ON RE-READING DANTE

By E. L. WOODWARD

BY accident of war I am a temporary clerk in a Government office, with my evenings to myself. I am neither a high- brow nor a low-brow, and, therefore, I do not enjoy cinemas. The B.B.C. rations me drastically in the only kind of music which I do not find unpleasant. Therefore, I find it more amusing to read books. My peace-time job is reading and writing history, but there is so much history happening before my eyes that I do not want to read about past events as described by historians. So I have taken to reading books which have long been unopened on my shelves.

I began, almost by chance, with The Divine Comedy. I am now climbing canto by canto up the mountain of Purgatory. I had not read this poem, from beginning to end, for eleven years. I am reading it now without troubling about commentators or notes. I found a commentary on the Purgatorio, but the com- mentator was so boring that I could not endure his dusty erudition. I do not bother to enquire about the dates or deeds, or misdeeds, of the Italians dotted here and there about the more unpleasant parts of hell. It appears that Dante disliked most of his contemporaries, and even when he meets one or two whose death-bed repentances have saved them from damnation, he and they engage, like legendary old colonels, in disquisitions to the effect that Italy is not what it was. Furthermore, I do not concern myself with the complicated river-system of hell, or with Dante's equally complicated way of telling the time by reference to the signs of the Zodiac. An Ingersoll watch would have saved the poet a good deal of calculation.

Certain passages in the Inferno seem to me extremely tire- some (e.g., the exact foreknowledge of temporal events possessed by the damned). Other passages are plainly sadistic. More- over, for anyone who has accustomed himself, merely by looking at sixpenny handbooks on astronomy, to thinking in terms of vast intra-stellar distances, hell itself is none too impressive. It is far too small ; one thinks of it with a curious patronage, just as, years ago, one looked at Rutland among the counties of England. Hell, like a duke's park, ought to be impressively big_ It is equally difficult to be frightened by the monsters ; Minos is too much like an immense dog, twitching his tail, and I do not find anything funny, or even sardonic, in the fight between the small devils who fished with their hooks for the Peculators in the river of Boiling Pitch.

There are deeper sources of bewilderment. Six hundred years and more divide,me from the age in which Dame lived, and I find it impossible to take his attitude towards physical pain, retributive punishment, theological heresies, and so on. Finally, I cannot fathom Dante's view of the relation between good and evil. Why does he inscribe on the gates of hell:

giustizia mosse it mio Alto Fattore: Fecemi la Divina Potestate, La Somma Sapienza e'l Primo Amore.

(Justice moved Him on high Who made me ; Almighty Power fashioned me ; Divine Wisdom and Creative Love.)

Divine wisdom and Creative Love. . . . Dante was too clever a man to be taken in by dialectical sophistries about evil as the absence or deprivation of good. Is this inscription, then, a piece of grim irony? Is this journey through hell to be taken as a proud and fierce act of rebellion against God, and against the rigida giustizia which for ever and ever withholds mercy from sinners? Is this Catholic poet attacking the whole of Christian doctrine? There are many passages which support such a view. The gentle Francesca, in this foul place, driven on the eternal wind which blows round and round the second circle of hell. Dante himself on hearing Francesca's story fainted with pity: e caddi come corpo morte cadde . . . and I fell as a dead body falls. Yet the argument that Dante was attacking Christian doctrine makes no sense. There is, above all, the line which no familiarity can ever make too familiar: in la sua volontate a nostra pace. . . . In His will lies our peace. In His will, whose Wisdom and Love are driving two lovers for ever before a tireless wind in the twilight of hell?

Nevertheless, in spite of the long distance in time between the children of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and my own generation, and in spite of the many obstacles to under- standing, I fmd the reading of this poem, here and now, in these months of unwanted war, not merely a diversion but a fortifica- tion of the mind. The Divine Comedy is not a way of escape from reality. It is not romantic. It is hard, violent, steadfast. It gives a significance to those things for which we are fighting, and also to those things against which we are bound to fight.

I cannot describe this significance, unless I call it the signi- ficance of truth—truth in the widest and deepest sense. At other times I find Virgil himself the most significant figure ; Virgil, a master speaking with authority, with pride, and with resignation because he knows the sum of human knowledge and human capacities. Or, again, the significance lies in the seriousness of every moment of life as Dante describes it ; the immense value of every act of every day, since, for good or evil, those acts echo throughout eternity in hell or heaven.

As for the delight. The rhythm of The Divine Comedy is beyond comparison with that of any other poem. It has not the vitality of the Homeric hexameter or the temporal magnificence of the Aeneid. There is nothing of the darting mind of Shake- speare. The lines are too short, and the rhymes tinkle a little for modern ears, but the beat of the syllables, the economy and pride of the words, the alternation of light and darkness are beyond the reach of any paraphrase or translation.

Moreover, the story is told with a skill no modem novelist could even approach. You may be puzzled about the general disposition of hell (how the air gets in and the smoke gets out); you may wonder exactly how spirits feel physical pain, are burned, scarred, whipped, bound down by leaden weights, but you know that Dante is describing a journey which he took at a certain time ; that he took this journey with Virgil as his guide, and that, strange and impossible as it seems, he did in fact see everything which he claims to have seen. The eternal wind is blowing the spirits of Paolo and Francesca round one of the circles of hell ; the flame which hides the spirit of Ulysses eddies to and fro for ever and ever, and from the top of this flame Dante most certainly heard Ulysses' voice. Pope Nicolas III is in hell, waiting in malice for the arrival of Pope Boniface VIII, as surely I walk in the sunlight.

Or again, the digressions (the small digressions, not the dis- quisitions about the Empire and the Papacy), are extraordinarily convincing ; the little flowers suddenly described, the dykes built by the Flemings between Ouissant and Bruges, and the tide sounding against them ; the peasant who gets up to find an early white frost, and, then, a little later, when the sun is out, leads his flock to pasture: e fuor le pecorelle a pascer caccia ; the interesting discovery of the Romans, in the year of Jubilee, that the traffic over the Tiber bridge would pass more quickly if people kept to the left ; the story of the last voyage of Ulysses. . .. Ulysses is in hell ; he does not boast or complain ; he is still a Homeric hero, a wanderer who could not end his days in peace.

Above all, in those days of " the breaking of nations," the opening cantos of the Purgatorio overwhelmed me ; the first hour of morning, when, after the agonies and desolation of hell, in the small light just before dawn, Dante walked with Virgil on the island of Purgatory, and acclaimed, from a long way off, the movement of the sea.

di lontano Conobbi ii tremolar della marina.

Still nobler, at sunrise, the Angel of God pilots the faithful souls across the water, and Dante speaks to this happy company ; la nuova genie, the new-corners. Little wonder that Virgil told Dante to kneel before this Angel. Ecco l'Angel di Dio; the Messenger of God is here. Piega le mani ; fold your hands.