distinct from each other, must by the spec. tator be contemplated distinctly, derogates from the high genius which we feel to be Dante's prerogative; it is easy to substitute vague admiration of the transcendent mental power of the poet for an examination of the wonderful work which he has executed, and of the hidden resources of art which he has called into his service. Doubt and disregard are states of mind in which it is often easier to remain than to incur the trouble of acquiring distinct information. The extraordinary symmetry of a poem consisting of a hundred cantos-each canto of as nearly as possible one hundred and fifty lines, woven together in an indissoluble net-work of verse and thirty-three cantos being assigned to each of the great divisions of the poem, with a canto introductory to the entire, but which being prefixed to the first makes the Inferno exceed either of the other canticas by a canto, would alone suggest that the precise proportions of the poem were a subject of careful attention with the poet-that the respective parts and their relation to each other were in his mind anxiously meditated.

In two of his works we have his own com. ment on some of his shorter poems, and from those comments, as well as from discussions in the essay, which we have just quoted, we find not only how every word and thought of each particular line was weighed with reference to its immediate effect on the mind, but how artifices of concealment were practised to withhold the full meaning which was, throughout, before the poet's mind, but which it was his purpose should not in the early stages of the poem be communicated to his hearer. This was at times the enjoyment of an author playing with his subject, looking at the same object in different lights, and watching effects of shade or of colour-at times the mode in which he sought to wile on by curiosity, partially gratified, the minds of hearers not indisposed to sympathy with him; and not unfrequently was it the amusement of adjusting the thin veil of allegory, so as now to shew-now to hide the object which was occupying his thoughts. But everywhere there is art-consummate art.

It may be thought that the poem which produces on the mind its full effect at once Of Dante or his studies we know little is that which is to be regarded as the highbut what he has himself told, but fortunate- est triumph of genius. We doubt the truth ly he has in various ways communicated of this in any case, but certainly in Dante's much, and from his treatise, "De Vulgari case it is not true even of his earliest Eloquio," in which he discusses questions of poems. Some of them we have read over style and literary construction, we learn in and over before we saw the poet's entire what low regard he esteemed the mere po- purpose--some we think it probable we etical impulse undisciplined by assiduous should not even yet understand, though the cultivation, and refusing to call to its aid language itself never presents difficulty, if it all the resources of art. His language on were not for the poet's own comments. In this subject is not unlike that of Milton, the Vita Nuova he interprets several of his who speaks of the "celestial patroness" in- earlier poems, and exhibits the principles of spiring "easy his unpremeditated verse," art on which they were constructed. In the and yet dwells on the impossibility of pro- Convito we have a distinct and very lucid ducing anything that must not soon perish, essay, illustrated by an examination in mion any other condition than that of indefa-nute details of three poems of his of a later tigable labour. Dante in the same way speaks of the poet's exercise of his high gift, as if it were a thing habitual, and flowing freely from within, but, whatever nature may have originally applied, he insists that nothing can be done, “sine strenuitate ingenii et artis assiduitate scientiarumque habitu." He quotes his favourite Virgil for the same thought; and in the strongest language of indignant contempt speaks of those who, in reliance on natural talent, disregard art.*

* Caveat ergo quilibet, et discernat ea quæ dicimus; et quando. cantare intendit, prius Helicone potatus, tensis fidibus adsumat secure plectrum, et cum more incipiat. Sed cautionem et discretionem hanc, sicut decet, facere, hoc opus et labor est; quoniam nunquam sine strenuitate ingenii, et artis assiduitate, scientiarumque habitu fieri potest. Et ii sunt, quos poeta, Eneidorum sexto,

date, and in this essay he tells us how writings are to be interpreted in four different meanings. The first, and that on which all the others depend, is the literal meaning of the words; in the next the allegorical, "Orpheus tames wild beasts and makes trees move." The literal meaning of the words is obvious, and scarcely less obvious the intended allegory, which, however, is not represented in the words and must therefore be regarded as hidden, and thus "a wise

dilectos Dei, et ab ardente virtute sublimatos ad æthera, Deorumque filios vocat, quanquam figurate loquatur. Et ideo confiteatur eorum stultitia, qui arte scientiaque immunes, de solo ingenio confidentes ad summa summè canenda prorumpunt; et a tanta presumptuositate desistant; et si anseres naturali desidia sunt, nolint astripetam aquilam imitari.-De Vulgari Eloquio, book ii., chap. 4.

