Dante as Lyric Poet

I.

WE have been so long accustomed to think of Dante chiefly as the poet of The Divine Comedy, and of Shakespeare chiefly as the dramatist of the Plays, that we do not always remember that they are also supreme among modern lyric poets. There are two apparent reasons for this supremacy. The first concerns the Poet as Artist. Dante could never have perfected the terza rima of The Divine Comedy, Shakespeare could never have elaborated the blank verse of the Plays, — those Protean metres, each susceptible of endless variety in cadence, in sweep, in delicacy of modulation, in richness of tone, — unless they had both been, potentially at least, masters of minor metrical forms. The greater includes the less.

The second reason concerns the Poet as Man. Of all poetry, the lyric is the most personal. Through it the poet utters, without feigning or restraint, his subjective emotions. But the value of an emotion, for the purpose of poetry, depends on the calibre of the individual who experiences it. In music or painting it may be otherwise, but great poetry inevitably presupposes greatness of character in the poet. He may have many flaws, — sins, even, and startling limitations; he certainly will not let himself be measured easily by conventional standards; but his greatness is essential, the one fixed fact in literature. Accordingly, there is no luck in the surpassing excellence of the lyrical poems of Dante and Shakespeare, nor of the lyrics of Milton and Goethe, — the greatest characters after those that have expressed themselves through poetry in modern times. Let us glance first at Dante the Man.

Fate gave him genius; life brought experience : and he, by self-correction, perfected both. Commentators, in their effort to reconstruct the poet from his poetry, have almost made us forget that he was a man at all: rather was he, if we could believe them, a marvelously intricate mechanism for turning out literary masterpieces according to rules which these commentators have deduced from his works. Now, little as we know about Dante’s external life, we do know this beyond dispute, — he was no literary formula.

Historically, he came at the climax of the thirteenth century, — that wonderful century, only to be matched in importance by the fifteenth and the nineteenth. It was the great Catholic century. It witnessed the Papacy at its zenith under Innocent III, the formulation of Catholic theology by Thomas Aquinas, the rise of the great orders, — the Dominican to safeguard the faithful by persecuting heretics, the Franciscan to lead all men to Christ by following his example. It boasted its mystics and its logicians; it built cathedrals ; it set forth on eight crusades; it beheld the establishing of popular government in Italian cities, the bourgeonings of popular literatures, the astonishing expansion of the great universities. Above all, it saw the death struggle between the Holy Roman Emperors and the Popes, — the world their stake,— which resulted in the destruction of both Church and State as the sole temporal head of Christendom.

Into all these immense problems of creed and of government, into the speculations of the philosophers, into the antagonisms of popes and emperors, Dante plunged with might and main. He mastered not merely the theory of the mediæval world religion and world politics, but threw himself into the civic life of his native Florence, where factions raged, and where to discharge a citizen’s duties meant to hazard property and life on the caprice of a fickle people.

Coming of a well-to-do family, he enjoyed whatever schooling Florence then gave her youth, and he early, I conceive, outstripped his masters. Like most Italian lads, he wrote verses ; unlike most, he quickly proved himself a poet, for when he was eighteen his sonnet, “A ciascun’ alma presa, ” won him a reputation among the chief poets of Florence.

He fell in love with a damsel whom, after the fashion of his time, he never aspired to marry, being content to worship her at a distance, from his ninth year to his twenty-fifth, when she died. The commentators would persuade us that throughout his adolescence and young manhood this passion shut Dante out from all other thoughts, keeping him in a state almost hysterical — now ecstatically oblivious to everything except the recollection that Beatrice had saluted him last week; now plunged in gloom ; now fainting or seeing visions ; forever sighing and weeping; and more than once stark mad. In his “little book, ” The New Life, Dante himself supplies the outlines for this portrait; but not to perceive that he there writes as an artist, and not as a systematic chronicler, is to miss the key to The New Life and to him. Unquestionably, that passion for Beatrice was the chief experience of his youth; and, on looking back, he omitted, like the great artist that he was, all that he had done or thought outside of the orbit of Beatrice during those years, so that he created the impression that there was nothing more.

