John T. Slattery - Dante: The Central Man of All the World

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"Virgil was gone! and we were all bereft!
Virgil my sweetest sire! Virgil who led
My soul to safety, when no hope was left.
Not all our ancient mother forfeited,
All Eden, could prevent my dew cleansed cheek
From changing whiteness to a tearful red."
(Purg. XXX, 45, Grandgent's trans.)

One quality is still necessary to complete the picture which our poet
gives of himself. So far we see him as a man of strong faith, of abiding
intensity--a man having supreme confidence in himself with resulting
pride of life, a man big with splendid sincerity and dowered with deep
passion, yet manifesting a gentle, gracious and grateful spirit. So
composed, he is a combination of virtues that may inspire and traits
that may attract many readers. But this is not the finished picture of
the strangely fascinating man who has for six hundred years exercised an
irresistible sway over hearts and minds. What feature is lacking? The
one which has made him master over willing subjects who love and admire
him whether they live in a monarchy or republic, a hovel or a palace,
whether they are of his faith or alien to it. Because the world ever
loves a lover, and because Dante is The Lover _par excellence_ whose
love-story is one "to which heaven and earth have put their hand," he
stands forth with a hold on humanity that is both enduring and supreme.

Love as a passion and a principle of action never left him to his dying
day, from the time when he, a boy of nine years of age, became attracted
by the sweet little girl Beatrice. "She appeared to me" he says,
"clothed in a most noble color, a modest and becoming crimson, and she
was girt and adorned in such wise as befitted her very youthful age." If
we add to those few lines the brief statements made later in the _New
Life_ that her hair was light and her complexion a pearl-pink and that
when he saw her as a maiden she was dressed in white, we have the only
description that Dante ever gave of her personal appearance. It was
love at sight. "I truly say that at that instant the spirit of life
which dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, said these words:
'Behold a god stronger than I, who coming shall rule over me.' From that
time forward Love lorded it over my soul which had been so speedily
wedded to him and he began to exercise over me such control and such
lordship, through the power which my imagination gave him, that it
behooved me to do completely all his pleasure."

If we are disposed to doubt Dante's capability of deep emotion at so
tender an age we have only to remember that Cupid's darts pierced at an
early age the hearts of others of precocious sensibilities. The love
experience of Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, and Canova the sculptor, when
they too were only children is a matter of history. This statement we
shall the more readily accept if we recall the dictum of Pascal: "The
passions are great in proportion as the intelligence is great. In a
great soul everything is great." In the light of that principle we must
say that if Dante's love attachment in early life runs counter to the
experience of mankind, he is, even as a boy, exceptional in the power of
imagination and peculiarly sensitive to heart impressions.

His experience as a nine year old boy loving with a depth of increasing
emotion a girl with whom there probably had never been any
communication except a mere greeting, a love reverential, persisting,
even after her marriage to another, continuing through the married life
of the poet himself, a love, the story of which is celebrated in
matchless verse,--all that is so unique a thing that critics have been
led to deny the very existence of Beatrice or to see in the story an
allegory which may be interpreted in various ways.

Some critics see in Beatrice only the ideal of womanhood; others make
her an allegory of conflicting things. Francesco Perez holds that
Beatrice is only the figure of Active Intelligence, while Dante Gabriel
Rossetti advances the fantastic theory that she is the symbol of the
Roman Empire, and love--the anagram of Roma--on Dante's part is only
devotion to the imperial cause. According to Scartazzini, Beatrice is
the symbol of the Papacy. Gietmann denies the historicity of Beatrice
and declares that she typifies the Church. The argument for this theory
expressed by a sympathetic reviewer of Gietmann's book, "Beatrice, Geist
und Kern der Danteshen Dichtung," follows: "Beatrice is the soul and
center of the poet's works, his inspiring genius, the ideal which moulds
his life and character. If we consider her as a mere historical
personage we must look upon those works as silly and meaningless
romances, and on the poet himself as a drivelling day-dreamer.

"But if we are able to assign to Dante's beloved an appropriate and
consistent allegorical character, in keeping with the views of the
poet's time, and with the quality of the varied material which goes to
build up his poetic structures, his creations will appear not only
intelligible and natural, but unfold a treasure of thought and beauty
nowhere else to be found, while the poet himself will be shown to be not
only one of the greatest masters of thought and imagination, but one of
the noblest and loftiest minds to be met with in the history of letters"
(John Conway, Am. Cath. Quar. Review, April, 1892).

