age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased
altogetherto think as Dante did, may find this too all an "Allegory," perhaps an idle
Allegory! It is a
sublime embodiment, or
sublimest, of the soul of
Christianity. It expresses, as in huge world-wide
architectural emblems,
how the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the two polar elements of
this Creation, on which it all turns; that these two
differ not by
preferability of one to the other, but by incompatibility
absolute and
infinite; that the one is excellent and high as light and Heaven, the other
hideous, black as Gehenna and the Pit of Hell! Ever
lasting Justice, yet
with Penitence, with
lasting" target="_blank" title="a.永久的,无尽的">
everlasting Pity,--all Christianism, as Dante and the
Middle Ages had it, is emblemed here. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged the
other day, with what entire truth of purpose; how
unconscious of any
embleming! Hell, Purgatory, Paradise: these things were not fashioned as
emblems; was there, in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of
their being emblems! Were they not indubitable awful facts; the whole
heart of man
taking them for practically true, all Nature everywhere
confirming them? So is it always in these things. Men do not believe an
Allegory. The future Critic,
whatever his new thought may be, who
considers this of Dante to have been all got up as an Allegory, will commit
one sore mistake!--Paganism we recognized as a veracious expression of the
earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards the Universe; veracious, true
once, and still not without worth for us. But mark here the
difference of
Paganism and Christianism; one great
difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly
the Operations of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combinations,
vicissitudes of things and men in this world; Christianism emblemed the Law
of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a
rude
helplessutterance of the first Thought of men,--the chief recognized
virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous
nature, but for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect
only!--
And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in a very
strange way, found a voice. The _Divina Commedia_ is of Dante's writing;
yet in truth it belongs to ten Christian centuries, only the finishing of
it is Dante's. So always. The craftsman there, the smith with that metal
of his, with these tools, with these
cunning methods,--how little of all he
does is
properly _his_ work! All past inventive men work there with
him;--as indeed with all of us, in all things. Dante is the
spokesman of
the Middle Ages; the Thought they lived by stands here, in
lasting" target="_blank" title="a.永久的,无尽的">
everlastingmusic. These
sublime ideas of his, terrible and beautiful, are the fruit
of the Christian Meditation of all the good men who had gone before him.
Precious they; but also is not he precious? Much, had not he
spoken, would
have been dumb; not dead, yet living voiceless.
On the whole, is it not an
utterance, this
mystic Song, at once of one of
the greatest human souls, and of the highest thing that Europe had
hithertorealized for itself? Christianism, as Dante sings it, is another than
Paganism in the rude Norse mind; another than "Bastard Christianism" half-
articulately
spoken in the Arab Desert, seven hundred years before!--The
noblest _idea_ made _real_
hitherto among men, is sung, and emblemed forth
abidingly, by one of the noblest men. In the one sense and in the other,
are we not right glad to possess it? As I calculate, it may last yet for
long thousands of years. For the thing that is uttered from the inmost
parts of a man's soul,
differs
altogether from what is uttered by the outer
part. The outer is of the day, under the empire of mode; the outer passes
away, in swift endless changes; the inmost is the same
yesterday, to-day
and forever. True souls, in all generations of the world, who look on this
Dante, will find a
brotherhood in him; the deep
sincerity of his thoughts,
his woes and hopes, will speak
likewise to their
sincerity; they will feel
that this Dante too was a brother. Napoleon in Saint Helena is charmed
with the
genial veracity of old Homer. The oldest Hebrew Prophet, under a
vesture the most
diverse from ours, does yet, because he speaks from the
heart of man, speak to all men's hearts. It is the one sole secret of
continuing long
memorable. Dante, for depth of
sincerity, is like an
antique Prophet too; his words, like
theirs, come from his very heart. One
need not wonder if it were predicted that his Poem might be the most
enduring thing our Europe has yet made; for nothing so endures as a truly
spoken word. All cathedrals, pontificalities, brass and stone, and outer
arrangement never so
lasting, are brief in
comparison to an unfathomable
heart-song like this: one feels as if it might
survive, still of
importance to men, when these had all sunk into new irrecognizable
combinations, and had ceased
individually to be. Europe has made much;
great cities, great empires, encyclopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion and
practice: but it has made little of the class of Dante's Thought. Homer
yet _is_ veritably present face to face with every open soul of us; and
Greece, where is _it_? Desolate for thousands of years; away, vanished; a
bewildered heap of stones and
rubbish, the life and
existence of it all
gone. Like a dream; like the dust of King Agamemnon! Greece was; Greece,
except in the _words_ it spoke, is not.