So we must distinguish between the ideal world, in which Dante placed his passion for Beatrice, and the actual world, in which, during those very years, he was really busy with many other things. Specifically what things, we cannot say in detail. We know, however, that he was mixing with the best intellects of his time, studying, meditating; eagerly taking part in the affairs of Florence, even enlisting in her militia and going forth to battle for her independence; in a word, playing from the outset the part of a man hungry for life, impetuous, stern, of manifold capacities, and as far removed as possible from any abstraction or formula. Let us not think of him as the central figure in a Pre-Raphaelite picture, — a soulful, æsthetic youth, condemned to gaze yearningly at sad-eyed, large-jointed, wry-necked ladies, whose spirits and complexions seem sodden in opium. Pre-Raphaelitism had its charms, but it could no more interpret Dante than Pope could Homer.

After Beatrice died, almost every authentic glimpse we get of Dante, for ten years, shows us a man seizing hold on active life with ever increasing energy. He takes part in the government of Florence; he goes on embassies; he is one of the city priors, and a recognized leader in one of the great political parties. He marries, and has several children; presumably, he has also some bread-giving occupation. Then, in January, 1302, while he is absent from Florence, his enemies, having got the upper hand, banish him on a charge of barratry and falsifying, and ten weeks later they condemn him to be burned alive. Thenceforward, until his death in 1321, he leads an exile’s life: at first coöperating in attempts to capture Florence, then chafing because one possible liberator after another fails to come to her aid. Amid these perturbations, and in spite of wanderings which took him to almost every part of Italy, and perhaps across the Alps, he writes The Divine Comedy and The Banquet, and makes himself master of all the knowledge of his time. And to his learning he adds an intensity of observation and a breadth of reflection which had been united in no earlier man of genius.

I venture to recall almost at random these points in Dante’s career, because I believe it to be much more essential to know the tremendous energy of the man, and to see how in his character and genius he held a whole epoch in solution, than to be learned in his commentators. Only in this way shall we rid ourselves of the common notion that a great poet cannot be a man of action, and we shall understand Dante’s lyrics better by perceiving that they are authentic fragments of a colossal personality.

To be able to certify that a given poem was written on a given day in a given year, or to whom it was addressed, or what all its allusions refer to, is often gratifying; but the matter of first importance is, how much of these poems is alive to-day? how much of the eternal do they hold ? what message do they bring to your heart and to mine ?

The approach to all the masterpieces of literature has become so clogged by the patient labors of the critics that one might waste a lifetime climbing over or tunneling the Cordilleras they have raised before reaching the rich kingdoms where Homer or Dante or Shakespeare reigns. To be a scholar now is to read,not the originals, but the reviews of critiques of commentaries on the originals ; and yet the best advice is, Seek the original — read it — ponder it — enjoy it — absorb it — find out what it means to you. What it meant to the poet himself or to his contemporaries we shall never wholly know; for we can never reconstruct Dante’s mind or Shakespeare’s, or the age in which each lived. Many of the allusions, much of the spirit of that age, and the scope of the master’s genius, we can understand; but still much remains, and, unless evidence now unknown be discovered, will forever remain, conjectural. In the domain of conjecture criticism shifts its position from time to time, as an army besieges an impregnable fortress, attacking now on one side and now on another, even making a complete circuit, yet never taking it.

A beautiful Greek statue is dug up: while archæologists are disputing whether it represents god, demigod, or hero, and who carved it, and where the marble was quarried, shall their uncertainty prevent us from delighting in its beauty ? And although it can never be established to whom Shakespeare addressed his Sonnets, or just how far The New Life mingles fact with allegory, have they no meaning for us? Does it really signify whether Shakespeare had Pembroke or Southampton in mind when he uttered his passion in such sonnets as “ When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, ” or “ Not marble, nor the gilded monuments, ” or “ That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” or “ When to the sessions of sweet silent thought ” ? Must we have solved the enigma of Beatrice in order to thrill as a lover thrills at the beauty of “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare ” ?

Let us emphasize this, because erudition threatens to usurp the function of taste in dealing with literature, and, indeed, with all works of art. Erudition continually thrusts upon us irrelevances whose only excuse is that they are facts. Philology sits in judgment on poetry. And since the authentic facts about Dante or Shakespeare were inventoried long ago, erudition offers theories, conjectures, plausible guesses, buttressed by many citations, instead of facts.

II.

Dante’s Canzoniere, or book of lyrical poems, contains eighty-six pieces usually held to be genuine, eight more called “doubtful, ” and some fifty surely “apocryphal.” I propose to consider only the genuine, — counting less than twenty-eight hundred lines in all, — among which are fifty sonnets and twenty canzoni ; taking their authorship for granted, and making such comments on them as would still be pertinent even if Dante were not their author. In short, it is their substance and style — questions of pure literature rather than of erudition — with which I wish to deal.

