The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante E-Book

Charles Williams

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

This study of Dante is intended to pay particular attention to the figure of Beatrice and to the relation which that figure bears to all the rest. That figure is presented at the beginning of Dante’s first book, for Dante is one of those poets who begin their work with what is declared to be an intense personal experience. That experience is, as such, made part of the poetry; and it is not only so, with Dante, at the beginning, but also when, in his later and greater work, the experience is recalled and confirmed.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

THE FIGURE OF BEATRICE

I INTRODUCTION

II BEATRICE

III THE DEATH OF BEATRICE

IV THE CONVIVIO

V THE NOBLE LIFE

VI THE DE MONARCHIA AND THE EXILE

VII THE MAKING OF THE COMMEDIA

VIII THE INFERNO

IX THE PURGATORIO

X THE RE-ASSERTION OF BEATRICE

XI THE PARADISO

XII THE RECOLLECTION OF THE WAY

FOOTNOTES

INDEX

THE FIGURE OF BEATRICE

A Study in Dante by CHARLES WILLIAMS

1943

© 2021 Librorium EditionsISBN : 9782383831280

Table of Contents

THE FIGURE OF BEATRICE

I INTRODUCTION

II BEATRICE

III THE DEATH OF BEATRICE

IV THE CONVIVIO

V THE NOBLE LIFE

VI THE DE MONARCHIA AND THE EXILE

VII THE MAKING OF THE COMMEDIA

VIII THE INFERNO

IX THE PURGATORIO

X THE RE-ASSERTION OF BEATRICE

XI THE PARADISO

XII THE RECOLLECTION OF THE WAY

FOOTNOTES

INDEX

I INTRODUCTION

This study of Dante is intended to pay particular attention to the figure of Beatrice and to the relation which that figure bears to all the rest. That figure is presented at the beginning of Dante’s first book, for Dante is one of those poets who begin their work with what is declared to be an intense personal experience. That experience is, as such, made part of the poetry; and it is not only so, with Dante, at the beginning, but also when, in his later and greater work, the experience is recalled and confirmed.

He defined the general kind of experience to which the figure of Beatrice belongs in one of his prose books, the Convivio (IV, XXV). He says there that the young are subject to a ‘stupor’ or astonishment of the mind which falls on them at the awareness of great and wonderful things. Such a stupor produces two results—a sense of reverence and a desire to know more. A noble awe and a noble curiosity come to life. This is what had happened to him at the sight of the Florentine girl, and all his work consists, one way or another, in the increase of that worship and that knowledge.

The image of Beatrice existed in his thought; it remained there and was deliberately renewed. The word image is convenient for two reasons. First, the subjective recollection within him was of something objectively outside him; it was an image of an exterior fact and not of an interior desire. It was sight and not invention. Dante’s whole assertion was that he could not have invented Beatrice. Secondly, the outer exterior shape was understood to be an image of things beyond itself. Coleridge said that a symbol must have three characteristics (i) it must exist in itself, (ii) it must derive from something greater than itself, (iii) it must represent in itself that greatness from which it derives. I have preferred the word image to the word symbol, because it seems to me doubtful if the word symbol nowadays sufficiently expresses the vivid individual existence of the lesser thing. Beatrice was, in 8 her degree, an image of nobility, of virtue, of the Redeemed Life, and in some sense of Almighty God himself. But she also remained Beatrice right to the end; her derivation was not to obscure her identity any more than her identity should hide her derivation. Just as there is no point in Dante’s thought at which the image of Beatrice in his mind was supposed to exclude the actual objective Beatrice, so there is no point at which the objective Beatrice is to exclude the Power which is expressed through her. But as the mental knowledge or image of her is the only way by which she herself can be known, so she herself is (for Dante) the only way by which that other Power can be known—since, in fact, it was known so. The maxim of his study, as regards the final Power, was: ‘This also is Thou, neither is this Thou.’

I say ‘the only way’, but only to modify it. There were, in his mind, many other shapes—of people and places, of philosophies and poems. All these had their own identities and were each autonomous. But in his poetry Dante determined to relate them all to the Beatrician figure, and he brought that figure as near as he could to the final image, so far as he could express it, of Almighty God. It is, we all agree, one of the marks of his poetic genius. But it is something else also. It is the greatest expression in European literature of the way of approach of the soul to its ordained end through the affirmation of the validity of all those images, beginning with the image of a girl.