240

Dante.

man by the instrumentality of words makes savage beasts grow mild, and cause to move at his will those who have no life of science or art." The third sense is called by him the moral-and this the reader has to infer from the writing-it is not in words told him, and his inference may no doubt be one which he has rashly deduced from the narrative. Of such moral sense he gives an instance in the Gospel narrative of our Lord's transfiguration; he retires to a high mountain with three only of the twelve. The moral inference is that in secret things we should have but few companions. The fourth he calls the anagogical. It is where from some narrative of sensible things we are taught things above the reach of the senses. "By passing from the land of Egypt the Israelites became free." This we learn from the letter of the Scripture narrative. A truth, however, is suggested by it, and, Dante says, taught with equal distinctness,-that the human soul, abandoning sin, passes from capWe may easily imativity into freedom. gine much mistake and many tricks of selfdeception in the critic who endeavours to exhibit even any one of the four; and should a false view of any one be from any cause taken, it will infect all the rest. The letter, the least pliant of all, will be strained into accommodation with theories that arise out of views not suggested by it; as, for instance, Foscolo, who took up the fancy that Dante regarded himself as having a Divine mission to reform the Church, forces the let ter of a passage in the Paradise to bear false witness in his favour.* The cloud of allegory will shift with every wind of doctrine or of doubt. Such moral views as a man brings to the study of any work he will see reflected from it; and the higher meanings, those suggested by capricious analogies, will vary with each reader.

How remarkably all this is illustrated by the history of criticism on Dante's poem, we need scarcely mention. Yet we have Dante's own authority for seeking out his meaning in each of these paths of interpretation; and what is of more moment, we have his own illustrations of such interpretation in the From case of other poems of his own. every one of Dante's interpreters we feel that we have learned much-most perhaps from Landino--who is a faithful guide, and seems at all times awake to the beauties of the poet. In Landino there is little that is fanciful, nothing, properly speaking, which does not fairly arise from his duties as an interpreter. Now and then to a

* See Paradise, canto 25, and Convito. Fraticelli. -Opere Minori, tom. 2, xviii.

Aug.

modern reader he may seem tedious, as he
often quotes at length the passages from the
classics which have supplied Dante with
portions of his Mythology; and thus a good
Where
deal that is familiar encumbers, or seems to
encumber, this pleasant old book.
the book is most defective,-but no editor
that we know supplies the defect,—is in
omitting to quote from Thomas Aquinas
and Bonaventura those passages which would
aid us in perfectly understanding such parts
of Dante's language as the schoolmen sup-
plied. We suspect that many parts of the
labyrinth could be more safely pierced if we
could hold in our hands to uncoil it when
necessary, some hard knot of words in which
the tough old logicians twisted up much of
dogma and doctrine, which, rolled out, would
serve us as a clue in this strange world of
tortured or repentant or rejoicing spirits.
We should be glad that he more often gave
us the passages of St. Augustine, from which
Dante derived his chief knowledge of Plato.
Above all should we be glad that he, or that
any one, had illustrated the Purgatory and
the Paradise by extracts from St. Bernard. In
Ozanam's book about Dante there are a good
many references to Bonaventura and St.
Thomas, but unluckily he seldom quotes the
passages to which he refers, and where we
have sought for the passages, we have found
his references too imperfect to give us much
aid. We, of course, in no case imagine that
more than the language of the period, and
the modes of thinking exhibited by that lan-
guage, can be of moment to us in under-
standing the poet. Our anxiety is not to
prove that his doctrines were orthodox or
heretical; we have no desire to shew, as was
Ozanam's wish, that what imen regard as
fruits of imagination, were in his case but
exercises of memory; but without a know-
ledge of the language and modes of thinking
of his time, we shall not be able to under-
stand Dante. We shall be liable to per-
petual mistake; and how great such mistake
may be will perhaps best appear from an
example.

of

On their entrance into Purgatory Dante and Virgil meet Cato-to whom the guardianship of the shore is allotted. Virgil tells the circumstances under which Dante, a liv ing man, visits the regions of the dead. A lady from heaven has devised this means rescuing him from evil which had nearly Cato is implored by his overcome him. love for Marcia to take pity on him, and al lows him to visit the world of penitence and hope. The story of Marcia was, that hav ing been the wife of Cato, and having borne him several children, he resigned her to Sem pronius, whose wife she became-had chil.

that the understanding should see, by other light than any which the sun of earth supplies, what Dante calls "the secret things." To see what Dante saw, or thought he saw, and sought to render visible-to see the relation of the finite to the infinite, of man to God-in the state of separation and alienation--in the state in which that alienation is regarded as removed and the human spirit undergoes a healing process of disciplineand in the state of entire reconciliation, is what the poem undertakes to exhibit. Properly speaking, no relation can be the subject of sight. It can be but suggested, and to suggest these relations the poet used machinery which he found ready to his hand.

