrines are there, not in so far as thought, but. only in so far as they are imagined, and cannot therefore be dialecticized as true and false. They should be known, but in the same way as we know a myth or fable, or any ether fact, that is to say, as elements or parts of poetry, from which and not from logic they derive their significance."

Similarly, the correctness or otherwise of a poet's use of classical myth or tradition is, poetically, without importance..

" Dante, either ill-informed or forgetful, may have confused the characters of Cato of Utica and Cato the Censor ; but the figure of the guardian of Purgatory is not the fruit of a confusion, it is a poetical creation."

To anyone who has given any thought to the nature of poetry such a statement may seem a truism, but there are many facts, obvious in the case of other poets, which in the case of Dante, smothered beneath his monument of commentary, need to be reasserted emphatically.

The greater part of Croce's study is devoted, naturally, to " The Divine Comedy." In that work, he maintains, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise—the representation of other-world—are not " the intrinsic subject of the poem, its generative or dominant motive," for Dante was not a mystic or an ascetic who hated the world, but a man keenly and personally interested in life. " Upon the, real world," says Croce, " in his emotional, imagination, the other world did not super- impose itself, but on the contrary formed part of one single world with it, the world of his spiritual interest. Here both had a share, the real world perhaps a larger share than the other, certainly not a smaller one, so that the other could not in any sense overcome, or enslave it."

Dante being, then, a poet with a passionate interest in life, we should read him, says Croce, ingenuously, troubling little about the other world, the allegories, the moral divisions, but enjoying " the poetic representations, in which all the poet's multiform passion is condensed, purified and expressed." Such a method of approach does not limit or detract from the poetry.

" It may, and will be said that much of Dante is thus lost. But the opposite is true, we obtain even more of him, the con- templation of him as a supreme poet is increased in intensity. It may, and has been said also, that Dante is thus profaned, his religious thought being abstracted. But neither is this true. Only those thoughts, whether political or religious, or whatever else they may be, are removed, or rather set aside, which have not been translated by him into his poetry."

Croce's detailed criticism of " TheDivine Comedy" is trenchant and clear-sighted. He does not hesitate, for instance, to stigmatize the opening canto as laboured and obscure : those three mysterious animals which have provoked so much mental stress and fanciful ingenuity are a poetic failure.

" The imagination tries to satisfy itself with the representation of a road, of a danger, of succour, but no sooner is it moved and excited than it is driven to a different representation, this time of a soul-history. Expressed in images, as we find it in the work of other artists, this may be beautiful too. But here the imagination is driven away from it because the history is rather confused than made clear by the images employed."

Such criticism as that is wise, healthy, and refreshing ; and throughout the study, in spite of his evident reverence for Dante, Croce never does him the disservice to condone his failures. In consequence, we are given an =obscured impression of Dante's essential greatness as a poet.

Like all good criticism, Croce's study is not valuable only for what he has to say about Dante, but also for his many wise pro- nouncements on the nature of poetry in general. So when he deals with the statements that Dante is concerned not with the present but the past, and that he is supremely " objective," he refutes them in words whose scope includes all poetry. Beginning with the first assertion, he replies :- " What does this abstract distinction amount to ? In Dante all the emotions are restrained, the particular is subjected to the universal ; that is true enough. But it is none the less true that his powerful expression is, like all poetry, a representation of movement, of the kinetic rather than the static) quality in things. It is a common saying that Dante is supremely ' objective. Yet no poetry is ever objective, and Dante, as we know, is supremely subjective, always himself. Evidently ` objectivity ' is here a vague metaphor for the absence of discord in his conception of the world and his clear-cut presentation."

Mr. Ainslie's translation is a great improvement on his render- ing of the book of essays called Ariocto, Shakespeare and Cor- neille : indeed, we have little other fault to find with it than that the quotations from Dante are given in English and without references. That this is a very definite fault is hardly deniable. It was scarcely necessary, we think, to give an English version of the quotations at all, but in any ease the original should have been given in the text and the translations, if they were con- sidered necessary, confined to footnotes. Some day, perhaps, far. Ainslie will present Croce to English readers in a form free from any imperfections.