poet, Italy was experiencing the conse-pire of Rome as from the city of quences of the memorable struggle Athens, nor from the kingdom of which he had maintained against the France as from the city of Florence. Church. The finest works of imagina- The violence of party feeling may be tion have always been produced in an evil; but it calls forth that activity times of political convulsion, as the of mind which in some states of richest vineyards and the sweetest society it is desirable to produce at any flowers always grow on the soil which expense. Universal soldiership may be has been fertilised by the fiery deluge an evil; but where every man is a solof a volcano. To look no further than the dier there will be no standing army. literary history of our own country, can And is it no evil that one man in every we doubt that Shakspeare was in a great fifty should be bred to the trade of measure produced by the Reformation, slaughter; should live only by deand Wordsworth by the French Revo-stroying and by exposing himself to be lution? Poets often avoid political destroyed; should fight without entransactions; they often affect to thusiasm and conquer without glory; despise them. But, whether they per- be sent to a hospital when wounded, ceive it or not, they must be influenced by them. As long as their minds have any point of contact with those of their fellow-men, the electric impulse, at whatever distance it may originate, will be circuitously communicated to them. This will be the case even in large societies, where the division of labour enables many speculative men to observe the face of nature, or to analyse their own minds, at a distance from the seat of political transactions. In the little republic of which Dante was a member the state of things was very different. These small communities are most unmercifully abused by most of our modern professors of the science of government. In such states, they tell us, factions are always most violent where both parties are cooped up within a narrow space, political difference necessarily produces personal malignity. Every man must be a soldier; every moment may produce a war. No citizen can lie down secure that he shall not be roused by the alarum-bell, to repel or avenge an injury. In such petty quarrels Greece squandered the blood which might have purchased for her the permanent empire of the world, and Italy wasted the energy and the abilities which would have enabled her to defend her independence against the Pontiffs and the Cæsars. All this is true: yet there is still a compensation. Mankind has not derived so much benefit from the em and rot on a dunghill when old? Such, over more than two-thirds of Europe, is the fate of soldiers. It was something that the citizen of Milan or Florence fought, not merely in the vague and rhetorical sense in which the words are often used, but in sober truth, for his parents, his children, his lands, his house, his altars. It was something that he marched forth to battle beneath the Carroccio, which had been the object of his childish veneration; that his aged father looked down from the battlements on his exploits; that his friends and his rivals were the witnesses of his glory. If he fell, he was consigned to no venal or heedless guardians. The same day saw him conveyed within the walls which he had defended. His wounds were dressed by his mother; his confession was whispered to the friendly priest who had heard and absolved the follies of his youth; his last sigh was breathed upon the lips of the lady of his love. Surely there is no sword like that which is beaten out of a ploughshare. Surely this state of things was not unmixedly bad: its evils were alleviated by enthusiasm and by tenderness; and it will at least be acknowledged that it was well fitted to nurse poetical genius in an imaginative and observant mind. Nor did the religious spirit of the age tend less to this result than its political circumstances. Fanaticism is an evil, but it is not the greatest of evils. It is good that a people should be roused by any means from a state cent,-the growth of the Inquisition and the mendicant orders, the wars against the Albigenses, the Pagans of the East, and the unfortunate princes of the house of Swabia, agitated Italy during the two following generations. In this point Dante was completely under the influence of his age. He was a man of a turbid and melancholy spirit. In early youth he had entertained a strong and unfortunate passion, which, long after the death of her whom he loved, continued to haunt him. Dissipation, ambition, misfortunes had not effaced it. He was not only a sincere, but a passionate, believer. The crimes and abuses of the Church of Rome were indeed loathsome to him; but to all its doctrines and all its rites he adhered with enthusiastic fondness and veneration; and, at length, driven from his native country, reduced to a situation the most painful to a man of his disposition, condemned to learn by experience that no* food is so bitter as the bread of dependence, and no ascent so painful as the staircase of a patron,his wounded spirit took