It is this particular way of approach which these pages pretend to examine. It is an accepted fact that there have, on the whole, been two chief ways of approach to God defined in Christian thought. One, which is most familiar in the records of sanctity, has been known as the Way of Rejection. It consists, generally speaking, in the renunciation of all images except the final one of God himself, and even—sometimes but not always—of the exclusion of that only Image of all human sense. The great intellectual teacher of that Way was Dionysius the Areopagite; its conclusion was summed in a paragraph:

‘Once more, ascending yet higher, we maintain that It is not soul, or mind, or endowed with the faculty of imagination, conjecture, reason, or understanding; nor is It any act of reason or understanding; nor can It be described by the reason or perceived by the understanding, since It is not number, or order, or greatness, 9 or littleness, or equality, or inequality, and since It is not immovable nor in motion, or at rest, and has no power, and is not power or light, and does not live, and is not life; nor is It personal essence, or eternity, or time; nor can It be grasped by the understanding, since It is not knowledge or truth; nor is It kingship or wisdom; nor is It one, nor is It unity, nor is It Godhead or Goodness; nor is It a Spirit, as we understand the term, since It is not Sonship or Fatherhood; nor is It any other thing such as we or any other being can have knowledge of; nor does It belong to the category of non-existence or to that of existence; nor do existent beings know It as it actually is, nor does It know them as they actually are; nor can the reason attain to It to name It or to know It; nor is It darkness, nor is It light, or error, or truth; nor can any affirmation or negation apply to It; for while applying affirmations or negations to those orders of being that come next to It, we apply not unto It either affirmation or negation, inasmuch as it transcends all affirmation by being the perfect and unique Cause of all things, and transcends all negation by the pre-eminence of Its simple and absolute nature—free from every limitation and beyond them all.’

The other Way is the Way of Affirmation, the approach to God through these images. The maxim of this Way is in the creed of St. Athanasius: ‘Not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God.’ That clause was primarily a definition of the Incarnation, but, being that, it necessarily involved much beside. Other epigrams of the sort are, no doubt, scattered through the history of the Church. But for any full expression of it, the Church had to wait for Dante. It may be that that Way could not be too quickly shown to the world in which the young Church lived. It was necessary first to establish the awful difference between God and the world before we could be permitted to see the awful likeness. It is, and will always remain, necessary to remember the difference in the likeness. Neither of these two Ways indeed is, or can be, exclusive. The most vigorous ascetic, being forbidden formally to hasten his death, is bound to attend to the actualities of food, drink, and sleep which are also images, however brief his attention may be. The most indulgent of Christians is yet bound to hold his most cherished images—of food, drink, sleep, or anything else—negligible 10 beside the final Image of God. And both are compelled to hold their particular Images of God negligible beside the universal Image of God which belongs to the Church, and even that less than the unimaged reality.

Our sacred Lord, in his earthly existence, deigned to use both methods. The miracle of Cana and all the miracles of healing are works of the affirmation of images; the counsel to pluck out the eye is a counsel of the rejection of images. It is said that he so rejected them for himself that he had nowhere to lay his head, and that he so affirmed them by his conduct that he was called a glutton and a wine-bibber. He commanded his disciples to abandon all images but himself and promised them, in terms of the same images, a hundred times what they had abandoned. The Crucifixion and the Death are rejection and affirmation at once, for they affirm death only to reject death; the intensity of that death is the opportunity of its own dissolution; and beyond that physical rejection of earth lies the re-affirmation of earth which is called the Resurrection.

As above, so below; as in him, so in us. The tangle of affirmation and rejection which is in each of us has to be drawn into some kind of pattern, and has so been drawn by all men who have ever lived. The records of Christian sanctity have on the whole stressed the rejection. This indeed can hardly be avoided in any religion—nor perhaps outside all religion; the mere necessities of human life—change, misadventure, folly, age, and death—everywhere involve it. But even more within religion the discipline of the soul, ordinary or extraordinary, enforces it. The general praise of ascetic life and even the formal preference of one good (such as virginity) to another good (such as marriage) have themselves imaged that enforcement. On the other hand such great doctrines as the Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting have continually recalled the Affirmation; with every act of charity towards others, every courtesy towards others, and even permissibly towards ourselves. The very equalling of ourselves with others and of others with ourselves is a declaration of the republic of images. No doubt these doctrines, metaphysical or moral, are to be understood after a great manner and towards God. But no doubt also every way of understanding leaves them exact in themselves. After the affirmations we may have to 11 discover the rejections, but we must still believe that after the rejections the greater affirmations are to return.

In the literature of Europe the greatest record of the Way of Affirmation of Images is contained in the work of Dante Alighieri. There the facts of existence are translated into the actualities of poetry; they are all drawn, in Hippolyta’s admirable definition of poetry (Midsummer Night’s Dream, V, i) into

something of great constancy,

But howsoever, strange and admirable.

The ‘constancy’ of this work is its most remarkable characteristic—both in the sense of lastingness and in the sense of consistency. The greater, the most important, part of that work is poetry, and we must not, of course, confuse poetry with religion. We do not know if, or how far, Dante himself in his own personal life cared or was able to follow the Way he defined, nor is it our business. We do not know if he was a ‘mystic’, nor is it our business; and the word, having been mentioned, may now be dismissed. The present point about the work of this great poet is that it refers us not to a rare human experience but to a common; or rather it begins with one that is common and continues on a way which might be more common than it is. What we can say about Dante, and almost all that we can say about him, is that he had the genius to imagine the Way of Affirmation wholly—after a particular manner indeed, but then that is the nature of the way of the Images. If a man is called to imagine certain images, he must work in them and not in others. The record of the Dantean Way begins with three things—an experience, the environment of that experience, and the means of understanding and expressing that experience; say—a woman, a city, and intellect or poetry; say again—Beatrice, Florence, and Virgil. These images are never quite separated, even in the beginning; towards the end they mingle and become a great complex image. They end with the inGodding of man.

