deep enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the character of music. The three kingdoms, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, look out on one another like compartments of a great edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern, solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the sincerest of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the measure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts; and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say: "Eccovi luom ch'è stato all' Inferno, See, there is the man that was in Hell!" Ah, yes, he had been in Hell!-in Hell enough, in long, severe sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come out divine are not accomplished otherwise. Thought, true labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind; true effort, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought. In all ways we are "to become perfect through suffering." But, as I say, no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made him "lean" for many years. Not the general whole only; every compartment of it is worked out, with intense earnestness, into truth, into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each fits in its place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the Middle Ages, rendered for ever rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense one: but a task which is done. Perhaps one would say intensity, with the much that depends on it, is the prevailing character cf Dante's genius. Dante does not come before us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and even sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentred itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great not because he is world-wide, but because he is world-deep. Through all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know nothing so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with the outermost development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has a great power of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents that and nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the Hall of Dite: red pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom; so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and for ever! It is an emblem of the whole genius of Dante. There is a brevity, an abrupt precision in him: Tacitus is not briefer, more condensed; and then in Dante it seems a natural condensation, spontaneous to the man. One smiting word; and then there is silence, nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than words. It is strange with what a sharp, decisive grace he snatches the true likeness of a matter; 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, 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 Hell, each with its Soul in torment; the lids laid open there; they are to be shut at the Day of Judg ment, through Eternity. And how Farinata rises; and how Cavalcante falls at hearing of his Son, and the pas tense "fuel" The very movements ir 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 ad, what we may call, sympathised with ,-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. A small 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 for ever! 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 rigour 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 sup pose 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 rigour cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly, egotistic,- 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 Eolian harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart;-and then that stern, soresaddened 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. His 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. 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 rigour, 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. I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the In spirit, but is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say again, is the saving merit, now as always! ferno to the two other parts of the veracity as in this of Dante's; a man sent Divine Commedia. Such preference to sing it, to keep it long memorable. belongs, I imagine, to our general By- Very notable with what brief simplicity ronism of taste, and is like to be a he passes out of the every-day reality, transient feeling. The Purgatorio and into the Invisible one; and in the second Paradiso, especially the former, one or third stanza, we find ourselves in the would almost say, is even more excellent World of Spirits; and dwell there, as than it. It is a noble thing that Pur- among things palpable, indubitable! To gatoris, "Mountain of Purification ;" an Dante they were so; the real world, as emblem of the noblest conception of that it is called, and its facts, was but the age. If Sin is so fatal, and Hell is and threshold to an infinitely higher Fact must be so rigorous, awful, yet in Re- of a World. At bottom, the one was as pentance too is man purified; Kepent-preternatural as the other. Has not each ance is the grand Christian act. It is man a soul? He will not only be a beautiful how Dante works it out. The tremolar dell' onde, that trembling" of the ocean-waves under the first pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an altered mood. Hope has now dawned; Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, never-dying Hope, if in company still are a symbol withal, an emblematic with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn representation of his belief about this of dæmons and reprobate is under foot; a Universe:-some Critic in a future age, soft breathing of penitence mounts higher like those Scandinavian ones the other and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. day, who has ceased altogether to think Pray for me," the denizens of that as Dante did, may find this too all an Mount of Pain all say to him. "Tell" Allegory," perhaps an idle Allegory! my Giovanna to pray for me," my It is a sublime embodiment, our subdaughter Giovanna ; "I think her limest, of the soul of Christianity. It mother loves me no more!" They toil expresses, as in huge world-wide archipainfully