The editor of the English Quarterly Review (July, 1896, p. 41) while not
denying the real existence of Beatrice argues that she represents Faith,
and affirms that the story of Dante's love for her, a love wavering at
times, represents the conflict of Faith and Science. You will be
interested in seeing, as a curiosity of literature, how that author
attempts the translation into allegory of Dante's account of his first
meeting with Beatrice.

This is the translation--Dante speaking in the first person says: "At
the close of my ninth year I experienced strong impressions of religion.
This was the time of my Confirmation and my First Communion. I was
filled with reverence for the wondrous truths instilled into my mind by
those whom I loved best: and my whole being glowed with the roseate glow
of a first love. My feelings were rapturous yet constant; and from that
time I date the beginning of a New Life. From that time forward I was so
completely under the influence of this divine principle that my soul
was, as it were, espoused to heavenly love, and it was in the precepts
and ordinances of the Church that this passion found its proper
satisfaction. Often and often did it lead me to the congregation of the
faithful, where I had meetings with my youthful angel and these were so
gratifying that all through my boyhood I would frequently go in search
of a repetition of those pleasures and I perceived her so noble and
admirable in all her bearings, that of her might assuredly be said that
saying of Homer: 'She seemed no daughter of mortal man but of God.'"

We need not be surprised that there is such divergence of opinion among
critics as to the interpretation of Dante. He himself in The Banquet
(bk. II, ch. 15), written some years after his New Life, tells us that
there is a hidden meaning back of the literal interpretation of his
words. That is especially true of the Divine Comedy, as he writes to Can
Grande in explanation of the purpose of the poem. In the Paradiso he
bids this lacking in power of penetration to pierce the symbolism, to
accompany him no longer on his journey through the invisible world.

"O ye who in some pretty little boat
Eager to listen, have been following
Behind my ship, that singing sails along,
Turn back to look again upon your shores,
Do not put out to sea, lest, peradventure,
In losing me, you might yourselves be lost."
(Par. bk. II, I.)

With obscurity thus acknowledged, is it any wonder that Dante is
subjected to prolonged controversy by historical criticism which has not
hesitated to cast doubt upon the authorship of the Iliad and the Synotic
Gospels? In the face of this obscurity it is the opinion of such well
known Dantian scholars as D'Ancona, Charles Eliot Norton, John Addington
Symonds, Dean Plumtre, Edmund Gardiner, W.W. Vernon, Paget Toynbe, C.H.
Grandgent, Jefferson B. Fletcher, James Russell Lowell--that Beatrice is
both a real human being and a symbol.

The direct testimony, not to urge the subtle arguments furnished by
internal evidence of Dante's works, as to the reality of Beatrice
Portinari as the beloved of our poet is offered first by Boccaccio who
was acquainted with Dante's daughter Beatrice, a nun who lived near
enough to the poet to get information from the Portinari family.
Certainly Boccaccio did not hesitate when chosen in 1373 by the
Florentines to lecture on Dante, to make the very positive statement
that the boy Dante, "received the image of Beatrice Portinari into his
heart with such affection that from that day forward as long as he lived
it never departed from him." That statement was doubtless made within
the hearing of many relatives and friends of the families concerned, the
Alighieri, the Portinari, the Bardi. "If the statement was false,"
argues Dr. Edward Moore, England's foremost Dantian scholar, "it must
have been so glaring and palpable that its assertion could only have
covered Boccaccio with ridicule." The second authority for the statement
that Beatrice Portinari had a real existence and was the object of
Dante's love is furnished by Dante's own son Pietro, who wrote a
commentary on the Divine Comedy nineteen years after his father's
demise--a commentary in which he declares "because mention is here first
made of Beatrice of whom so much has been said, especially in the third
book of the Paradiso, it is to be premised that there really was a lady
Beatrice by name, greatly distinguished for her beauty and virtues who,
in the time of the author, lived in the city of Florence and who was of
the house of certain Florentine citizens called the Portinari, of whom
the author Dante was a suitor. During the life of the said lady, he was
her lover and he wrote many ballads to her honor. After her death in
order that he might make her name famous, he, in this his poem,
frequently introduced her under the allegory and style of theology."