refuge in visionary devotion. Beatrice, the unforgotten object of his early tenderness, was invested by his imagination with glorious and mysterious attributes; she was enthroned among the highest of the celestial hierarchy: Almighty Wisdom had assigned to her the care of the sinful and unhappy wanderer who of utter torpor;-that their minds ordinary system. The policy of Innoshould be diverted from objects merely sensual, to meditations, however erroneous, on the mysteries of the moral and intellectual world; and from interests which are immediately selfish to those which relate to the past, the future, and the remote. These effects have sometimes been produced by the worst superstitions that ever existed; but the Catholic religion, even in the time of its utmost extravagance and atrocity, never wholly lost the spirit of the Great Teacher, whose precepts form the noblest code, as His conduct furnished the purest example, of moral excellence. It is of all religions the most poetical. The ancient superstitions furnished the fancy with beautiful images, but took no hold on the heart. The doctrines of the Reformed Churches have most powerfully influenced the feelings and the conduct of men, but have not presented them with visions of sensible beauty and grandeur. The Roman Catholic Church has united to the awful doctrines of the one what Mr. Coleridge calls the "fair humanities" of the other. It has enriched sculpture and painting with the loveliest and most majestic forms. To the Phidian Jupiter it can oppose the Moses of Michael Angelo; and to the voluptuous beauty of the Queen of Cyprus, the serene and pensive loveliness of the Virgin Mother. The legends of its martyrs and its saints may vie in ingenuity and interest with the mytho-had loved her with such a perfect love.† logical fables of Greece; its ceremonies and processions were the delight of the vulgar; the huge fabric of secular power with which it was connected attracted the admiration of the statesman. At the same time, it never lost sight of the most solemn and tremendous doctrines of Christianity,-the incarnate God, the judgment, the retribution, -the eternity of happiness or torment. Thus, while, like the ancient religions, it received incalculable support from policy and ceremony, it never wholly became, like those religions, a merely political and ceremonial institution. The beginning of the thirteenth century was, as Machiavelli has remarked, e era of a great revival of this extra By a confusion, like that which often takes place in dreams, he has sometimes lost sight of her human nature, and even of her personal existence, and seems to consider her as one of the attributes of the Deity. But those religious hopes which had released the mind of the sublime enthusiast from the terrors of death had not rendered his speculations on human life more cheerful. This is an inconsistency which may often be observed in men of a similar temperament. He *"Tu proverai si come sa di sale Lo pane altrui, e come é duro calle hoped for happiness beyond the grave: [nate words, that he has even given but he felt none on earth. It is from measures and numbers, where Milton this cause, more than from any other, would have left his images to float unthat his description of Heaven is defined in a gorgeous haze of language. so far inferior to the Hell or the Both were right. Milton did not proPurgatory. With the passions and fess to have been in heaven or hell. miseries of the suffering spirits he feels He might therefore reasonably confine a strong sympathy. But among the himself to magnificent generalities. beatified he appears as one who has Far different was the office of the nothing in common with them,-as lonely traveller, who had wandered one who is incapable of comprehending, through the nations of the dead. Had not only the degree, but the nature he described the abode of the rejected of their enjoyment. We think that we spirits in language resembling the see him standing amidst those smiling splendid lines of the English Poet,— and radiant spirits with that scowl of had he told us of— unutterable misery on his brow, and that curl of bitter disdain on his lips, which all his portraits have preserved, and which might furnish Chantrey with hints for the head of his projected Satan. There is no poet whose intellectual and moral character are so closely connected. The great source, as it appears to me, of the power of the Divine this would doubtless have been noble Comedy is the strong belief with which writing. But where would have been "An universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature Perverse all monstrous, all prodigious things, Than fables yet have feigned, or fear con- Gorgons, and hydras, and chimæras dire "- the story seems to be told. In this that strong impression of reality, respect, the only books which approach which, in accordance with his plan, it to its excellence are Gulliver's Travels should have been his great object to and Robinson Crusoe. The solemnity produce? It was absolutely necessary of his asseverations, the consistency for him to delineate accurately "all