The first difficulty which confronts the reader of Dante is allegory. Not less in the Poems than in The Divine Comedy you soon find yourself entangled in a network of meanings and cross-meanings. Just as your mind grasps a thought, this suddenly dissolves into another, and this again is metamorphosed. It is as if, when you gaze into the translucent blue of noon, you could see, first, the constellations of the stars, and, after a little, beyond them, and lovelier still, angelic hosts, such as the old painters put in the heaven of their pictures. Dante intended this. There are, he said, four meanings possible in the highest poetry, — the literal, the allegorical or mystical, the moral, and, finally, the anagogical. For our present purpose, we will not lose ourselves in the maze of symbolism: we will take the poems as they stand, and see what they mean to-day.

For commentaries, turn to the excellent works of Witte and Fraticelli, those scholars to whom every subsequent reader of Dante gladly acknowledges his indebtedness, and to Giosuè Carducci, who is at once the most eminent living poet in Europe and one of the foremost living critics. In Carducci’s monograph Delle Rime di Dante ¹ there is a full discussion, based on the latest information, of the sources, composition, date, probable meaning, and style of most of the poems in the Canzoniere. Sig. Carducci discriminates so nicely that he thinks he can set down the order in which the lyrics were written. He assigns the first poems of The New Life, inspired by Guido Guinizelli and the popular poets of the third quarter of the thirteenth century, to 1283 and the next few years. Then Dante, feeling his own genius, enters his second period, that of the “sweet new style ” (il dolce stil nuovo), which lasted till Beatrice’s death. From 1292 to 1298 Carducci discerns another period, which he subdivides into three parts, according as “natural,” “allegorical,” or “gnomic ” tendencies manifest themselves. Finally, Dante’s banishment in 1302 opened another period, in which the agonizing novelty of exile rekindled the poet in him, while years and experience matured the sage and the statesman.

Let us admit at once that Dante’s lyric poetry has the raw material from which such a classification can be made; but let us be politely skeptical as to the probability that such minute dissection is right. To suppose that Dante, or any other true poet, produced his works after this orderly, chessboard fashion — now all black, again all red, one month joy, the next month gloom — would be to make that most mysterious of all creations, a poet’s soul, as humdrum as a railway time-table.

Before we survey the contents of Dante’s lyrics, let us examine for a moment his work as an artist in metre. He did not invent the forms in which he moulded his poems, but he so stamped his orignality on each of them that the sonnet, the ballata, and, above all, the canzone, became through his genius new metrical instruments, capable of producing effects hitherto undreamt of. It was as if two strings had been added to a primitive violin.

While he ennobled these verse forms, he showed how the Italian language could serve the highest purposes of poetry. There is a striking contrast between the metrical development of English and of Italian. English is rough rather than musical in sound ; it has few perfect rhymes; its words, except in a few cases, refuse to be contracted or curtailed. How to get from such an instrument the delicate modulations that beautify the lyrics of Shakespeare, Shelley, and Tennyson, — that was the technical problem for the masters of English verse.

Italian stands as the reverse of all this. It is plastic almost to the point of fluidity. If a final syllable harms the rhythm, it can be elided; if the first syllable interferes, it can often be suppressed ; if a foot or half-foot is needed, a suffix, of the required length, can be added; even the central syllable of a word is not always safe from condensation. Of rhymes there is no limit, and they are exact rhymes. The very genius of the language is musical, its prose having a dactylic flow almost as marked as the formal metres of its poetry. For improvisation, for sweet ditties and dulcet serenades, for folk-songs with their simplicity and their easy, haunting refrains, such a language could not be surpassed; but could it be the mouthpiece for great passion? Would tragedy not find it too soft, satire too flimsy ? Could it be trumpet, violin, or organ, as well as guitar ?

Dante achieved this wonder! He wrote some sonnets which not even Petrarch, coming after him and profiting by his example, has rivaled. He raised the canzone to be the peer of the English ode. Welcoming difficulties, because he saw that to overcome them he must have control over every phrase, word, and syllable, wherewith to clothe his thought, he experimented with novel kinds of metres and rhymes. The intricacies of structure which in English prevent the sonnet from ever losing, except with a few masters, an artificial air, checked in Italian that tendency to improvisation which Dante resisted. Accordingly, he packed his canzoni with thought, firm of texture and polished until every syllable fitted irremovably into its place. Sometimes, indeed, he carried condensation across the border of obscurity: imagine the terseness of Tacitus rendered still more difficult by the omissions and ellipses permitted in poetry, and you will get an idea of his most compressed passages. His treatise on The Vulgar Tongue shows how completely he had mastered the theory of the science of verse, especially in the Romance languages; his poems prove that he could embody his knowledge in his technique.