They remained, long after the empire had thought, and be more than a mere spectator become Christian, the objects of secret wor- of scenes brought before him, to render inship, adored with magical rites, regarded telligible things that require the exercise of as actual existences, by those who abhorred a higher faculty than the mere understandand avoided their worship, and by their woring, or,-to use a different language, require shippers, who must be described as also conscious that such worship was a degradation of human nature. It is not, then, as if they were but fossil remains of the monsters of ancient faith, things to be disregarded and thrown aside but some vacant expression of wonder,--that we are to look on the mention of the gods of the heathens in mediæval writings. To the popular mind they still had an existence and a life, and of Dante's Inferno they were properly regarded as the least fabulous part. He now and then deviates from the descriptions in the ancient poets, but for the most part he adopts what he has found in Ovid and Virgil. We have seldom been led to refer to any passage, either in the classics,-of which Dante seems to have been a great student, or in the Vulgate, without finding illustrations of this. From the latter a great deal, both of the diction and the imagery of his poem, is taken,--much more than a reader of the English Bible could possibly imagine; for our translation, being immediately from the original languages in numberless passages where figurative language is employed, differs, not in the essential meaning, but in some apparently accidental image, from the thought presented in the Vulgate --and from the latter and its very words, often exceedingly picturesque and calculated to awaken true poetical faculty, has this great poet built his chambers of imagery. Of this we shall by and bye give some examples.

It is a strange thing that it should be necessary, in order to the study of a single work of the human mind, to have thus to disinter all the language and all the science of the world at the time it was written, and to feel that in so doing we are but clearing the way to understanding the work,-to feel that bey nd us far is the mind of the great architect of that work, styled from the first-in prophetic anticipation of admiration which each day must increase "Divine," beyond us, and wholly unapproachable without other aid than such studies can give. The reader's own spirit must sound the dim and perilous depths of

remarkable passage from Aristotle's Politics, quoted in the notes to a sermon of the Archbishop of Dublin, there cited :-"Expeλés per our for rais ἄρχουσι μηθὲν μήτε ἄγαλμα μήτε γραφὴν εἶναι τοιούτων

πράξεων μίμησιν εἰ μὴ παρὰ τισι θεοις τοιούτοις οἷς καὶ

τὸν τωθασμον ἀποδίδωσιν ο νόμος. Obscenity's ti banished from everything but the service of the gods."

But before we pass to this we must say a word as to the language of Italy. On this, as on all parts of our subject, Dante is our chief, we may almost say our sole authority. Our sole authority he is with reference to anything connected with his own acts or writings. In his work, "De Vulgari Eloquio," in which he vindicates the fitness of the spoken language of the country to become the language of elevated poetry, he gives us an account of the various dialects of Italy, which, classed by him into fourteen primary idioms, branched out into not less than a thousand varieties. Each of the Italian varieties of spoken language had its graces of style and also its own peculiar vices, and each is discussed by Dante for the purpose of shewing that in no one is to be found what the purpose of the poet would require, but that each might supply something to a common language, which should become that of literature, and which he dignifies with the name of illustrious--curialaulic. Of the dialects of Italy, as then spoken, he thought that of Rome the worst. After examining several of the other vernacular idioms of different parts of Italy, he gives the preference to that of Bologna, not as originally better, but as improved, by adopting and blending with its own proper elements a good deal from the dialects of Imola, of Ferrara, and of Modena. What it has borrowed from Ferrara and from Modena would not seem to be of much value, except as in some way that we do not understand, and which Dante leaves unexplained, modifying the Bolognese, for to the compound it would seem that these dialects brought nothing but garrulity, and that such a thing as verse in either of these dialects

which, he says, he would wish to indulge, is compelled to admit that there are, or have been, cities in some respects superior to Florence, and languages superior to any ever spoken in Italy.*

eludes him. There is no dialect, however rude, which does not indicate laws of language from which it deviates-laws which, while they govern thought, are yet, from one cause or other, often disregarded in the oral communications of men in the ordinary intercourse of life,-but with reference to which we must think when we would examine any of these dialects. We mentally compare each with an ideal which no one of them realizes.

