The Divine Florentine
Gommedia, or the Divine Vision of Dante Alighieri. In Italian and English. (The Nonesuch Press. £5 15s. 6d.)
4t-T}toti art more worthy than the_Crucifiecl;" said the Renais- sance scholar at Ravenna, taking the tall candles from the High Altar to set them by the tomb of Dante. For the Florentine poet whose supreme work was an imaginative synthesis of the learning and the passion of the Middle Ages Shared with recovered Greeks and Romans the idolatry of Renaissance-Italy. Petratch and .Boccaccio had transmitted the cult of his fierce and tender legend, his epic story of heaven and hell, with its visions that -da7.7.1ed the eyes, its strophes of dwelling music built -up from the faMiliar sirventese. - His spiritual pride was of a Renaissance quality : in the thirteenth century he had loved the beautiful shapes and sweet Voices of antiquity with a cinquecento tenderness : like the new philosophers, he exalted an intellectual love that rose to an 0„gefic rapture, for the chivalric love of Dante, medi4vaI in its wasting intensity, yet sought the heavenly goal Otthe Eros that came grave and fair frOm the Platonic dialogites he was a great personality as Well as a great elitist. Therefore Michelangelo brooded over the Cornmedia and iikade those lost drawings for it, and Leonardo, conSidering- his nfrsterious Anna, was aware, among much else, that so the in-other smiled at her daughter in the core of the Mystic Rose. Botticelli took his point of lead or silver and made the outline gietures for the copy of the great • book ordered by that ftne patron of the arts, Lorenzo's "kinsman, namesake, and Landino lectnred on the text In the Duonio ; and: the finical Magnificent himself sighed that Florence could .not reader intoned the ardent teria rima to the Duchess- at the sunset' hear. In Verona and in Mantua, the Florentine name went
sweetly consonant with the name of Virgil. In Rimini was he remembered ; and by her melancholy shore Ravenna kept his tomb as jealously as the burning mosaics of Justinian.
In England, the fame of Dante grew slowly. Chaucer spoke of the great Italian ; but Chaucer's fair tradition was broken by the Wars of the Roses ; and the Elizabethans, for several reasons, had no lucid notion of the Divine Comedy. Sir Philip Sidney courteously recognized the poet as a heavenly lover, Spenser had read in his work, and Milton, so like and yet so unlike him, had written his name in a copy of the Convivio. As time went on Dante became a famous word, and a tomb to visit on the Grand Tour, while it was observed that the women of Florence still sang his verses through the streets. The Age of Reason found him " Gothick " ; but when it - cultivated a taste for the " horrid," the story of Ugolino became fascinating for translators ; and artists like Reynolds, Fuseli, Flaxman, and Blake, not at his best, did him some wrong. But the Romantic poets read the Divine Comedy atten- tively, and Dante has had considerable devotion since. The Pre-Raphaelites served him well, for Rossetti's Mind dwelt on his earlier life with something like clairvoyance.
I dare say that all the bright young journalists who weekly assure us that some splendid renown is obsolete, will remark presently that nobody now reads the Divine Comedy. The high tradition of literature, however, is maintained by a succession of quiet people who live their lives according to some code of beauty and honour, often quite heretical, whose highest pleasure is great verse, and who never dream of conveying their nations to the Press. These know that Dante is indeed with the immortals. Is his conception of the Amiyerse outmoded 1' —What matter -Y. -Conceptions of. the universe are merely symbolic. With the passion of his intellect, the passion of his heart, he has stamped his dream of God like a constellation upon Eternity. Hell, Purgatory, Paradise—they are true as long as life endures, whatever may come after. Dante is a definite and thorough architect. The inverted cone of his Inferno, the winding terraces of the Purgataiio with the • Earthly Paradise upon the summit, the ineffable wheels of fire and music that make the highest heaven, have become as actual to the imagination as the idea of the Parthenon, or the Pyramids, or Chartres Cathedral, - or his own beloved Baptistery in the city he adored and . denounced. And he himself seems more visible than most poets, whether he drifts, a fine proud amorist, through the streets of Florence, with the dreamy morbidezza air that . he has in the famous fresco, or whether he goes darkly in alien cities, and the women whisper that he has been singed in hell. He loved and he hated with even more than mediaeval inten- sity, according to his own great ethic ; his subtle • brain reasoned out his emotion ; his command over words turned all to music—fire-music. He is the poet for every idealist who considers treachery the worst of sins, and who believes that in ecstasy we find God, and triumph over Time.