Dante gives no comfort to the idle singers of an empty day, who pretend that technical knowledge and the file need not be included in a poet’s outfit. “The highest conceptions cannot exist, ” he says, “except where there is knowledge and genius.”² “Never without sharpness of genius, nor without assiduity in art, nor without practice of knowledge, ” he says again, can one succeed in writing a canzone; “ and hereby is confessed the folly of those who, without art and without knowledge, relying solely on their genius, set themselves to sing in the highest fashion of the highest things.” ³ In a famous passage of The New Life he remarks: “It would be a great disgrace to him who should rhyme anything under the garb of a figure or of rhetorical coloring, if afterward, being asked, he should not be able to denude his words of their garb, in such wise that they should have a true meaning. And my first friend [Guido Cavalcanti] and I are well acquainted with those who rhyme thus foolishly.” ⁴ And so are we, who have heard the follies of French Symbolists and of their foreign mimics gravely proclaimed as a new triumph in poetry.

In Dante we find that rarest union, — intensity of imagination and clearness of intellect. When Love inspired him, he wrote; but the fervor of that inspiration did not prevent the working of his critical faculty, by which he tested its validity and decided how to clothe it in words. He seems to have held that our thought lies beyond our control, but that its expression depends on faculties which we may direct, — on knowledge, taste, patience, and skill, which are greater or less according as we voluntarily cultivate them. “Speech,” he says, “is not otherwise an instrument necessary to our conceptions than is the horse to the soldier.” ⁵ A memorable simile.

The little singers of our day and of all days shun knowledge and dread criticism, and well they may; for their verse-making is but effervescence. But Dante, seer and knower in one, could endure the most searching criticism — his own — without chilling his inspiration. The analyses which he makes of each poem in The New Life, and his exhaustive interpretation of the canzoni in The Banquet, show critical talents of the highest order. Indeed, we almost resent his cold-blooded dissection of those throbbing sonnets to Beatrice, until we reflect that through his ability to criticise, not less than to create, Dante became the chief moulder of Italian poetry. He rescued Italian poetry from the doom of improvisation. The Provencal, lacking such a savior, had degenerated quickly, never to revive.

Thus we can hardly overestimate Dante’s importance as a lyric craftsman. As such, he greatly influenced his immediate successors, and he has dominated the best Italian poets ever since. Shakespeare certainly ranks second to no other lyric poet, and yet his direct influence on English metrical development is scarcely discernible, — his lyrics, like his plays, have had no progeny ; while Dante, both in his lyrics and in his epic, stands literally as the Father of Italian Song.

Such was Dante’s influence on the structure of Italian poetry : not less elemental was his effect on its substance. His treatment of Love, the imperial theme of lyric poetry, illustrates this.

Chivalry as an ideal partook somewhat of the feudalism and somewhat of the religion of the society out of which it sprang. The devotion of the Knight to his Lady went by the name of love, but ought rather to be called worship ; for between them there existed, in theory at least, no personal relations. In fact, however, that faultless worship of the Knight for his Lady, untainted by thought of sex, had few votaries. As ancient as Adam and Lilith was the love the Troubadours sang. “Galeotto was the book, and he who wrote it,” — in those words Francesca da Rimini revealed to Dante the influence which had brought her and her lover to Hell. That sexless attachment of Knight and Lady, like its counterpart, sacerdotal celibacy, might have prospered save for one thing: in the one case Chivalry, in the other the Church, left human nature out of the reckoning; and flax and flame, then and to-day and always, must burn when they meet.

The sudden exalting of woman, commonly regarded as the chief product of Chivalry, had in essence a deeper origin. It marked a change in the ideals of sex that had slowly overspread Christendom ; nay, they had not only overspread Christendom, they had mounted to heaven. The deification of the Virgin Mary typified the gradual recognition, unconscious rather than reasoned out, that at the very Heart of the Universe there must abide those qualities which make woman woman. The Christian God, as defined by the theologians, whether he were worshiped as One, or as Three in One, was a masculine God. The Power personified in the Father, the Wisdom in the Son, the Love in the Holy Ghost, were still the attributes of man, and not of mankind, since they did not include attributes which are the peculiar endowment of woman. Motherhood, the most intimate and beautiful of human relations, had no recognition in that scheme of Deity. But instinct deeper than creed supplied the lack in the creed which theology had drawn up. In the apotheosis of Mary mediæval Christendom made its most precious contribution to human ideals.