This, to Dante, necessary (but also voluntary) choice of images is not, of course, the only choice; it is not the only method of that Way. On the whole, the nearest thing to it which we have in English literature is in the Prelude of Wordsworth, and in his other lesser poems. The Prelude begins also with the affirmation 12 of images, but this time of ‘fountains, meadows, hills and groves’. Had Wordsworth been of the stature of Dante, we should have had in English an analysis and record of a Way of Affirmation comparable to the Italian. He was not; he ceased even while he spoke of those ‘hiding-places of man’s power’ of which he desired to write. Yet the very title of the poem reminds us that he had intended no less a task; he was precisely aiming to enter into an understanding, in poetry, of ‘the two great ends of liberty and power’; ‘la potestate’, says Virgil to Dante (Purg. XVIII, 70-5), ‘. . . la nobile virtù . . . lo libero arbitrio.’ ‘This power . . . this noble virtue . . . (is) the liberty of the will.’ Wordsworth rather reminded us of the Way than defined it for us. But he did remind us of the business of the Imagination which is the faculty by which images, actual or poetic, are understood.

Imagination—here the power so-called

Through sad incompetence of human speech,

That awful Power, rose from the mind’s abyss;

and again:

This spiritual love acts not nor can exist

Without Imagination; which, in truth,

Is but another name for absolute power,

And keenest insight, amplitude of mind,

And Reason in her most exalted mood;

and again:

Imagination having been our theme,

So also hath this spiritual love,

For they are each in each, and cannot stand

Dividually. Here must thou be, O man,

Power to thyself; no helper hast thou here;

Here keepest thou in singleness thy state.

No other can divide with thee this work.

No secondary hand can intervene

To fashion this ability; ’tis thine,

The prime and vital principle is thine,

In the recesses of thy nature, far

From any reach of outward fellowship,

Else is not thine at all. But joy to him,

13

Oh, joy to him who here hath sown, hath laid

Here, the foundation of his future years!

For all that friendship, all that love can do,

All that a darling countenance can look,

Or dear voice utter, to complete the man,

Perfect him, made imperfect in himself,

All shall be his; and he whose soul hath risen

Up to the height of feeling intellect

Shall want no humbler tenderness.

It has seemed worth while to quote at this length for two reasons: (i) because the whole passage is a description of the difficulty of the Way of the Images, (ii) because a number of the phrases are, as might have been expected, exactly applicable to that other Dantean Way. It is not to be rashly assumed that the Way of Affirmation is much easier than the Way of Rejection. To affirm the validity of an image one does not at the moment happen to like or want—such as that of one’s next door neighbour—is as harsh as to reject an image—such as oneself as successful—which one does happen to like and want. ‘To fashion this ability’ is a personal, secret, and arduous business. It is the Purgatory of the Divine Comedy; just as ‘the dear voice’ of Beatrice assists in the New Life, as in the Paradise, in the perfecting of Dante. That Wordsworth wrote like Wordsworth and not like Dante may be a criticism of his verse but does not alter the application of the maxims.

The great resemblance between Dante and Wordsworth rather than any other of the English poets is that the work of each of these pretends to start from a definite and passionate personal experience. In that sense their work has something in common which is not, for example, in either Shakespeare or Milton, the throb in their poetry of a personal discovery. The Shakespearian world becomes gradually full of human capacities; the Miltonic is ritually aware (in the Ode on the Nativity) of the moment following the victory of one capacity over the others. But Dante, even in the first—call it an anecdote, is aware of three kinds of capacity all overwhelmed by a power; and Wordsworth has a similar, though less analysed, sense. The next to nearest is Patmore, but the entry of Patmore on this Way is more graceful 14 and delicate; he delays, as it were, poetically, before the revelation of an ‘unknown mode of being’. This ‘unknown mode’ which in Wordsworth is ‘Nature’ is in Dante Romantic Love. I keep the word Romantic for three reasons. The first is that there is no other word so convenient for describing that particular kind of sexual love. The second is that it includes other loves besides the sexual. The third is that in following the Dantean record of his love it may be possible to understand something more of Romanticism itself, and of its true and false modes of being. The word should not be too narrowly confined to a literary manner. It defines an attitude, a manner of receiving experience. I do not see any grounds on which, if we are to call the young Wordsworth a Romantic, we can deny the term to the young Dante. That there is a false Romanticism I willingly concede; that Dante denounced it I hope to suggest. But the false does not abolish the true or the value of the true, any more than the cheap use of the word Romantic spoils the intellectual honour which properly accompanies it.

