C. THE POETIC COMPOSITION OF THE _DIVINA COMMEDIA

C. THE POETIC COMPOSITION OF THE _DIVINA COMMEDIA_

The solitary eminence of Dante is a perpetual reminder of the limits of any lore of poetic. As for medieval lore, its approach to the _Divina Commedia_ is hopelessly short. The ultimate reason, of course, for its inadequacy is that the greatest poetic achievement of the middle age is far more than medieval. It is for all time even more clearly than the _Œdipus Rex_ or the _Æneid_ or _Othello_; and like them it derives its greatness from something beyond poetic.

Nevertheless it is also medieval and also a great achievement of poetic composition. So to consider it is to discern both more of its greatness and more of medieval habit. In the current medieval lore the main lack is seen by contrast to be in the larger movement of composition. Medieval poetic carries us so short a distance toward the _Divina Commedia_ because it is preoccupied with style. Vergil is currently cited and quoted, but usually as an exemplar of the three styles.[14] Medieval romances carried nationalism back to Troy for centuries without discerning the larger art of the _Æneid_ in composition. For Dante Vergil was guide not only in a deeper sense, but also in poetic.

This makes clearer why Dante turned his back on current lore. He knew that lore, not only the elaborate technic of the troubadours, but the Latin _poetria_. His ignoring of it is tantamount to an arraignment of its cardinal weakness. It had too little technic for his main poetic concern, the movement of the whole. It had too much schoolmasterly fiddling with words to carry orchestration beyond a few conventional modes. No one can study the history of poetic without finding this deficiency exceptional only in degree. In kind it is historic. Here, again and again, appears the gap between pedagogically formulated poetic and poetry.

In Dante’s style the medieval _poetria_ is not merely outdistanced; it is repudiated. Matthieu de Vendôme, Geoffroi de Vinsauf, John the Englishman, might have tolerated figures of wrestlers and dogs in hell, but hardly broth, cooks, oxen, and swine. They would have challenged bellows in purgatory; they would have been shocked at rooks and a fish-pool in heaven. The decorative descriptions of a rhetoricated poetic seem nowhere else quite so futile as beside Dante’s figures of precise geography.

As seems beetling Carisenda, when a cloud goes over it so as to make it hang the other way, so seemed Antæus to me as I stood watching to see him bend. I. xxxi. 136.[15]

As that stream which has its own path first from Monte Veso toward the east on the left coast of Apennine, which is called Acquaqueta above before it descends to its low bed, and at Forlì has lost that name, reëchoes there over San Benedetto from the alp, because its fall has a single leap where for a thousand should be room, so down an abrupt bank we heard resounding that turbid water. I. xvi. 94.

As for Paolo and Francesca, Ugolino, and a hundred other passages, with those single lines that enrich memory,[16] no better praise can be compassed than Matthew Arnold’s word “touchstones.” They tell us, better than any definition, what poetry is. But the mere historical significance of Dante’s luminous precision is its vindication of that true theory of poetic diction which was formulated in the _De sublimitate_.[17] The essential character of poetic style is not dilation, which belongs to rhetoric; it is sublimation. Dante’s extraordinary conciseness, austere, ascetic, is never bare; it is surcharged. For style too, as well as for composition, he must have discerned that ancient critic’s fine distinction: rhetoric and poetic must never be confused; but at high temperatures they can be welded together.

Poetry conveyed vision oftener, perhaps, in the middle age than in any other period. _Piers Plowman_ and _Pearl_ carry on in the next century a persistent medieval preoccupation. The _Divina Commedia_, fulfilling this aspiration, reveals man’s need, his quest, his attainment, of vision. “Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God.” Purity remains negative to those who have no desire to see God. But Dante answers those for whom it is positive and constructive.

Ye other few, who have lifted up your necks betimes to the bread of angels, by which men live here, but with which none cometh away sated. III. ii. 10.

The poetry of this “concreate and perpetual thirst” (III. ii. 19) animates for all time a whole cosmogony antiquated merely as science, and communicates the great philosophy of the middle age to the heart. The _Divina Commedia_ achieved the high quest of the Grail romances. It is _the_ vision poem.

The heaven of Dante’s vision transcends time and space.

And I was with him; but of my mounting I was no more aware than is a man, ere his first thought, aware that it is coming. Beatrice is she who thus discloses from good to better so instantly that her act has no extent in time. III. x. 34.

Brother, thy high desire shall be fulfilled in the last sphere, where all the rest are fulfilled, and mine.... For it is not in space, nor hath it poles, and our ladder attains even so far. III. xxii. 61.

But it is not reserved for rapt contemplatives.

Of the seraphim he who is most rapt, Moses, Samuel, or that John whom thou choosest to take, nay, even Mary has not a seat in another heaven than these spirits who but now appeared to thee; nor have they to their being more or fewer years; but all make beauteous the first circle, and have sweet life differently as they feel more or less the eternal breath. III. iv. 28.

