第37章
cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the blustering giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke; it is "as the sails sink, the mast being suddenly broken." Or that poor Brunetto Latini, with the _cotto aspetto_, "face _baked_," parched brown and lean; and the "fiery snow" that falls on them there, a "fiery snow without wind," slow, deliberate, never-ending!
Or the lids of those Tombs; square sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each with its Soul in torment; the lids laid open there;they are to be shut at the Day of Judgment, through Eternity. And how Farinata rises; and how Cavalcante falls--at hearing of his Son, and the past tense "_fue_"! The very movements in Dante have something brief;swift, decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius this sort of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent, passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent "pale rages," speaks itself in these things.
For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of doing it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it, unless he had, what we may call, _sympathized_ with it,--had sympathy in him to bestow on objects. He must have been _sincere_ about it too; sincere and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the likeness of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, about all objects. And indeed may we not say that intellect altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning what an object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may have will come out here. Is it even of business, a matter to be done? The gifted man is he who _sees_ the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage: it is his faculty too, the man of business's faculty, that he discern the true _likeness_, not the false superficial one, of the thing he has got to work in. And how much of _morality_ is in the kind of insight we get of anything; "the eye seeing in all things what it brought with it the faculty of seeing"! To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.
Raphael, the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal.
No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with him.
Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is every way noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what qualities in that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of eternal black. Asmall flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into our very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too: _della bella persona, che mi fu tolta_; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a solace that _he_ will never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these _alti guai_. And the racking winds, in that _aer bruno_, whirl them away again, to wail forever!--Strange to think: Dante was the friend of this poor Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon the Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigor of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his _Divine Comedy's_ being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigor cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic,--sentimentality, or little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like the wail of AEolian harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart;--and then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of his towards his Beatrice; their meeting together in the _Paradiso_; his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes, her that had been purified by death so long, separated from him so far:--one likens it to the song of angels; it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human soul.
For the _intense_ Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity. Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;--as indeed, what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love? "_A Dio spiacenti ed a' nemici sui_, Hateful to God and to the enemies of God: "lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; "_Non ragionam di lor_, We will not speak of _them_, look only and pass." Or think of this; "They have not the _hope_ to die, _Non han speranza di morte_." One day, it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of Dante, that he, wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full surely _die_; "that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die." Such words are in this man. For rigor, earnestness and depth, he is not to be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his parallel we must go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets there.