It is true that the Commedia is now a difficult poem to read through. The great passages of the Inferno are familiar, but the Inferno is not comprehensible until you stand with Dante where the fixed light' of God pulses iri the Primum Mobile, and see in the infinite distance the souls in the sad circles of hell fixed in their self-created torments, because they cannot desire the good, and escape by penitence. The Purgatorio and the Paradiso demand some pains of initiation ; but the music becomes more ethereal, the movement more rapturous ; and the final vision of the Mystical Rose, all music, light, and ecstatic vibration, is so triumphal that none should refuse that difficult bright ascent.
Francesca drifting on the eternal wind with her lover, the heretical Farinata rising from his burning sepulchre to speak his haughty and beautiful words, the bleeding thicket of the suicides—the Inferno is wonderful enough ! But when .
you,emerge to the stars, and the sky is "the clear colour of orient sapphire," there are lovelier and tenderer encounters.' Casella the musician will fold Dante in that eager embrace and sing to him his own canzone. The proud shade of Sordello will salute the other Mantuan; and you may pass La Pia in a sigh. Among the flight of penitent lovers Guido Guinicelli the poet will pause to speak of the dyke stil nuove. But at last you come to the clear streams, and the gracious may-trees, and the lady gathering flowers and singing as she goes. Then come the chariot led by the Heavenly Gryphon with his spiring wings, and the golden trees of candlesticks, the incense, the light, the music, the symbolic beasts, and she who was clothed in green . . .
`•` Guarded ben ! Ben son, ben son Beatrice." Thereafter you will hear Piccarda in the moon, vanishing through her world of pearl . . .
" E In sue volontade o nostra pace."
Wreaths of spirits in the sun, chivalries passing over the Cross, flights of golden birds, circles of flame, seraPhiin and cherubim, ant the intense Light of God ! Every now and then in this upward flight Beatrice smiles and speaks as 'only lovers may. For she is the Beatrice of the springtide_ Florence . and the Vita Nuova, of whom her pilgrim vowed to write' " whit neer. was writ of vienien." They read WithMic grace who think not so.
Of course, to apprehend Dante completely, you need much history. His book is a retrospect of a mighty period. The story of the Holy Roman Empire, the vicissitudes of Christianity in Alexandria, Carthage, Byzantium, RoMe, the theory of the two conflicting AuthoritieS, the divisions of Guelf and Ghibelline, Black and White, are hot in his veins. Virgin-worship, and romantic love in Provence and Tuscany,. Matter of Arthur and Matter of Trey, Franciseans, Doininicaini; • Crusaders, Saint Thomas Aquinas subtly working Aristotle into the faith, the end of chivalry with the passing of the Hohenstaufen family and the coming of Charles of Anjou with " the lance of Judas," Henry of Luxembourg whom Florence refused, these all enter into the structure of AN; Divine Comedy. ' ' Soon it will be Good Friday, the day on which the poet
entered the dismal wood where he was rescued by Virgil. If you would renew your acquaintance with one of the few perfect poetic styles, with a dialect • piercing and intimate,' with a music that slides into the soul like the sweet river Enna, may you do it in the Nonesuch Divine Comedy. It is a noble book, with a cover the colour of a soft orange flame; and pages of clear and lovely italic script. The text is revised by Professor Casella ; and Carey's translation runs alongside; so that you may see how much more expressive is the original. Forty-two. of _Botticelli's illustrations' are exquisitely renna duced. The painter of. pale seas and pale roses,.. and a leery kind of Paganism, is not really successful with the Inferno;' though now and then he captures a compassionate gesture or a piece of pattern. In the Paradiso, however, are some delightful roundels of Beatrice and Dante moving . upward alone in space, sometimes with a background of flamelets and the Triumph of Beatrice in the gryphon-chariot is a delicate decoration. May the copies of this admirable Volume. go indeed, to Dante scholars, not to those perverse bibliophiles who thwart the holy intentions Of books by locking them uncut upon their jealous shelves, or, worse still, to those who Speen- late upon the fmancial values of such treasures ! But for these last Dante has provided a place in hell. RACHEL ANHAND TAYLOR.
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