For the _Divina Commedia_ ranges beyond the lyric exaltation of the individual poet. It is suffused with social sense, as constantly aware as the _Piers Plowman_ of the “fair field full of folk,” of the world of striving men and women. Its vision begins with society gone bad and frustrating itself; it arrives at society perfectly realized as immediate intercommunion and interaction. So the Church, the heavenly society, recurs constantly in communal echoes of hymns and canticles: _Ave_, _Agnus Dei_, _Benedictus qui venit_, _Salve Regina_. In the same spirit Cynewulf had composed his _Christ_ upon the seven great antiphons of Advent.[18] Familiar gospels are recalled. Most frequent echoes, as of symbols most suggestive of common human experience, are of the Psalms.[19] The artistic harmony is based upon the medieval conception of social history as the redemption of mankind.

The word allegory has come to suggest vagueness, or conventionalization, or fancy. None of these has any place in the _Divina Commedia_. Allegorical, indeed, it may be called in a sense large enough to include _Piers Plowman_, the _Faerie Queene_, and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_; but no other allegory is so large in scope, so consistent and complete in composition. For such details as the sacred chariot, the eagle, wolf, and dragon (II. xxxii) we search the carved capitals and the windows; but including all these and ranging beyond them is the constant interpretation of the whole sensible, transitory world as typical of the eternal. Ephemeral matters, politics, even quarrels and grudges (I. xvi. 73), are interpreted permanently. The intensely specific realism is made constantly to serve idealization. Human life is revealed _sub specie æternitatis_.

For life beyond is seen as the prolongation of the line that we give to life here and now. Its motive power throughout is love radiating from God and leading men back to him. The disturbance of life is sin. The horror of the _Inferno_ is of sin as perversion. The warpings of life there tormenting Italians or ancients are typical to the fearsome degree of revealing our own. Thus the course of the _Divina Commedia_ is of ideas and principles of action so embodied as to lead emotion on. What is familiar in lyric is here carried through a whole conception of life. Theology is translated through vision into emotion and will, as if lyric were carried through into drama.

Thus the persons are typical, not merely as wearing recognizable costumes and uttering appropriate sentiments, but more intensely as acting in our drama. The thieves transformed into serpents, which in turn absorb them (I. xxv), are thus akin artistically to the sculpture of medieval capitals. They are not pictorial imitation of the other arts, as are the conventional descriptive pauses of the _Roman de la Rose_ and the _poetriæ_; for they are narrated. There is no ecphrasis.[20] The method is never static. The speaking flames move.

As a little cloud ascends, so moved each flame along the throat of the chasm, none showing its theft, each stealing away a sinner. I. xxvi. 39.

Such narrative progress in detail is integral with the progress of the total symbolism toward culmination. The famous ascent in Paradise moves both in and by itself and with the movement of the whole.

Now were my eyes fixed again on the face of my lady, and my mind with them, and from every other thought were removed.

And she smiled not; but “Were I to smile”, she began, “thou wouldst fare as Semele when she turned to ashes;

For my beauty, which up the stair of the eternal palace kindleth more and more, as thou hast seen, the higher it ascends,

Were it not tempered, is so radiant that thy mortal power at its flash would be foliage shriveled by thunderbolt.”

III. xxi. 1.

In method, as in degree, this is the individual achievement of a great poet; in kind the symbolism is characteristically medieval. For in detail and in total conception the _Divina Commedia_ starts not with the individual event or person, not with Beatrice Portinari,[21] but with the idea. Whether Dante recalls a youthful love is a question so subordinate as to be artistically immaterial. He has not sublimated earthly passion into heavenly. His conception is heavenly from the beginning, and progressively throughout. He carries a single, controlling idea forward imaginatively, stage by stage. Each stage is vivid with intensely specific realism; but this realism, as that of the carved capitals, is neither the object nor the occasion; it is only the imaginative means to impress the idea. The idea is constant; it is beginning and end. The final vision is not transformation; it is conclusion.

Such grasp of poetic movement doubtless owed much to Vergil. Dante’s homage to the “courteous soul of Mantua” (I. ii. 58) is more than conventional tribute.

Art thou then that Vergil and that spring which spreads so large a stream of speech?... O poet’s honor and light, may the long zeal avail me and the great love which made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author, thou alone he from whom I took the fair style that hath brought me honor. I. i. 79.[22]

The larger narrative movement of the _Æneid_, which quite escaped the average medieval romancer, was not lost on so great a composer. Of all the ancient art available in his time this alone could give him that instruction. But if the _Æneid_ inspired him with its poetic scope and reach, and gave him a sense of the poetic energy of onwardness, it did not prescribe his method. The _Divina Commedia_ is not an imitation of the _Æneid_. Its movement is both different and more compelling.