and minuteness of his details, the ear- monstrous, all prodigious things,"-to nestness with which he labours to make utter what might to others appear the reader understand the exact shape "unutterable," to relate with the air and size of everything that he describes, of truth what fables had never feigned, give an air of reality to his wildest to embody what fear had never confictions. I should only weaken this ceived. And I will frankly confess statement by quoting instances of a that the vague sublimity of Milton feeling which pervades the whole work, affects me less than these reviled deand to which it owes much of its fasci-tails of Dante. We read Milton; and nation. This is the real justification of the many passages in his poem which bad critics have condemned as grotesque. I am concerned to see that Mr. Cary, to whom Dante owes more than ever poet owed to translator, has sanctioned an accusation utterly unworthy of his abilities. "His solicitude," says that gentleman, "to define all his images in such a manner as to bring them within the circle of our vision, and to subject them to the power of the pencil, renders him little better than grotesque, where Milton has since taught us to expect sublimity." It is true that Dante has never shrunk from embodying his conceptions in determi-canto iv. we know that we are reading a great poet. When we read Dante, the poet vanishes. We are listening to the man who has returned from "the valley of the dolorous abyss;"*-we seem to see the dilated eye of horror, to hear the shuddering accents with which he tells his fearful tale. Considered in this light, the narratives are exactly what they should be,-definite in themselves, but suggesting to the mind ideas of awful and indefinite wonder. They are made up of the images of the earth: they are told in the language of the earth.-Yet the whole effect is, beyond "La valle d'abisso doloroso."-Inferno, expression, wild and unearthly. The The metaphors and comparisons of ner. known. The boiling pitch in Malebolge was like that in the Venetian arsenal:-the mound on which he travelled along the banks of Phlegethon was like that between Ghent and Bruges, but not so large :-the cavities where the Simoniacal prelates are confined resemble the fonts in the Church of John at Florence. Every reader of Dante will recall many other illustrations of this description, which add to the appearance of sincerity and earnestness from which the narrative derives so much of its interest. fact is, that supernatural beings, as Dante harmonise admirably with that long as they are considered merely with air of strong reality of which I have reference to their own nature, excite spoken. They have a very peculiar our feelings very feebly. It is when character. He is perhaps the only poet the great gulf which separates them whose writings would become much less from us is passed, when we suspect intelligible if all illustrations of this some strange and undefinable relation sort were expunged. His similes are between the laws of the visible and frequently rather those of a traveller the invisible world, that they rouse, than of a poet. He employs them not perhaps, the strongest emotions of to display his ingenuity by fanciful which our nature is capable. How analogies,-not to delight the reader by many children, and how many men, affording him a distant and passing are afraid of ghosts, who are not afraid glimpse of beautiful images remote of God! And this, because, though from the path in which he is proceedthey entertain a much stronger convic-ing, but to give an exact idea of the tion of the existence of a Deity than of objects which he is describing, by comthe reality of apparitions, they have no paring them with others generally apprehension that he will manifest himself to them in any sensible manWhile this is the case, to describe superhuman beings in the language, and to attribute to them the actions, of humanity may be grotesque, unphilosophical, inconsistent; but it will be the only mode of working upon the feelings of men, and, therefore, the only mode suited for poetry. Shakspeare understood this well, as he understood everything that belonged to his art. Who does not sympathise with the rapture of Ariel, flying after sunset on the wings of the bat, or sucking in the Many of his comparisons, again, are cups of flowers with the bee? Who intended to give an exact idea of his does not shudder at the caldron of feelings under particular circumstances. Macbeth? Where is the philosopher The delicate shades of grief, of fear, who is not moved when he thinks of anger, are rarely discriminated with of the strange connection between sufficient accuracy in the language of the infernal spirits and "the sow's the most refined nations. A rude diablood that hath eaten her nine far- lect never abounds in nice distinctions row?" But this difficult task of of this kind. Dante therefore employs representing supernatural beings to our the most accurate and infinitely the minds, in a manner which shall be most poetical mode of marking the neither unintelligible to our intellects precise state of his