But while ideal womanhood had already before Dante’s birth been deified, chivalric love had sunk in practice to the carnal level. The song might still be innocent, but the courtly singer and his mistress, the Knight and his Lady, were not. And the poetry itself, naïvely charming in its youth, had become conventional. The old phrases and much of the old prettiness remained, and the metrical skill had increased; but instead of many themes there was only ingenious repetition of one theme, — conceits refined and overrefined, and, worst of all, the evidence that neither the poet nor his readers believed in the pure devotion which he extolled.

Then Dante came, and into this ideal faded he poured that which first suffused it with new life, and then transfigured and sanctified it, until he had created a new ideal. Dante’s passion for Beatrice was genuine; accordingly, his lyric poems to her vibrate with sincerity. Fortunately, he was spiritual as well as sincere; and it is of great moment that he, the earliest master of modern poetry, should thus spiritualize the poetry of personal passion. Physical beauty remains of the earth, unless it be the medium through which the soul shines forth. Expression transcends form. Into his portrait of Beatrice he painted those attributes which never grow old, which could not be exhausted though every woman in the world possessed them; and the mere description of them must have more and more meaning according as men see with the eyes of the spirit. To have converted the poetry of chivalry from being either a metrical plaything or an erotic ornament to such high uses attests the genuineness of his passion. But he did more than this: he revived and amplified the mystical conception of Platonic love.

In his passion for Beatrice — as in all his other vital experiences — he passed by a process of growth from the personal and concrete to the impersonal and universal. At first it was the real Beatrice, the beautiful and lovely daughter of Folco Portinari, on whom all his passion centred; then, after she died, it was her memory that he worshiped; until gradually, from a person she became a personification, — the Symbol in Paradise of Heavenly Wisdom. What is this but Platonic Love, as described so mightily by Plato in The Symposium, and so commonly misunderstood ?

III.

And now for the poems themselves. We find in the earliest of them a mystical view of love, which tends more and more toward the Platonic ideal, and which, after the death of Beatrice, when Dante writes avowedly in allegory, visibly merges in that ideal. As a youth, he had before him the beautiful canzone of Guido Guinizelli, “ Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore, ” in which mystical love is described with much philosophical finesse and much poetical charm. Among all the poems of that century, not by Dante, this is, I think, the most delightful; and if it had here and there a little more distinction of phrase, it would rank with the best modern lyrics. In it we have the two cardinal points laid down, that Love’s dwelling place is the gentle heart, — “Love and the gentle heart are one same thing, ” is Dante’s own expression, — and that Love, since it came from God, wears an angel’s face.

Only a barbarian would undertake to degrade into cold prose the loveliness of the love poems in The New Life: no other medium than verse can convey the music of the words, the heightened imagery, the emotion which vibrates through the metre. We may, however, indicate some of their characteristics.

First, the freshness of them! They are the earliest blossoms of the Spring of modern Love; and they glisten with the newness and the tenderness of Spring. For this vernal rapture we go back, in English poetry, to the Elizabethans ; but Sidney and Spenser drew from Italian streams which flowed from Dante’s fountain.

Then, their blending of naïveté with knowledge. This strange power, Love, overcomes Dante: it fills all his life, and transfigures the universe before his eyes; he watches its influence spread, as he might watch with increasing wonder the mystery of dawn grow into the pageant of sunrise. But while his soul is thus enthralled by the ecstasy of love, his reason seeks to know the origin and nature of his new master: hence that interweaving of passion and philosophy, in which Dante came at last to transcend all other poets.

This blending reaches perfection in his descriptions of Beatrice, which rise higher and higher in spirituality, without letting us doubt that they apply to an actual woman. He reveals her to us by the effect she produces on those who beheld her, rather than by a definite portrayal of her countenance. Her eyes and her smiling mouth (the two features through which the soul becomes visible), and the sweet dignity of her bearing, her expression, and not her physical mould, — these are the outward signs of Beatrice which Dante describes. Accordingly, his portrait of her is at once actual and ideal: every lover who looks upon it believes that it was drawn from a living Beatrice, but that it cannot possibly be true of any other than his own beloved.