For the movement of the _Divina Commedia_ is at once logical and imaginative, an extraordinary fusion of rhetoric and poetic. The first canto closes with a forecast of the whole progress.

Lead me where thou hast said, that I may see the gate of St. Peter. I. i. 134.

Throughout, the progress is so reasoned that it can be mapped and briefed. None the less the _Divina Commedia_ is a great exemplar of poetic movement. It arrives not at a demonstration, but at a catharsis. Its conception, at once constant and widening, is carried forward imaginatively. We move not from proposition to proposition, but from scene to scene. The _Faerie Queene_, no less imaginative in detail, has none of this force of imaginative composition. The _Christ_ in the earliest middle age, the _Pearl_ in the latest, have far less scope. The _Divina Commedia_ reveals the whole capacity of medieval symbolism by sustained poetic movement.

So sustained a movement has no time for the conventional descriptive pause. In spite of the abundance of its illustrations, the _Divina Commedia_ is never merely pictorial.[23] Nor is the steady movement monotonous. The transitions are beautifully various. _Purgatorio_ does not repeat the plan of _Inferno_; and it has more interaction. As the action advances through _Purgatorio_ into _Paradiso_, there is increasing exposition of ideas. There is even the Gothic variety that enlivens the cathedrals. The grotesque devils of the twenty-second canto of _Inferno_ are brothers to those on the capitals of Vézelay. At the other pole of sentiment, the eleventh canto of _Purgatorio_ opens with a poetic amplification of the Paternoster. The fifth canto of _Paradiso_ is Justinian’s summary of the history of Rome. But the variety is never merely picturesque. Never merely aggregative, the variations of the _Divina Commedia_ are more like those of Bourges than like those of Chartres. They are still more like the variations in a symphony.

The logical order fused with this poetic movement is: _Inferno_, the punishment of self-enslavement; _Purgatorio_, the progress of self-mastery; _Paradiso_, the rapture of self-expression. From perversion and frustration we pass through discipline to the liberation of personality.

Then said my lady, “Let out the heat of thy desire, so that thy utterance bear the print of the press within; not that our knowledge may increase by thy speaking, but that thou mayst learn how to tell thy thirst, that drink be given thee.” III. xvii. 7.

It is through this liberation of personality that the human drama becomes divine. “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” For the _Divina Commedia_ is far more than a vindication of free will; it is a vision of the progressive freeing of the will. After the terrible revelation of hell as self-enslavement, free will is asserted from purgatory as essential to divine justice.

Ye who are living refer every occasion only up to heaven, as if all moved of itself by necessity. Were it so, in you would be destroyed free will; and it would not be justice to have joy for good, mourning for evil. II. xvi. 67.

But this liberty is not innate merely as are the physical impulses. God’s gift of free will is a progressive energizing of man’s struggle to will higher and higher till he attains perfect freedom.

Now in order that to this [will] every other may be reunited, innate in you is the virtue that giveth counsel,[24] and ought to guard the threshold of assent. This is the principle whence is derived the scheme of desert in you according as it collects and winnows good loves and guilty. Those whose scheme of life went to the foundation became aware of this innate liberty, and so left ethics to the world. III. xviii. 61.

So developed by the mutual response of God and man, free will becomes the greatest gift (“lo maggior don,” III. v. 19). Heaven is the final release and achievement of personality.

The culmination is quite beyond what is usually meant by self-satisfaction. As personality can be progressively released and achieved only through giving, so the self-expressive joy of _Paradiso_ contributes to the common joy. It is simultaneously giving and receiving, utterance and response. No longer, as the poet of _Pearl_ discerned again in the parable of the laborers, is giving and receiving frustrated by competition. Immediately every joy is the joy of all, every expression of personality is a gift and a response, in the creative activity of love.

As in a fish-pond that is still and clear the fishes draw to what so comes from without that they deem it their food, so saw I more than a thousand radiances draw toward us, and in each was heard: “Lo! one who will increase our loves.” III. v. 100.

I saw more radiances, living and conquering, make of us a center and of themselves a corona, sweeter in voice than lucent to behold. III. x. 64.

The amazing figures in which this triumph is symbolized sum up also Dante’s poetic: vividness of charged simplicity in expression carried forward in a composition of progressive movement.

No other single work of medieval art conveys so much of the middle age; for no other concedes so little to medieval convention. The centuries of St. Bernard, Adam of St. Victor, and St. Thomas Aquinas, of Chrétien and the _Roman de la Rose_, of Vézelay and Bourges, like other centuries, had their artistic conventions. These, as too often in other centuries, seemed to the makers of manuals to comprise the theory of art. Such theory needs both correction and expansion from great artists.