Romantic Love then was the personal experience with which Dante’s poetry ostensibly began; that is, the love which has been described in so many exalted terms by so many poets. Since one of the purposes of this book is to examine its nature as Dante revealed it, there is no need to delay to do so outside Dante. A question debated is whether it is, in varying degrees, a normal human experience. Those who suppose it not to be will naturally deny that an examination of the pattern of the work dealing with that abnormal state can have any general value. Those who believe that it is may agree that such an examination of a normal state may perhaps have some such value. I am not suggesting that Dante confined his attention to Beatrice alone. Beatrice, as was said above, was met in Florence; and Florence was a city; and images of cities, human and indeed divine, are part of Dante’s affirmation. That affirmation was made, by him, in prose and verse; and such prose and verse was the means of his poetic images, and formed in itself an actuality of his life; that is, literature was an image, of which the greatest expression in his own work was the shape of Virgil. It is because Dante knew that there was a great deal other than Beatrice to which he must attend that his attention to Beatrice is valuable. It is that inclusion 15 which prevents his Way of Affirmation being either a mere sentimentality or a disguised egotism. He was, it must be admitted, moral, for he perceived that images existed in their own right and not merely in his.

The image of the woman was not new in him, nor even the mode in which he treated it. What was new was the intensity of his treatment and the extreme to which he carried it. In his master’s great poem—in Virgil’s Aeneid—the image of the woman and the image of the city had both existed, but opposed. Dido had been the enemy of Rome, and morality had carried the hero away from Dido to Rome. But in Dante they are reconciled; the appearance of Virgil at the opening of the Commedia has about it this emphasis also. Virgil could not enter the paradise of that union, for his poem had refused it. But after Virgil the intellect had had visions which it communicated to the heart, if indeed they are so far separate. Since Dante the corrupt following of his way has spoiled the repute of the vision. But the vision has remained. People still fall in love, and fall in love as Dante did. It is not unusual to find them doing it.

There are two other matters which should be touched on in relation to this particular romantic vision and marriage. The first is the error that it is, or should be, the only basis for marriage. It would be as ridiculous to assert this as it is foolish to deny that it often forms such a basis. The ‘falling in love’ often happens, but it is not to be either demanded or denied. There are many modulations and combinations of vision, affection, and appetite, and none of these modulations is necessarily an improper beginning for that great experiment which we call marriage.

The second, and opposite, error is that it necessarily involves marriage; it may indeed exist—as it seems to have done in Dante’s own case—where, for one reason or another, marriage is not only impossible but is never even contemplated. Adoration, and it is adoration of its own proper kind which is involved, may exist between all kinds of people; that kind of secondary worship permitted, under the name of dulia, to saints and angels and other express vehicles of the Glory. Where this romantic adoration exists, there this proper intellectual investigation of it ought to exist. The clearest possibility of this Way, and perhaps the most difficult, may be in marriage, but the suggestion of it is 16 defined wherever the suggestion of adoration is present. ‘Hero-worship’, and even more sentimental states, are only vaguer and less convincing images of the quality which this love is. They are often foolish, but they are apt also to have that kind of sincerity which may, one way or another, become fidelity to the image or to the principle within and beyond the image. One way or another this state is normal; what is not yet normal is the development of that state to its proper end.

It may be thought that the death of Beatrice interferes with the proposition that the way of Dante’s imagination can be an image of the normal way of romantic love, whether with marriage or without. There are two answers. The first is that the death of Beatrice corresponds to a not uncommon stage in the sensible development in the Way. Something will be said about that in the third chapter. The second is that the death of Beatrice, or (let us say) the disappearance of Beatrice, does not mean the abandonment of her image; and that the Commedia, by its maintenance of that image, exhibits the definitions of the Way in their general application.

We have then three themes with which this book is, one way or another, intended to deal: (i) the general Way of the Affirmation of Images as a method of process towards the inGodding of man, (ii) the way of romantic love as a particular mode of the same progress, (iii) the involution of this love with other images, particularly (a) that of the community—that is, of the city, a devotion to which is also a way of the soul, (b) that of poetry and human learning. The general maxim of the whole way in Dante is attention; ‘look’, ‘look well’. At the beginning he is compelled to look by the shock of the vision; later his attention is enforced by command and he obeys by choice. At the beginning, two of the three images—poetry and the city—are habitual to him though still fresh and young; they do not astonish him. But Beatrice does. Incipit Vita Nova. It was, with Dante as with Wordsworth,

the bodily eye . . .

Which spake perpetual logic to my soul,

And by the unrelenting agency

Did bind my feelings even as in a chain.

17

II BEATRICE

The Vita Nuova is said to have been written when Dante was twenty-six, directly after the death of Beatrice. He is reported in maturer years to have been ‘much ashamed of having made this little book’.[1] This is likely enough; Shakespeare at the time of King Lear probably had no great opinion of Romeo and Juliet. The greater the poet, the farther his later achievement from his earlier. Even in our degree, we can feel a little, from the midst of the Paradiso, how tender, how thrilling, but how young and small a thing it is. That does not prevent it from being much beyond our own capacities at twenty-six.