The third witness quoted by W.W. Vernon, is Benvenuto da Imola who
attended the lectures of Boccaccio and succeeded him as incumbent of the
chair of Dantian literature, established by the government of Florence.
This Florentine professor whose "commentary on Dante was written only
fifty years after the death of the poet, expressly states that this
Beatrice (he does not mention her family name) was really and truly a
Florentine of great beauty and most honorable reputation. When she was
eight years old she so entered into Dante's heart that she never went
out from it and he loved her passionately for sixteen years, at which
time she died. His love increased with his years: he would follow her
where-ever she went and always thought that in her eyes he could behold
the summit of human happiness. Dante in his works, at one time, takes
Beatrice as a real personage and at another in a mysterious sense as
Sacred Theology" (Readings on Inf., I, 61.)

The question now arises: Did Beatrice know of Dante's love and did she
reciprocate his passion? Many critics answer in the negative, believing
that an affirmative view must premise a guilty love since Beatrice was
married to Simone de Bardi and Dante to Gemma Donati. But an opposite
view holds that such a deduction overlooks the unique fact that the love
of Dante and Beatrice was purely spiritual and mystical. Doctor Zahm
says that Dante's passion was "a species of homage to the beloved which
was common during the age of the troubadours but which has long since
disappeared--a chivalrous devotion to a woman, neither wife nor
mistress, by means of which the spirit of man, were he knight or poet,
was rendered capable of self-devotion, and of noble deeds and of rising
to a higher ideal of life" (Great Inspirers, p. 245.)

In any event we know that it was a most noble, exalting sentiment and if
we accept the statement of Bishop de Serravalle, the love was mutual and
lasting. This ecclesiastic while attending the council of Florence in
1414 was asked by the Bishops of Bath and Salisbury, England, to make a
Latin translation of the Divine Comedy. In the preamble to his
translation he not only declares that Dante historically and literally
loved Beatrice (_"Dantes delexit hanc puellam historice et
literaliter"_) but he affirms that the love was reciprocal and that it
lasted during the lifetime of Beatrice, ("_Philocaptus fuit de ipsa et
ipsa de ipso, qui se invicem dilexerunt quousque vixit ipsa puella_").

Only by holding such a view can we really appreciate the significance
and beauty of that episode in Purgatorio depicting the first meeting of
the lovers in the invisible world after ten years' separation--a meeting
said to be "one of the most touching and beautiful episodes in all
literature."

In the Terrestrial Paradise a voice is heard after the sudden departure
of Virgil. "Dante" it says "though Virgil leave thee, weep not, weep not
yet, for thou must weep for a greater wound. I beheld that Lady who had
erst appeared to me under a cloud of flowers cast by angel's hands: and
she was gazing at me across the stream ... 'Look at us well. We are,
indeed Beatrice. Hast thou then condescended to come to the mountain?'
(the mountain of discipline)--Shame weighed down my brow. The ice that
had collected about my heart, turned to breath and water and with agony
issued from my breast through lips and eyes." Beatrice then proceeds to
tell the angels of her love for the poet and of his faithlessness to
her. "For some time I sustained him with the sight of my face. Showing
to him my youthful eyes I led him toward the right quarter. As soon as I
reached the threshold of the second age of man and passed from mortal to
eternal life he took himself from me and gave himself to another."

Beatrice now turns to Dante and rebukes him: "In order the more to shame
thee from thine error and to make thee stronger, never did nature and
art present to thee a charm equal to that fair form now scattered in
earth with which I was enclosed. And if this greatest of charms so
forsook thee at my death, what mortal thing should thereafter have led
thee to desire it? Verily at the first hour of disappointment over
elusive things, thou shouldst have flown up after me who was no longer
of them. Thou shouldst not have allowed thy wings to be weighed down to
get more wounds, either by a little maid or by any other so short lived
vanity." The effect of her rebuke is the overwhelming of his heart with
shame and contrition. "So much remorse gnawed at my heart that I fell
vanquished and what I then became she knoweth who gave me the cause"
(Purg. XXXI, 49). He arose forgiven, the memory of his sin removed by
the waters of Lethe. Then drinking of the waters of Eunoe he was made
fit to ascend to Heaven.

