II
DANTE
I
The Divine Comedy is not yet complete. When the disdainful poet wrote that last fair starry line, he had merely finished the fundamental theme on which other men were to execute complicated variations. For a great book is only an initial motif, a starting point from which later generations proceed to develop all the possible themes of a perennial symphony. Every man who reads a great work, even though he be poor in spirit, adds to it some meaning, some pause, some intonation of his own; something of what he feels enters into it and is borne on to those who are to read thereafter.
The greatest books, then, such as the Divine Comedy, are to be considered not as mere personal creations, but rather as artistic structures of a special type in which an original central block has been so enlarged, by the addition of stratum after stratum, that the primitive form is wholly changed. Even if we read the Commedia without a commentary, it is impossible for us to forget all that has been said of Dante, all the interpretations of his vast work. We may indeed forget the marginalia of pedants, the minutiæ of casuists, the erudition of philologians, the glosses of fanatics; but we cannot forget the conceptions expressed, and thus imposed upon the sacred poem, by certain men of outstanding intellectual power. We view Dante through them as we view the heavens through Newton, and God through Dionysius the Areopagite.
And we may do better than forget: we may continue the work of such collaborators of Dante. It is indeed our proper task to find a new interpretation of his soul and of his work, an interpretation more rich in truth than all those we have inherited. In a recent book I asserted that modern Italy cannot understand Dante—and certain scholars took offense at this simple statement of fact. Yet if they would sincerely examine their own consciences they would be obliged to agree with me that the so-called "cult of Dante" is primarily a pretext for the composition of works of criticism, or history, or philology, in which there is no authentic trace of a true understanding of Dante. Critics in general study Dante just as they might study an obscure mock-heroic poet or an insignificant question of Greek epigraphy. In the presence of one of the most terrible creations of man they have not trembled.
But my purpose is not merely to say that Dante is not rightly understood, that men fail to comprehend his apostleship of moral grandeur. I desire to indicate a new conception of his work, a new view-point from which we may behold his great figure towering against the background of eternity.
II
The best proof of my thesis that the modern world is in general unable truly to understand the Divine Comedy lies in the limited nature of the ideas regarding Dante which have been held by certain very intelligent men. Some, like Carlyle, have seen in him a prophet; some, like Mazzini, an apostle of Italian unity; some, like Rossetti, an adept in strange mysteries; some, like Aroux, a heretic and precursor of the Reformation; some, like De Sanctis, simply a very great artist. But all such men are merely attributing to Dante purposes and qualities which many other writers have possessed as well. And we all tend to forget that Dante was something apart, a man unique. We assign him to one of the several classes into which we so readily divide the host of the workers of the spirit. Before his birth and since his death there have been great poets, great prophets, great reformers; and we are content to ask to which of these groups he belongs, and to what extent and in what way he is superior to his fellows in that group.
But to my mind Dante was great because he claimed and fulfilled a function claimed by no other man before or since his time. He is indeed a great poet and a great mystic, but that which differentiates him from all other men is not his poetry nor his mysticism. Art, theology, politics, are for him means subordinate to one supreme purpose: he sought to be the vicar of God on earth.
Dante was a sincere son of the Church, and for that very reason he was conscious of the enormous decadence of the Papacy. The concept of the Pope as the vicar of Christ was a noble one: had it been conserved in its purity there would have been nothing strange in the lordship which the Pope sought to exercise, by the sheer power of his word, over all the kingdoms of the earth. But the Papacy itself had become earthy, had fed on gold, had sold its right to the spiritual dominion of the entire world that it might gain material dominion over one small portion of the world. It had rendered itself liable to judgment, to condemnation, and had lost thereby its true raison d'être, its mission as the supreme judge of men. The Popes, faithless to Hun who gave them their commission, could no longer claim to be His representatives on earth.