It is a conventional book; that is, it is written according to the literary habits of his time. Dante was acquainted with contemporary poets and writing more or less in their style. He himself tells us how he sent the first sonnet in it to various well-known poets, ‘famosi trovati in quel tempo’, and how some of them answered him, and how one answer was the beginning of a friendship between him and its writer, who became the chief of his friends. This too is natural enough; it has a kind of epistolary agreement with

What things have we seen

Done at the Mermaid!

or to Wordsworth reading the Prelude to Coleridge. But Wordsworth was then thirty-six; the Prelude was begun when he was thirty. The events of which he was writing had taken place some years before. It is of interest to observe that the great crisis in Wordsworth’s early experience—the declaration of war by England against France; that is, against the Revolution—took place when he was twenty-three: the death of Beatrice is supposed to have taken place when Dante was twenty-four. This, at least, on the assumption that she was Beatrice Portinari. Whether she was or not, whether her actual name was Beatrice or not, is 18 another, and less important, matter. There was a girl; ‘for four centuries no biographer and no commentator . . . doubted the physical reality of Beatrice.’[2]

Before the experience of this great emerging Image of Beatrice is considered in detail, it is desirable to observe what Dante meant by Love. At a certain point in the Vita Nuova—precisely, as we shall see, after the most evangelical of all the significances in Beatrice has been defined—he breaks off his story in order to explain. He says he has been talking throughout about Love ‘as if he were a thing in himself and not only an intelligent being but a corporeal being. Which thing according to truth is false, for Love does not exist in himself as a substance does but as an accident in a substance.’ It is a quality; it is not, as Dante has been calling it, a living creature. ‘I have spoken of Love as a man.’ Dante defends this style as traditional and proper; the poets who wrote in Latin did it, therefore so may those who write in Italian. But, he adds, those who do so write must have clear reason for what they do; it is shameful for any man to write in figure and colour and not be able to strip his meaning of such decoration and say plainly what he has in mind.

Love then, however he speaks of it, is a quality—a quality of himself towards Beatrice. It is this quality, once he has become aware of it, which he is to express and analyse, by ‘a passion and a miracle of words’. ‘Dante’, wrote Coleridge, ‘does not so much elevate your thoughts as send them down deeper’; that is, make them more profound. The distinction was well made; it is not a rarefying but a deepening and enlargement of this quality and relation which is in question, until it becomes the universal relationship, in its most intense quality, of the close of the Paradiso.

Incipit vita nova. He was nine when he first met Beatrice and she was eight. He saw her, during the next nine years, on a number of occasions, but it was not until he was eighteen that she spoke to him. She was then walking in the street with two other ladies, rather older than she was; she had on a white dress, and as they passed him she looked at him and ‘saluted’ him. It was nine on a May morning of the year 1283, in a street in Florence. 19 Those two meetings together, with all that went between, formed the ‘falling in love’ of Dante Alighieri, the first but obscure emergence in him of that ‘quality’ of love. He was full of a

deep and undetermined sense

Of unknown modes of being.

He was also a poet, and a particular kind of poet; what kind he describes in the Purgatorio (XXIV, 52-63)

Io mi son un che, quando

Amor mi spira, noto, ed a quel modo

che ditta dentro, vo significando.

‘I am one who, when Love breathes in me, note it, and expound it after whatever manner he dictates.’ He is careful, that is, to be accurate, and he is so sure of this that he causes the redeemed soul to whom he is then talking to congratulate him on it, and to say that Dante’s literary style is better than that of others only because of this. The poem of which they are both thinking is a poem which occurs later in the Vita and begins: ‘Ladies who have intelligence in love’—‘ch’avete intelletto d’amore.’ It is that ‘intelletto d’amore’ which he now begins to expound, and which his genius supplied for the profit of later and less articulate lovers.

The appearance of Beatrice, her ‘image’—‘la sua immagine’—produces at their first meeting three distinguishable effects, which he attributed in the physiological and poetic habit of his day to three centres of the human body. No doubt this analysis was supplied later; we need not suppose it untrue. The ‘spirit of life’ which dwells in the most hidden chamber of the heart trembled and said ‘Behold a god stronger than I who is come to rule over me’. The ‘animal spirit’ which lived in the brain where all sense-perceptions are known was amazed and said ‘Now your beatitude has appeared’. The ‘natural spirit’ which dwelled ‘where our nourishment is distributed’—that is, in the liver—begins to weep and says: ‘O miserable wretch! how often now shall I be hampered!’ It is something of a pity that poets in English do not any more distinguish between the heart and the liver. Aquinas called the heart ‘the organ of the passions of the soul’.[3] These are the greater emotions, the nobler but also no 20 doubt the worse. The liver is the seat of organic life, and in considering the whole history it would be unwise to forget that Dante allowed fully the disturbance to this third seat of his consciousness. It is not, I think, too much to say that his sex, like his intellect, was awakened. That he had, there and perhaps thereafter, no direct desire of Beatrice sexually is likely enough; first love often happens so. But that the potentiality of it was there is also likely. When, later, he says that his ‘natural’ spirit was ‘impeded in its operations’, so that he became weak and frail, and his acquaintances grew curious and even spiteful, he must mean at least that this potentiality was present. Long afterwards he was to cry out: ‘The embers burn, Virgil, the embers burn’, and the fire was general through him.