To understand the allusion to his defection and to see the progressive
development of his love of Beatrice as a woman, then as a living ideal
and finally as an animated symbol--the various transfigurations in which
Beatrice appears to him, we must go back to his New Life--the book of
which Charles Eliot Norton says--"so long as there are lovers in the
world and so long as lovers are poets this first and tenderest
love-story of modern literature will be read with appreciation and
responsive sympathy."

It is hardly to be supposed that the nine year old lover noted with
minute care in his diary, his first meeting of Beatrice Portinari but as
he looked back on the event years later he saw that the vision had been
the the greatest crisis in his mental, moral and spiritual history. The
story begins in the first page of the New Life. A real living child
familiarly called Bice, the diminutive for Beatrice, enamoured Dante
with a real, genuine love. "After that meeting," says the poet, "I in my
boyhood often went seeking her and saw her of such noble and
praiseworthy deportment that truly of her might be said the word of the
poet Homer: 'She seems not the daughter of mortal man but of God.'" Nine
years passed and the child, now a maiden, "blooming in her beauty's
spring, saluted me with such virtue that it seemed to me that I saw all
the bounds of bliss. Since it was the first time her words came to my
ears I took in such sweetness that, as it were intoxicated, I turned
away from the folk and betaking myself to the solitude of my own
chamber I sat myself down to think of this most courteous lady."

A little later the wrapt expression of his loving eyes as he looks at
Beatrice attracts the attention of others and to misdirect them, he
feigns love for the lady he calls the screen of truth and writes verses
in her honor. On the part of Beatrice there is misunderstanding of the
amatory verses he writes at this period and she withholds her greeting.
Then, more than ever, he realizes what that salutation meant to him.
Deprived of it now, he dwells upon the sweet memory of the salutation:
"In the hope of her marvelous salutation there no longer remained to me
an enemy, nay, a flame of charity possessed me which made me pardon
everyone who had done me wrong." Under the influence of her salutation,
Dante tells us that he devised this sonnet:

"So gentle and so gracious doth appear
My lady when she giveth her salute
That every tongue becometh, trembling, mute:
Nor do the eyes to look upon her dare
Although she hears her praises, she doth go
Benignly vested with humility:
And like a thing come down, she seems to be,
From heaven to earth, a miracle to show.
So pleaseth she whoever cometh nigh.
She gives the heart a sweetness through the eyes,
Which none can understand who doth not prove
And from her countenance there seems to move
A spirit, sweet, and in Love's very guise,
Who to the soul, in going sayeth: 'Sigh.'"
(Norton's translation.)

Because she now denies to him the bliss of salutation he says: "I went
into a solitary place to bathe the earth with most bitter tears." But
this misunderstanding is not his only torment. Almost from his second
meeting he fears that his beloved will soon die. His prophetic vision
becomes an agonising reality when in 1290 in her twenty-fourth year, the
eyes that radiated bliss are closed in death.

So stunned was he by the blow that his life was despaired of. When he
recovered it seemed to him that Florence had lost her gaiety and
desolate is mourning the loss of his beloved one. Pilgrims passing on
their way to Galicia do not appear to share the general grief. To arouse
their sympathy in the loss which the city has sustained the heart-broken
poet lover devises a sonnet "in which I set forth that which I had said
to myself.

Pilgrims:
If through your will to hear, awhile ye stay,
Truly my heart with sighs declare to me
That ye shall afterwards depart in tears.
Alas her Beatrice now lost hath she.
And all the words that one of her way may say
Have virtue to make weep whoever hears."

(Norton's translation.)

In his great affliction his grieving heart is sustained by his belief in
immortality. His vision penetrates the skies and he sees his 'lady of
virtue' in glory in the regions of the eternal.

"The gentle lady to my mind had come
Who, for the sake of her exceeding youth,
Had by the Lord most High been ta'en from earth
To that calm heaven where Mary hath her home."