And then, how many chords are touched by the poems in The New Life ! Dante sings not only the perfection of Beatrice, but also his own perturbations. Like all lovers, he pendulates between boldness and shyness. For days or weeks his one desire is to see her, yet when they meet his courage deserts him, he trembles at her salutation. He goes home to cry out on the tyrant Love who thus torments him; and even while he cries out, he longs for a repetition of the torment. Like other lovers, he resorts to subterfuge, and pays such marked attention to another damsel that Beatrice herself is deceived into thinking that he has forsaken her. When he hears of this, he sends her a poem (Ballata i) in which he explains his conduct, and protests that his devotion has never wavered. The time comes when his passion is no longer a secret: his friends talk to him about it; Beatrice’s companions question him as to its goal, and he pours forth the canzone, “ Ladies, who have intelligence of love, ” a passionate ode in praise of Beatrice, whom the angels desire to be their comrade in heaven. Not long afterward the father of Beatrice dies, and for the first time the realization that Beatrice herself may die crashes like a thunderbolt through Dante’s soul. For him, as for every true lover in youth, nothing else can equal the dismay and agony which that possibility causes. Life and love are identical to the youth who loves; how can he think of life without the beloved ? Only in the all-enveloping immensity of Death can the agony which Death inflicts be quenched. This sublimation of grief is rarely felt in later years, for experience teaches us that life can be lived, bereft of the beloved, or even lovelessly, and that Duty, Friendship, or Philanthropy may take Love’s place at the helm.

This canzone, embodying Dante’s first premonition of Death, lifts his love story to a higher plane of significance by endowing it with that tragic quality which intrudes sooner or later upon us all. Dante had, in truth, already written two poems (Sonnet 3, Ballata ii), when one of Beatrice’s friends died; but they are graceful and sweet, the utterance of sentiment, while this is tragic. And even after the death of Beatrice herself he speaks as one sorrowing, but not amazed, at Death. In the third canzone he pictures Beatrice in heaven, God having called her to him because he saw that this troubled mortal life was not worthy of such a gentle thing. But if we except the lamentation addressed to pilgrims who are passing through Florence, sorrow rather than anguish henceforth prevails. He suffers keenly, but he continues to live; he strives for resignation, or at least for distraction, and is stirred by moral incentives of whose force he had not dreamed till now.

The conclusion of The New Life contains further the record of Dante’s experience with the Compassionate Lady, who grieved at his grief and tried to cheer him, and so far succeeded that he found himself in love with her. A very human touch is this, bearing witness to the close resemblance between Sympathy and Love. But the memory of Beatrice comes back so vividly to Dante that he realizes that Sympathy, however sweet, is not Love, and cannot replace the passion which Beatrice inspired; and so he concludes The New Life with that famous resolve to say of her “what was never said of any woman. ”

Brief as is this analysis of the themes dealt with in The New Life, it will show, I trust, how wide their range is. Alike in the history of the poetry of the modern world and in the history of the ideals of love, they are of immense importance: intrinsically, also, many of them have never been surpassed, some of them have never been equaled, by subsequent singers of spiritualized love, of beauty, and of womanly perfection.

This cycle of poems in The New Life, although it fills less than a quarter of the Canzoniere, is better known because of its sequence, its completeness, and the delightful prose setting, than all the rest, although among these are many magnificent poems, the fruits of Dante’s lyric genius at its maturity. There are perhaps a dozen which seem to belong, either in theme or in treatment, with The New Life; then come the three canzoni of The Banquet, and finally some forty other pieces which have not been classified.

We may mention first that strange group of poems⁶ in which Dante inveighs against a lady who will not listen to his suit. They have shocked some of his critics and puzzled all, and many specious allegories have been invented to explain them. To analyze them we have not space here; but in the briefest review of Dante’s lyrics they should not be passed by. For just as the poems to Beatrice reveal him as the youthful lover, so these show him to us loving with the full vehemence of his prime, and not at all resigned to worship silently and aloof the object of his passion. Who the lady was who has been called Pietra, quite without authority, and whether she was also the Lady of the Casentino, will probably never be known, but the poems add a whole province to our estimate of Dante’s personality.