So much only to prevent too great an ‘elevation’ of Dante’s thought; we are not to suppose him a mere cerebralist. When, after the second critical meeting, he dreamed of Love, and saw in a cloud of the colour of flame the figure of a lord, ‘of terrible aspect to whoever should look on him’, who seemed ‘of such joy as to himself that it was a marvellous thing’ it is his first imaginative formation of this ‘quality of love’. Love speaks aloud but Dante understands little of what he says, except the words: ‘I am thy lord.’ This great and terrible figure, fire-shrouded, is carrying Beatrice asleep in his arm, and lightly wrapped in some crimson cloth, and in his other hand something burning, of which he cries to Dante: ‘See, your heart!’ Then he wakes Beatrice and causes her ‘by his art’ to eat, though in fear, of the burning thing; and then presently Love begins to weep, and gathers her, and still weeping ascends towards heaven.

They were, said Wordsworth, of other huge and mighty forms, ‘a trouble to my dreams.’ The dream is generally referred to the death of Beatrice, and so perhaps properly. But this figure is what this accident of substance, this quality of being, this new relation, is. His spiritual emotions, his intellectual perceptions, his organic sensations, all coalesce in a recognition of it and of her by whom it comes. It is no wonder he quotes Homer: ‘She did not seem the daughter of a mortal man, but of God.’ A kind of dreadful perfection has appeared in the streets of Florence; something like the glory of God is walking down the street towards him. It appears that this is an experience which has 21 occurred to a large number of young people besides Dante. Their elders do not encourage them to believe that the phenomenon is what it seems; the causes of their elders’ hesitation are many, and some of them at any rate are exhibited in the ditches of the Inferno or (if they are fortunate) on the terraces of the Purgatorio.

This state of things is what Dante calls ‘Love’. It must however be stressed that this image of Beatrice is ‘of so noble a virtue’ that it does not allow Love to triumph without Reason, in all things proper to Reason. This, at that moment, is not a very advanced business; indeed, an opponent might say that Reason is only there to show Dante how to carry himself towards the lady. It would be an unfair retort; at the moment certainly that is Reason’s chief occupation because it is Dante’s. But the part that Reason plays is the beginning of a much greater part; it is the first determination that this Love is precisely what Wordsworth said his was—

kindred to our purer mind

And intellectual life.

Beatrice is ‘la gloriosa donna della mia mente’—the glorious lady of my mind. The development of that intellectual concern is to be shown long afterwards—in its rejection and in its affirmation. ‘We are come’, says Virgil to Dante at the opening of the Inferno, ‘where I told you you should see that unhappy people who have lost the good of intellect’—‘il ben dell’intelletto.’ And at the close of the Paradiso Beatrice says to him: ‘We are come to the heaven which is pure light—intellectual light full of love’—‘luce intelletual piena d’amore.’ In the Vita it is rather love (of its own proper kind) full of intellectual light. But the greatest Romantic poet, like every other true romantic, insists on the intellect at every step of the Way; of that threefold image—Beatrice, love, and intellect—no element was ever false to the others.

With the dedication of the Vita to Reason in mind, it is permissible to observe the kind of language that Dante uses concerning the Florentine girl. She has ‘an ineffable courtesy’; she is ‘la mia beatitudine’—my beatitude; she is ‘the destroyer of all vices and the queen of virtue’; she is, in one remarkable poem, ‘salute’—salvation. In 1576, when the Vita was first printed, 22 the ecclesiastical authorities revised it for the press. They removed all these semi-theological words; they substituted ‘felicità’ for ‘beatitudine’ and ‘dolcezza’ for ‘salute’, and they made other alterations. The net result was to cut out as much theology as they could. They were (it seems probable) foolish; but they were not so foolish as those other commentators who, keeping Dante’s language, have assumed either (a) that Dante did not mean it, or (b) that Dante’s experience was abnormal and that his language is not applicable to any other love affair. What between clerical caution and lay obtuseness, the idea that Dante’s state of being is that of many others, and that the doctrine is generally applicable, and was seriously meant, has been almost lost.

But in fact Dante did mean his language. The proof of it is in the famous passage in which he describes the significance of her ‘salutation’. He wished to keep his feelings about Beatrice secret—it was a convention of ‘courtly love’, but it is also quite a frequent human tendency, especially if combined with a tendency to talk about the beloved on every possible occasion: literary conventions (in spite of some critics) are not necessarily ‘psychologically’ unsound. He therefore pretended to be ‘attentive’ to another young woman, and (after that one left Florence) to a third. Of this third lady and Dante there was a good deal of gossip; the worst of the talk came to Beatrice’s ears. She cut Dante in the street. ‘She refused me her most sweet greeting in which all my blessedness lay.’