up by that winding steep, tectural emblems, how the Christian "bent down like corbels of a building," Dante felt Good and Evil to be the two some of them, crushed together so polar elements of this Creation, on which "for the sin of pride;" yet nevertheless it all turns; that these two differ not by in years, in ages, and cons they shall preferability of one to the other, but by inhave reached the top, which is Heaven's compatibility absolute and infinite; that gate, and by Mercy shall have been ad- the one is excellent and high as light and mitted in. The joy too of all, when one Heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehas prevailed; the whole Mountain henna and the Pit of Hell! Everlasting shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise Justice, yet with Penitence, with everrises, when one soul has perfected re-lasting Pity,-all Christianism, as Dante pentance, and got its sin and misery left and the Middle Ages had it, is emblemed behind! I call all this a noble embodi- here. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged ment of a true, noble thought. the other day, with what entire truth of But indeed the Three compartments purpose. how unconscious of any emmutually support one another, are in-bleming! Hell, Purgatory, Paradise : dispensable to one another. The Pa- these things were not fashioned as emradiso, a kind of inarticulate music to blems; was there, in our Modern Eurome, is the redeeming side of the Inferno; the Inferno without it were untrue. All three make up the true Unseen World, as figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing for ever memorable, for ever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was perhaps delineated in no human soul with such depth of pean 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 in 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 recognised 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 emblomed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a rude helpiess utter ance of the first Thought of men, -the chief recognised 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 everlasting music. 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. 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 for ever. 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 spoke: 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 irrecognisable combinations, and had ceased individually to be. DANTE. From the Essays of T. B. Macaulay. On the whole, is it not an utterance, this mystic Song, at once of one of the greatest human souls, and of the highest The beginning of the thirteenth centhing that Europe had hitherto realised tury was, as Machiavelli has remarked, for itself? Christianism, as Dante sings the era of a great revival of this extrait, is another than Paganism in the rude ordinary system. The policy of InnoNorse mind; another than "Bastard cent,-the growth of the Inquisition and Christianism" half-articulately spoken the mendicant orders,-the wars against in the Arab Desert, seven hundred years the Albigenses, the Pagans of the East, before!-The noblest idea made real and the unfortunate princes of the house hitherto among men is sung, and em- of Swabia, agitated Italy during the two blemed forth abidingly, by one of the following generations. In this point smiling and radiant spirits with that scowl of unutterable misery on his brow, and that curl of bitter disdain on his lips, which all his portraits have preserved, and which might furnish Chantrey with hints for the head of his pro Dante was completely under the influ- There is no poet whose intellectual and moral character are so closely connected. The great source, as it appears to me, of the power of the Divine Comedy is the strong belief with which the story seems to be told. In this respect, the only books which approach to its excellence are Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. The solemnity of his asseverations, the consistency and minuteness of his details, the earnestness with which he labours to make the reader understand the exact shape and size of everything that he describes, give an air of reality to his wildest fictions. I should only weaken this statement by quoting instances of a feeling which pervades the whole work, and to which it owes much of its fascination. This is the real justification of the many passages in his poem which bad critics have condemned as grotesque. I am concerned to see that Mr. Cary, to whom Dante owes more than ever poet owed to translator, has sanctioned an accusation utterly unworthy of his abilities. "His solicitude," says that gentleman, "to define all his images in such a manner as to bring them within the circle of But those religious hopes which had our vision, and to subject them to the released the mind of the sublime enthu- power of the pencil, renders him little siast from the terrors of death had not better than grotesque, where Milton has rendered his speculations on human life since taught us to expect sublimity." It more cheerful. This is an inconsistency is true that Dante has never shrunk from which may often be observed in men of embodying his conceptions in determia similar temperament. He hoped for nate words, that he has even given happinesss beyond the grave: but he measures and numbers, where Milton felt none on earth. It is from this cause, would have left his images to float undemore than from any other, that his de- fined in a gorgeous haze of language. scription of Heaven is so far inferior to Both were right. Milton did not profess the Hell or the Purgatory. With the to have been in heaven or hell. He might, passions and miseries of the suffering therefore, reasonably confine himself to spirits he feels a strong sympathy. But magnificent generalities. Far different among the beatified he appears as one was the office of the lonely traveller, who who has nothing in common with them, had wandered through the nations of the -as one who is incapable of compre- dead. Had he described the abode of hending, not only the degree, but the the rejected spirits in language resem nature of their enjoyment. We think bling the splendid lines of the English that we see him standing amidst those poet, had he told us of |