May we not be content to admit that much of the Canzoniere has never been satisfactorily “ explained, ” nor can be, unless further evidence turn up, but that, nevertheless, nine tenths of it has intrinsic, vital meaning to-day ? Most of the controversies rage round insoluble matters. I care not whether the stonyhearted lady lived in Padua, or the Lady of the Casentino had (as alleged) a goître; what would it profit us to know the names of the grandmothers of the sculptor of the Venus of Milo, or of the musicians who played the shawms when the 90th Psalm was first sung? The vital facts we have: the passion of the “ Pietra ” canzoni and of the canzone written in the Casentino is plain, and these poems all testify that no bardling wrote them.

Nor do I observe that psychology has yet contributed anything of value to literary criticism. Like pedantry, — orscholarship, if the old name seems discourteous, — it furnishes facts which do not touch the inner meaning of any art product. Suppose that we could, by some miracle of hindsight, measure after the psychologist’s fashion the emotions of Shakespeare and Dante, and that we learned that Shakespeare’s pulse rose three beats when he entertained an angry thought, or that Dante’s temperature fell three twenty-ninths of a degree when he thought vehemently of love: what would it prove ? Absolutely nothing as to the value of a scene from Timon or a sonnet from The New Life. Equally vain are the efforts, so far as I have seen them, of those critics who have imagined that by such devices they could fathom the mysteries of the creative imagination. Psychology hath its bubbles, as religion and science have, and these are of them. Thirty years ago other critics believed just as confidently that they could explain genius by heredity.

Returning to our survey, we cannot but be amazed, as we get to the heart of one poem after another, by Dante’s inexhaustibility of thought, phrase, and metre. Judged merely by their number, the twenty canzoni are among the most remarkable evidences of poetic genius; but quality is the final test, and in this they do not fail. Not one is mediocre; fully three quarters are superior. If Coleridge had produced fifteen odes equal to Dejection, we might have had in English a poetical achievement to set beside Dante’s canzoni. I do not imply, of course, that Coleridge’s genius resembles Dante’s in quality. But without frequent citations from the original, if is impossible to do more than speak of some of the obvious characteristics of such poetry. Lyrics like the ballate — ten in number — evade even description. Their beauty depends on the perfect marriage of word and music, and is no more to be described except by itself than is one of Shakespeare’s songs.

The first two canzoni of The Banquet record the stages by which Dante passed from the love of Beatrice to the love of philosophy; the third expounds the nature of true nobility. The remaining forty-five lyrics may be divided into moral, personal, and patriotic, according to their themes.

Concerning Dante’s didactic poems in general, it may be said that, even to an Anglo-Saxon who has personally, and vicariously through Puritan ancestors, listened for centuries to moral preaching, they still have that insistence of truth which was old before Dante’s birth, and is born again whenever the youngest child perceives its meaning. In their intensity, they are among the few modern utterances through which the Old Testament resonance echoes; but Dante reasons,whereas the Jewish prophet proclaims downright, “ Thus saith the Lord! ” and awaits no reply. In these works, as in nearly all that he wrote, Dante was a pioneer. He tells us that before his time there were only love poems in Italian, but that he chose to write of Philosophy under the guise of Love. When we reflect that the Italians, from never having read the Bible freely in their mother tongue, have been cut off from the traditional source of moral education in Protestant countries, we shall hardly overestimate what it meant to them that their greatest poet was also their greatest moralist.

Among other personal poems there are three sonnets (40, 41, 43) apparently written to Cino da Pistoja, for whom Dante feels such friendship that he frankly urges him to mend his ways; but above all, there is the sonnet to Cavalcanti, “ Guido, I would that Lapo, thou and I, ” — the delightfulest expression of Love and Comradeship, with its strange modernness of sentiment, and its language as simple and musical as that which captivates us in Heine’s songs.

Finally, there are two patriotic canzoni. In one of them (xx) Dante addresses Florence, — “ My country, worthy of triumphal fame, mother of great-souled sons, ” — conjuring her by her spotless past, when the citizens “chose virtues to be the pillars of the State,” to extirpate the impious children who degrade her: “ so that downtrodden faith may rise again with justice, sword in hand.” From the first line to the last, we hear the outpouring of a true patriot, one who loves his country with a son’s devotion, and knows that he best proves his love by repudiating the evil policy into which she has been led. Are there not lands to-day which might well heed the alarum of this envoy? “Thou shalt go forth, Canzone, boldly and proudly, since Love leadeth thee, into my country, for which I mourn and weep; and thou shalt find some good men whose lantern gives no light; for they are submerged, and their virtue is in the mire. Shout unto them: Arise, arise! It is for you I call! ”