was a thing unheard of. The Bolognese, | heart of human mould. He reluctantly, and however, made a nearer approach to the yielding rather to inferences of reason than required curial language--the ideal which to the feeling of love to his native place, Dante sought, but yet was not the thing; and this he says is proved by the fact that men of Bologna, who had been distinguished for the accomplishment of verse, found it necessary to use words which were unknown in the local dialect. Mr. Rose, who travelled But neither the dialect of this district of in Italy in 1817, has expressed some sur- Italy nor of that assumes the conditions prise at the praise which Dante gives to the which Dante requires. Each has graces vernacular of Bologna, and suggests that it which the other wants; each has defects must have changed its character since Dante's which renders it unavailable for the purposes time, "a thing which," he adds, "appears of a cultivated literature. The feather of impossible, or that Dante, in his inveterate which he is in chase, and over which he hatred to Florence, sought to exalt another would throw his nets-such is his metaphor city at its expense. The latter," says Mr.is present every where ideally, but still Rose, "is my own belief." There is a third solution the Tuscan, which Mr. Rose had an opportunity of comparing with the Bolognese, had, in the interval since Dante's time, approached very near in its spoken dialect to the written Italian,-to what was the ideal of Dante's contemplation; but if we are to credit what Dante himself says in this tract, and what, we have no doubt, must have been the fact, everywhere these local dialects, where there is no written standard with which they can be regulated, are for ever in a process of gradual though slow change. The alteration he describes to be as entire, as certain, and as little noticed at any given moment of life, as the transition from youth to age in man; and he deals not very courteously with those who, like Mr. Rose, think such a thing "impossible."* The five hundred years that had past between the time when Dante wrote this treatise and Mr. Rose's visit to Italy, gave ample time for change in languages more fixed than the local dialects of which Dante speaks could at any period have been; but we should not have mentioned Mr. Rose's remark, if it were not for the pitiful motive of hatred against Florence which he imputes to Dante. That such passion, did it exist at all, could have influenced Dante in the statement of a fact, and when carefully conducting a scientific investigation-for such, and a very valuable one, is this remarkable tract is in utter contradiction with everything we know of the poet; and in the very treatise itself, his unbounded affection for Florence is expressed in words that, even at this distance of time, have power over every

* Non enim admiramur, si existimationes hominum, qui parum distant a brutis, putant eandem civitatem sub unicabili semper civicasse sermone, cum sermonis variatio civitatis ejusdem non sine longissima temporum successione paulatim, contingat, et hominum vita sit etiam ipsa sua natura brevissima.-Lib. i. cap. 10.

He says that this illustrious-cardinalaulic-curial Italian,† has been exemplified in a few poems. Why it is called illustrious is in analogy with the use of the word where applied to men-the characters which distinguish it from particular idioms, with all their roughness and tediousness and involutions of construction, are not unlike those which confer distinction upon men-its power is manifested in its influence over the heart-and its votaries hold a rank higher than princes or kings-such is his account of the attribute "Illustrious." It is called cardinal, as that with reference to which all the dialects of Italy move-and as it were hinge upon it,-aulic and curial, as if Italy had a court and a palace, such would the

* Nos, cui mundus est patria, velut piscibus æquor, quanquam Sarnum biberimus ante dentes, et Florentiam adeo diligamus, ut quia dileximus exspatulas nostri judicii podiamus: et quamvis ad voilium patiamur injuste, ratione magis quam sensu, luptatem nostram, sive nostræ sensualitatis quietem in terris amenior locus quam Florentia non existat, revolventes et poetarum et aliorum Scriptorum volumina quibus mundus universaliter et membratim describitur, ratiocinantesque in nobis situationes varias mundi locorum et eorum latitudinem ad utrumque polum et circulum equatorem, multas usu perpendimus firmiterque censemus et magis nobiles et magis deliciosas et regiones et urbes quam Thusciam et Florentiam, unde sum oriendus et civis et plerasque nationes et gentes delectabiliori atque utiliori sermone uti quam Latinos.-Lib. i. cap. 6. + Illustre, Cardinale, Aulicum, et Curial Vulgare in Latio.