mind. Every pernor wholly inconsistent with our ideas son who has experienced the bewilderof their nature, has never been so well ing effect of sudden bad tidings,-the performed as by Dante. I will refer to stupefaction,-the vague doubt of the three instances, which are, perhaps, truth of our own perceptions which the most striking :-the description of they produce,-will understand the folthe transformations of the serpents and lowing simile:-"I was as he is who the robbers, in the twenty-fifth canto dreameth his own harm,—who, dreamof the Inferno, --the passage concern-ing, wishes that it may be all a dream, ing Nimrod, in the thirty-first canto of so that he desires that which is as the same part, and the magnificent though it were not." This is only one procession in the twenty-ninth canto out of a hundred equally striking and of the Purgatorio. expressive similitudes. The compari nec ponere lucum Artifices, nec rus saturum laudare. The orthodox poetical creed is more Catholic. The noblest earthly object of the contemplation of man is man himself. The universe, and all its fair and glorious forms, are indeed included in the wide empire of the imagination; but she has placed her home and her sanctuary amidst the inexhaustible varieties and the impenetrable mysteries of the mind. sons of Homer and Milton are magni- [have been the favourite themes of our ficent digressions. It scarcely injures most eminent poets. The herd of bluetheir effect to detach them from the stocking ladies and sonneteering genwork. Those of Dante are very diffe- tlemen seem to consider a strong sensirent. They derive their beauty from bility to the "splendour of the grass, the context, and reflect beauty upon it. the glory of the flower," as an ingreHis embroidery cannot be taken out dient absolutely indispensable in the without spoiling the whole web. I can- formation of a poetical mind. They not dismiss this part of the subject treat with contempt all writers who are without advising every person who can unfortunately muster sufficient Italian to read the simile of the sheep, in the third canto of the Purgatorio. I think it the most perfect passage of the kind in the world, the most imaginative, the most picturesque, and the most sweetly expressed. No person can have attended to the Divine Comedy without observing how little impression the forms of the external world appear to have made on the mind of Dante. His temper and his situation had led him to fix his observation almost exclusively on human nature. The exquisite opening of the eighth canto of the Purgatorio affords a strong instance of this. He leaves to others the earth, the ocean, and the sky. His business is with man. To other writers, evening may be the season of dews and stars and radiant clouds. To Dante it is the hour of fond recollection and passionate devotion, the hour which melts the heart of the mariner and kindles the love of the pilgrim,--the hour when the toll of the bell seems to mourn for another day which is gone and will * return no more. The feeling of the present age has taken a direction diametrically opposite. The magnificence of the physical world, and its influence upon the human mind, *I cannot help observing that Gray's imitation of that noble line "Che paia 'l giorno pianger che si muore,"is one of the most striking instances of injudicious plagiarism with which I am acquainted. Dante did not put this strong personification at the beginning of his decription. The imagination of the reader is so well prepared for it by the previous lines, that it appears perfectly natural and pathetic. Placed as Gray has placed it, neither preceded nor followed by any thing that harmonises with it, it becomes a frigid conceit. Woe to the unskilful rider who ventures on the horses of Achilles ! οἱ δ ̓ ἀλεγεινοὶ ἀνδράσι γε θνητοίσι δαμήμεναι ἠδ ̓ ὀχέεσθαι, ἄλλῳ γ' ή 'Αχιληϊ τὸν ἀθανάτη τέκε μήτηρ. In tutte parti impera, e quivi regge; Quivi è la sua cittade, e l'alto seggio.* Othello is perhaps the greatest work in the world. From what does it derive its power? From the clouds? From the ocean? From the mountains? Or from love strong as death, and jealousy cruel as the grave? What is it that we go forth to see in Hamlet? Is it a reed shaken with the wind? A small celandine? A bed of daffodils? Or is it to contemplate a mighty and way. ward mind laid bare before us to the inmost recesses? It may perhaps be doubted whether the lakes and the hills are better fitted for the education of a poet than the dusky streets of a huge capital. Indeed who is not tired to death with pure description of scenery? Is it not the fact, that external objects never strongly excite our feelings but when they are contemplated in reference to man, as illustrating his destiny, The or as influencing his character? most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman. But who that can analyse his feelings is not sensible that she owes her fascination less to grace of outline and delicacy of colour, than to a thousand associations which, often unperceived by ourselves, connect those qualities with the source * Inferno, canto i. |