He explains what he means by blessedness, and it seems that he meant blessedness. He writes: ‘Dico—I tell you when she appeared from any direction, the hope of her admirable greeting abolished in me all enmity, and I was possessed by a flame of charity which compelled me to forgive anyone who had done me an offence; and if anyone had asked me a question about anything, I should have said only Love! with a countenance full of humility.’ The sight of Beatrice (dico—I tell you) filled him with the fire of charity and clothed him with humility; he became—and for a moment he knew it—an entire goodwill. Neither of these great virtues is gained by considering oneself; and the apparition of this glory, living and moving in Florence, precisely frees him from the consideration of himself. Love is greater than he: his soul was right when it exclaimed: ‘A stronger than I 23 dominates me’ and trembled, and his brain was right when it said: ‘Behold your blessedness’, and even his flesh when it said: ‘O misery, how I shall be shaken’, as in Malory ‘the deadly flesh began to tremble right hard when it beheld spiritual things’. This love certainly does not exclude the physical reactions; his body, he says, was so oppressed by it, as by a surfeit of sweetness, that it felt heavy and lifeless; her greeting was too much for him; it ‘passava e redundava la mia capacitade—overpassed and overflowed my capacity’. This too is not without significance when we consider the way in which, in the Paradiso, the body is spoken of, ‘the glorious and holy flesh’ (Par. XIV, 43); there the light, beauty, and love of the holy souls will grow greater through their bodies, and they will see more deeply into God. It is an image of this state which he already sees in Beatrice, as for a moment its actuality—humility and charity—is, so far as he can bear it, communicated to his soul.

On this particular occasion she passes and ignores him. That sudden snub, those cold averted eyes, must have struck similarly—for better or worse reasons—on numbers of young men. Dante was young; he was medieval and an Italian; he went away and cried. It did not occur to him to be ashamed of his emotions; he wept and slept—‘come un pargoletto battuto lagrimando—like a beaten sobbing little child’, and he had a dream of Love. The image of Love appeared to him in sleep on a number of occasions; or (perhaps more truly) he invented these dreams in order to declare something of the nature of this quality of Love. It is not possible to go over all, but this one is of importance. Love appears to him clothed in white and sitting deep in thought; presently he gazes at Dante and after a time says with a sigh: ‘Son, it is time to put aside our pretences—simulacra’, and he himself begins to weep. ‘I said: “Lord of nobility, why do you weep?” He said: “Ego tamquam centrum circuli, cui simili modo se habent circumferentiae partes; tu autem non sic.” Thinking over these words, it seemed to me he had spoken obscurely, and I forced myself to speak and say to him: “Lord, why do you speak to me so darkly?” And he answered me in the common tongue: “Do not ask more than is useful to you.”’ After which they go on to the matter of the snub, and Love causes Dante to write a poem to put himself right with ‘our Beatrice’.

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But while Love was talking the more ceremonial Latin, what did he mean? ‘I am the centre of a circle to which all parts of the circumference are in a similar relation; but you are not so.’ The whole crisis is about Dante’s unhappiness at Beatrice’s behaviour; this saying then has some bearing on it. Dante is not like Love; he is not central to all the circumference. The earlier similitudes are to be put away; they are to speak truth, and the truth is that Dante is not Love. He moves, presumably, on the circumference; he changes and is changed with it, but Love is not. Greeting or no greeting, Love is Love.

Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds

Or bends with the remover to remove.[4]

But Dante, for all that momentary charity and humility, is not yet in a state to recognize so much.

There was written by St. Bonaventura, about the same time, a sentence which, with a like simile, had a further aim; it was the famous ‘God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere’. The two formulae together cover almost the whole of the Way of Images—and indeed of the Way of Rejection of Images also. Dante is not in the centre; he feels great emotions varyingly; only some parts of the circumference impose goodwill. But to Love in the centre all parts are equal; it does not matter whether the lover is successful or not, happy or not. To be so—‘but you are not so’—one must will charity and humility; it is not enough that they shall be communicated by joy. Beyond this again lies that further state when Love is no longer in relation to something in the soul which is not Love; charity and humility do not exist there only in relation to some other particular image; they are at all times everywhere to everyone.

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So that, in this matter of the salutation, Dante knows the fullness of Love on occasion and by grace; but then he has to become it, without the means of that special illumination and particular initiative; and so becoming, all along the Way of the Images, he will find no separate knowledge of them, but in the end their absolute existence, as at the close of the Paradiso, where the Divine City exhibits them on all sides.

But at this earlier time it might almost be said that the refusal of the salutation is the second stage on the Way, and it was carried further at a certain feast. It was the wedding-feast of a friend of Beatrice, and Dante had gone there in the company of a friend of his own. He was aware (he says) of the presence of Beatrice before he saw her; his heart shook and a faintness took him. He saw her and was no longer himself, and the young women there began to smile at him and made feminine fun of him to (or with) Beatrice, but his friend seeing something was amiss drew him aside and questioned him. ‘And I said: “I have set my feet in that part of life beyond which it is not possible to go with any intention of return.”’