Thus Dante pleads for the regeneration of his beloved Florence. In the other canzone (xix) he rises at once to the summit of patriotism. He is an exile, outcast, yearning for his ungrateful city, when three ladies come together about his heart, because Love sits within. They too have been cast out from their rightful place in the affairs of men ; they have been scorned, insulted, despised. Who are they ? Righteousness, Generosity, Temperance: think what it means that a whole people should banish them, and that their refuge should be the heart of one just man, himself in banishment! Love listens to the story of their wrongs, and bids them not despair, for he and they are of one family, founded on the Eternal Rock. “And I who hear,” says Dante, “such lofty exiles console them and lament, hold as an honor the exile decreed to me: and if man’s judgment or the force of destiny will that the world turn its white flowers to dark, to fall among the good still merits praise. ” Here, then, is the last behest of patriotism : you shall not condone your country’s sins, but you shall keep your heart so pure that it may be the abode of Justice and Righteousness when all other men reject them; and above any compromise with the wicked, you shall prefer to fall among the good.

We may well close our survey with this magnificent poem, in which Dante has set Patriotism immutably on the heights, where Love and Righteousness dwell.

Thus is the circle of the Canzoniere complete. Love in many phases, — expectant, adoring, timid, angry, ecstatic; Friendship; Scorn; Wisdom; Integrity; Honor; Beauty; Patriotism ; Death, — Dante has touched one after another these everlasting chords of human interest, and he has so touched them as to produce lyric poetry of the very highest quality. If we measure the range of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Songs, the only other work which equals the Canzoniere in lyric genius, we shall find that Shakespeare has little or nothing to say on several of these themes, however royally abundant is his treatment of others. In their capacity for passion the two poets were equal; but Dante had a theory of life, the centre of which was Love, by which he came to test whatever experience, reflection, or imagination brought him. Shakespeare, so far as I discern, had no such unifying principle. The Niagara of life swept before him, and he sat upon the bank and strove to paint it as he saw it, — incessant, vast, awful, beautiful, — infinite in its momentary variations, yet apparently one and permanent: so he painted it, not recking to put on to his canvas any questions of Whence, or Why, or Whither. Accordingly, myriads of men have had their characters formed by Dante; I doubt whether many have been consciously formed by Shakespeare. I am not trying to compare these incomparable Two, but merely to indicate their most striking differences. A comparison of Dante and Shakespeare, for the purpose of ranking them, would be as idle as a comparison of the Alps and the Atlantic Ocean ; the genius of each sufficed to symbolize life in its entirety.

What abatement must we make in our estimate of the Canzoniere ? Something, no doubt, must be deducted on the score of age, although Dante’s language has fewer antiquated words than Shakespeare’s. More formidable is his use of allegory; for even when we have agreed to take what we can of the natural meanings, and let the gnomic and anagogical go, we should prefer to know all the possible answers to the riddle, and may feel a little aggrieved that we never can. That Dante sometimes exercises his marvelous gift for logical disputation beyond the proper limits of lyrical poetry, in which the main business is not to syllogize, can hardly be denied. So, too, we may justly object to an occasional display of learning, or to a passage obscured by too great condensation. But these blemishes occur very rarely, and not one of his poems is spoiled by them. To complain that even he could not lift some of the intricate metres with which he experimented out of the region of artificiality condemns those verse forms, and not him.

After making whatever deduction we must, an inestimable treasure remains. In the Canzoniere, the highest lyrical genius embodies itself in the noblest themes. Appraising Dante’s lyrics absolutely, for their contents and art, they belong at the head of modern poetry; judging them historically, to determine their place in the evolution of European poesy, they have, like all of Dante’s writings, unique structural importance. By his conscience for form and respect for unity of theme and tone he belongs with the ancients, while by his treatment of the passionate and spiritual he seems strangely modern. He is the spokesman not of his own time and place merely, but of an entire age, of a complete civilization, which after six centuries of growth culminates before his eyes. And so his works embody that civilization, and transmit to us and to later ages as much of it as has perennial life.

But it is his genius, — the throbbings of his heart, the intensity and penetration of his mind, the mediæval ideals exalted by his spirit, the terrible earnestness of his moral nature, — it is Dante, the man, the person, the poet, and not his epoch, that lives to-day; it is Dante, the passionate lover, that sings this matchless song to Beatrice — “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare.”

William Roscoe Thayer.