In the soul of Dante there rose instinctively the desire to take the place of these faithless vicars, and to judge them as God Himself would have judged them. He desired to exercise to the full extent of his power that judicial authority which the Popes had forgotten. But he was none the less resolved to remain within the Church, since for all its decadence it still represented the unbroken Christian tradition. He had no wish to become the leader of a revolt, or to overthrow the existing hierarchy. He chose the instrument which was most familiar to him—art—and composed a poem which is not, as certain critics maintain, an anticlerical pamphlet, but rather a true actus pontificalis.
But if we are thoroughly to understand the significance of this act of his we must realize that his idea of divine vicarage was very different from that represented by the Roman tradition. The Catholic church was primarily a continuation of the apostolic service of Christ, and the Pope, as vicar of Christ, devoted himself especially to the spiritual education of men. The institution of the Mass as a daily symbol of man's redemption from sin, the confessional, the propagation of the faith among the heathen—all these are proofs of the primarily pedagogical and moralizing purpose of the church. The church was the teacher of the world, and in Christ the church saw primarily the teacher of moral and eternal truths.
Dante, on the other hand, had in mind a part of the doctrine of Christ to which the Popes had given relatively slight importance: the idea of the Last Judgment. God is not only the God who enlightens and saves mankind, but the God who, on a terrible distant day, will judge the quick and the dead. The idea of the Last Judgment, so tragically expressed throughout the Middle Ages in hymns, in mosaic, and in painting, had not been hitherto associated with the idea of the Papacy.
Dante, aware that God is not only a teacher but a judge, and believing it necessary that God should have a vicar on earth, chose to represent Him rather as judge than as teacher. In this intent he conceived the Divine Comedy, which is, in fact, an anticipatory Last Judgment.
Dante knows that the world has not come to an end, that the roll of the dead is not yet complete; but he takes all peoples, all generations, from the Hebrew patriarchs to the leaders of his own day, and distributes them in the three realms even as God would have done. He takes the place of God, forestalls the great Assize, exalts to the spheres or thrusts down into infernal caverns the souls of cowardly Popes, proud emperors, rapacious captains, enamored ladies, saints and warriors, hermits and thinkers, poets and politicians. No one is overlooked. Beside the queens of the thirteenth century appear the women of the Old Testament; beside the consuls of Rome, the painters of Tuscany. The king but newly dead converses with the Greek or Roman poet; the Christian martyr with the Florentine warrior.
Each has his penalty or his reward. Dante walks among them all in the guise of a spectator, but he is in reality their judge. The Divine Comedy is the Dies irae of a great spirit which cannot wait for the manifestation of divine wrath, and assigns a place provisionally to every man. It is an incomplete Vale of Jehoshaphat, in which all the dead are gathered, while beyond the dread hills the renewal of life goes on.
Dante felt that his genius was a divine investiture which gave him the right to judge those who had lived before his time. He was so sure of being a better representative of God than the venal priests and intriguing Popes of his experience that he did not hesitate to thrust into Hell men who passed themselves off before their fellow men as vicars and ministers of God. Thus from a lofty throne, more enduring than bronze, the Florentine poet pronounces terrible condemnations which have not yet been canceled. He seems verily, by the power of his art, to compel God to ratify his sentences.
III
Only one man since Dante's time has achieved a conception of equal grandeur—and that man is Michelangelo. The Sistine Chapel is the only worthy illustration of the Divine Comedy.
I have sometimes imagined a tremendous drama of the Last Judgment, the words to be written by Dante, the music to be composed by Palestrina—save that for the trumpets of the angel who is to wake the dead (think of the sound of trumpets that will wake even from the sleep of death!) I should have sought the aid of Richard Wagner.
Should there come to the throne of St. Peter a Pope with daring and initiative, he might well cover the quattrocentist frescoes on the side walls of the Sistine Chapel—frescoes that yield but incidental charm—and in their place inscribe, in fair red characters, the whole Divine Comedy, in the presence of its only worthy interpretation: the Last Judgment of Michelangelo.