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate—those two states are not the same. But they have something in common, and what they have in common is finality. Nothing will ever be the same again; he will never be the same again—if he takes another step. There is about him an agony of choice; this now is the quality of love. He cannot bear to see her and he cannot bear not to see her; either is a little death, and all of it is one of the commonest experiences. ‘I forget’, he wrote in a sonnet, ‘all that happens to me, when, fair Joy, I set out to see you, and when I am near you I hear Love saying: “Flee away, if you find it tiresome to perish.” My face shows the colour of my heart, which faints and looks for support, and I grow drunk with a great trembling and seem to hear the very stones crying out to me: “Die, die!”’ . . . This is the present climax of self-preservation and self-loss. Love itself says ‘Flee’, and the stones say ‘Die’. The beauty and the joy are too much for him; they are absolute over him; there is in them a high and dreadful conclusion; it is either flight or death.

But if he stays? if he dies this little death? if he, so far, understands this new centre which is Love? It is, I think, true to say that from this point the quality of Love is found illuminating in 26 a new way. We are still to suppose that Dante was right when he said that he was one who took note when Love spoke, and wrote accurately. What he writes now is the famous ‘Donne, ch’avete intelletto d’amore’, and it was this poem of which he was thinking in the Purgatorio. He remembered and ratified it there; he gave it, that is, the value of his maturity and not only of his youth, the value of his purification as well as the value of his delight. Coleridge was right; Dante does not exalt our thoughts, he makes them infinitely more profound. We ought to have taken at least this poem seriously, if we call Dante a great poet; we might have thought it was meant for all who desire to have intelligence in love, intellect in love.

Briefly, he says (addressing himself only to those ladies who have intelligence in love; it is not proper to speak to the rest), that an angel cried out in divine intellect, and said that a wonder was on earth which shone as if in heaven. Heaven itself desired her presence. But God answered that she must remain on earth a little, for one was there who expected to lose her and who should say in hell to the damned: ‘I have seen the hope of the blessed—Io vidi la speranza de’ beati.’ She is such that whoever stays to behold her becomes a noble thing or dies; she proves her virtue, for he grows so humble that he forgets every offence; this grace God has given her, that whoever speaks with her cannot end badly. Love says of her: ‘How can a mortal thing be so beautiful and so pure?’ Love gazes at her (riguarda) and swears that God meant to make a new thing (cosa nuova). She has all goodness that Nature can give, and beauty proves itself by her example. This quality of Love sparkles in her eyes and touches the hearts of all who see her, and is painted in her smile which no-one can steadily look on. And Dante, speaking to his own canzone, adds that he has raised it to be a little daughter of Love, young and simple, and it is to go only among those who are courteous—‘solo con donna o con uomo cortese’—and with Beatrice it shall find Love; ‘recommend me to him.’

Dante wrote this when he was young; he ratified it when he was mature; he put it into the middle of the purging of the soul. He must therefore have supposed that he was talking sense, and not only sense but even holiness. Anyone who thinks him (and even anyone who calls him) a great poet will probably admit so 27 much. It may also perhaps be generally admitted that Dante did not rationally and out of love suppose Beatrice to be so much of an exception and example to all the young women of Florence as, in love but not unrationally, he imaginatively asserted that she was. The quality of love (he maintained) exhibited in her a heavenly glory. Are we to say that this was so or that it was not so? If so, was it unique, or is it general to other young lovers and other states of adoration? And if general, are we to take the glory as seriously as Dante did? and if so, why? and if not, why not?

These are the questions which, always supposing we go on calling Dante a great poet, we shall have seriously to try and answer. The answers which the present pages support are that the exhibition of glory is actual; that it is also general; that we do well to take it seriously; and for reasons these pages attempt to sustain. The immediate suggestion, put forward elsewhere, which coincides with that canzone, is that what Dante sees is the glory of Beatrice as she is ‘in heaven’—that is, as God chose her, unfallen, original; or (if better) redeemed; but at least, either way, celestial. What he sees is something real. It is not ‘realer’ than the actual Beatrice who, no doubt, had many serious faults, but it is as real. Both Beatrices are aspects of one Beatrice. The revealed virtues are real; so is the celestial beauty. The divinely intelligent angel is quite right; the place of this heavenly creature is heaven. God, not disapproving, says that Dante will call her ‘the hope of the blessed’. Beatrice then, so the quality of Love reveals, is the hope of the blessed; that is, the high and glorious Beatricean quality of Beatrice is the hope of the blessed. The phrase itself is obscure. We might allow Dante a rash, even an over-rash, phrase in his youth, but the purgatorial ratification should cause it to be considered further. It may however be left for the moment, only so that it be taken as a serious statement with all that is to follow.