The uses of this Dante? We will not say much about his "uses." A human
soul who has once got into that primal element of _Song_, and sung forth
fitly somewhat therefrom, has worked in the _depths_ of our
existence;
feeding through long times the life-roots of all excellent human things
whatsoever,--in a way that "utilities" will not succeed well in
calculating! We will not
estimate the Sun by the quantity of gaslight it
saves us; Dante shall be
invaluable, or of no value. One remark I may
make: the
contrast in this respect between the Hero-Poet and the
Hero-Prophet. In a hundred years, Mahomet, as we saw, had his Arabians at
Grenada and at Delhi; Dante's Italians seem to be yet very much where they
were. Shall we say, then, Dante's effect on the world was small in
comparison? Not so: his arena is far more restricted; but also it is far
nobler, clearer;--perhaps not less but more important. Mahomet speaks to
great masses of men, in the
coarsedialect adapted to such; a
dialectfilled with inconsistencies, crudities, follies: on the great masses alone
can he act, and there with good and with evil
strangely blended. Dante
speaks to the noble, the pure and great, in all times and places. Neither
does he grow obsolete, as the other does. Dante burns as a pure star,
fixed there in the
firmament, at which the great and the high of all ages
kindle themselves: he is the possession of all the chosen of the world for
uncounted time. Dante, one calculates, may long
survive Mahomet. In this
way the balance may be made straight again.
But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on the world, by
what _we_ can judge of their effect there, that a man and his work are
measured. Effect? Influence? Utility? Let a man _do_ his work; the
fruit of it is the care of Another than he. It will grow its own fruit;
and whether embodied in Caliph Thrones and Arabian Conquests, so that it
"fills all Morning and Evening Newspapers," and all Histories, which are a
kind of distilled Newspapers; or not embodied so at all;--what matters
that? That is not the real fruit of it! The Arabian Caliph, in so far
only as he did something, was something. If the great Cause of Man, and
Man's work in God's Earth, got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph, then
no matter how many scimetars he drew, how many gold piasters pocketed, and
what
uproar and blaring he made in this world,--_he_ was but a
loud-sounding inanity and f
utility; at bottom, he _was_ not at all. Let us
honor the great empire of _Silence_, once more! The
boundless treasury
which we do not
jingle in our pockets, or count up and present before men!
It is perhaps, of all things, the usefulest for each of us to do, in these
loud times.--
As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to
embody musically the
Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner
Life; so Shakspeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer Life of our
Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies, humors, ambitions,
what practical way of thinking,
acting, looking at the world, men then had.
As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece; so in Shakspeare and Dante,
after thousands of years, what our modern Europe was, in Faith and in
Practice, will still be legible. Dante has given us the Faith or soul;
Shakspeare, in a not less noble way, has given us the Practice or body.
This latter also we were to have; a man was sent for it, the man
Shakspeare. Just when that
chivalry way of life had reached its last
finish, and was on the point of breaking down into slow or swift
dissolution, as we now see it everywhere, this other
sovereign Poet, with
his
seeing eye, with his
perennial singing voice, was sent to take note of
it, to give long-enduring record of it. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce
as the central fire of the world; Shakspeare, wide,
placid, far-
seeing, as
the Sun, the upper light of the world. Italy produced the one world-voice;
we English had the honor of producing the other.
Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man came to us. I
think always, so great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is this