In heaven indeed more than upon earth she enamours the poet. There
divested of her mortal veil, to his eyes she

"grew perfectly and spiritually fair,"

leading him to fit himself to put on immortality. The passion of his
boyhood has now become the ennobling ideal of his life. Sustaining and
stimulating him, saving him from himself, ever leading him upward and
onward, his angelicized lady is an abiding presence with him whether he
is deep in the contemplation of the study of philosophy and the learning
of the ancients, or engaged in the activity of military or political
life, or as homeless wayfarer in exile, making his way from place to
place. When he falls from grace it is Beatrice who disturbs his peace of
mind by "a battle of thoughts." It is the "strong image" of Beatrice who
comes to him as he had seen her as a child, raises him from moral
obliquity, fills him with the very essence of the spiritual. Then he has
a wonderful vision--"a vision in which I saw things which made me
resolve to speak no more of this blessed one (Beatrice) until I could
more worthily treat of her. And to attain to this I study to the utmost
of my power as she truly knows: So that if it shall please Him through
whom all things live that my life be prolonged for some years, I hope to
say of her what was never said of any woman."

That promise, involving years of intense study and increasing devotion
to his beloved, Dante kept. The Divine Comedy is his matchless monument
to her who is the protagonist and muse of his poem and the love of his
heart. "Not only has the poet made her" says Norton, "the loveliest and
most womanly woman of the Middle Ages at once absolutely real and truly
ideal," but he has done what no poet had ever before conceived, thereby
achieving something unique in the whole range of literature--he has
"imparadised" among the saints and angels his lovely wonder, Beatrice,
"that so she spreads even there a light of love which makes the angels
glad and even to their subtle minds can bring a certain awe of profound
marvelling." He has given to her such a glorious exaltation that after
Rachel and Eve she of all women is enthroned in the glowing Rose of
Heaven next to the Virgin Mother, "our tainted nature's solitary boast,"
and so enthroned, Beatrice is at once his beloved and the symbol of
revelation, the heavenly light that discloses to mankind both the true
end of our being and the realities of Eternity.

Now with tremulous delight in his heart, admiration on his lips, ecstasy
in his soul, he is able to render her perhaps the very purest tribute of
praise and gratitude that ever came out of a human soul:

"O Lady, thou in whom my hope is strong
And who, for my salvation, didst endure
In Hell to leave the imprint of thy feet,
Of whatsoever things I have beheld,
As coming from thy power and from thy goodness
I recognize the power and the grace.
Thou from a slave hast brought me unto freedom,
By all those ways, by all the expedients,
Whereby thou hast the power of doing it.
Preserve towards me thy magnificence
So that this soul of mine, which thou hast healed
Pleasing to thee be loosened from the body."

Norton says: "It is needful to know Dante as a man in order fully to
appreciate him as poet."

What manner of man then was he? Redeemed by love, he was, to quote John
Addington Symonds, "the greatest, truest, sincerest man of modern
Europe."

DANTE'S INFERNO

DANTE'S INFERNO

At no period of modern times do we find that literature showed an
interest more keen in the Hereafter than at the present day. Religion
has always used both pen and voice to direct men's thoughts towards
eternity, but now it is literature that goes for subject-matter to
religion. This change of attitude is due, no doubt, to the fact that
several factors in present-day life--factors that literature cannot
ignore, have turned popular thought to religion. The World-war has
disciplined the character of men by the unspeakable experiences of
contact with shot, shell and shrapnel and the result has been that
countless numbers have turned to religion for strength and consolation.
Countless thousands whose dear ones made the supreme sacrifice for the
ideals of patriotism, also find in religion their only solace.

Those who have not this refuge turn to spiritualism and psychical
research in a futile effort to find a satisfactory solution of the
problem of the Hereafter. Again and again we see the unrest of the
ever-questioning soul depicted in the drama and the literature of the
day as it seeks enlightenment on the potentiality of the future life.
The stage presents plays based on spiritualistic manifestations or upon
supernatural healing or miraculous intervention. Many recent novels have
either psychical phenomena for their central interest or plots evolved
out of the miraculous in religion. As exponents of psychical research,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W.T. Stead and Sir Oliver Lodge make an appeal
to readers to accept as scientific truths, the psychical manifestations
of the unseen world. A typical answer is given to that appeal by a
distinguished writer, Doctor Inge, Dean of St. Paul's, London, who
declares: "If this kind of after-life were true, this portrayed in the
pitiable revival of necromancy in which many desolate hearts have sought
spurious satisfaction, it would, indeed, be a melancholy postponement or
negation of all we hope and believe about our dead."

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