Heroes and Hero Worship

T >> Thomas Carlyle >> Heroes and Hero Worship

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The little that we know of Dante's Life corresponds well enough with this
Portrait and this Book. He was born at Florence, in the upper class of
society, in the year 1265. His education was the best then going; much
school-divinity, Aristotelean logic, some Latin classics,--no
inconsiderable insight into certain provinces of things: and Dante, with
his earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt, learned better than most
all that was learnable. He has a clear cultivated understanding, and of
great subtlety; this best fruit of education he had contrived to realize
from these scholastics. He knows accurately and well what lies close to
him; but, in such a time, without printed books or free intercourse, he
could not know well what was distant: the small clear light, most luminous
for what is near, breaks itself into singular _chiaroscuro_ striking on
what is far off. This was Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he
had gone through the usual destinies; been twice out campaigning as a
soldier for the Florentine State, been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth
year, by natural gradation of talent and service, become one of the Chief
Magistrates of Florence. He had met in boyhood a certain Beatrice
Portinari, a beautiful little girl of his own age and rank, and grown up
thenceforth in partial sight of her, in some distant intercourse with her.
All readers know his graceful affecting account of this; and then of their
being parted; of her being wedded to another, and of her death soon after.
She makes a great figure in Dante's Poem; seems to have made a great figure
in his life. Of all beings it might seem as if she, held apart from him,
far apart at last in the dim Eternity, were the only one he had ever with
his whole strength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself was
wedded; but it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy, the rigorous
earnest man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make
happy.

We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with him as
he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podesta, or whatsoever they call
it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbors,--and the world had wanted
one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence would have had
another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries continued
voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there will be ten of
them and more) had no _Divina Commedia_ to hear! We will complain of
nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and he, struggling
like a man led towards death and crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it.
Give _him_ the choice of his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what
was really happy, what was really miserable.

In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or some other
confused disturbances rose to such a height, that Dante, whose party had
seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedly forth into
banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and wandering. His
property was all confiscated and more; he had the fiercest feeling that it
was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight of God and man. He tried what
was in him to get reinstated; tried even by warlike surprisal, with arms in
his hand: but it would not do; bad only had become worse. There is a
record, I believe, still extant in the Florence Archives, dooming this
Dante, wheresoever caught, to be burnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands,
they say: a very curious civic document. Another curious document, some
considerable number of years later, is a Letter of Dante's to the
Florentine Magistrates, written in answer to a milder proposal of theirs,
that he should return on condition of apologizing and paying a fine. He
answers, with fixed stern pride: "If I cannot return without calling
myself guilty, I will never return, _nunquam revertar_."

For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from patron to
patron, from place to place; proving, in his own bitter words, "How hard is
the path, _Come e duro calle_." The wretched are not cheerful company.
Dante, poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, with his moody
humors, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reports of him that
being at Can della Scala's court, and blamed one day for his gloom and
taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like way. Della Scala stood among
his courtiers, with mimes and buffoons (_nebulones ac histriones_) making
him heartily merry; when turning to Dante, he said: "Is it not strange,
now, that this poor fool should make himself so entertaining; while you, a
wise man, sit there day after day, and have nothing to amuse us with at
all?" Dante answered bitterly: "No, not strange; your Highness is to
recollect the Proverb, _Like to Like_;"--given the amuser, the amusee must
also be given! Such a man, with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms
and sorrows, was not made to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be
evident to him that he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit,
in this earth. The earthly world had cast him forth, to wander, wander; no
living heart to love him now; for his sore miseries there was no solace
here.

The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him; that
awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with its Florences
and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence thou shalt
never see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt surely see! What
is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life altogether? ETERNITY:
thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, art thou and all things bound! The
great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made its home more and more in that
awful other world. Naturally his thoughts brooded on that, as on the one
fact important for him. Bodied or bodiless, it is the one fact important
for all men:--but to Dante, in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty
of scientific shape; he no more doubted of that _Malebolge_ Pool, that it
all lay there with its gloomy circles, with its _alti guai_, and that he
himself should see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if
we went thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in
speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into "mystic
unfathomable song; " and this his _Divine Comedy_, the most remarkable of
all modern Books, is the result.

It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see, a
proud thought for him at times, That he, here in exile, could do this work;
that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him from doing it, or
even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that it was great;
the greatest a man could do. "If thou follow thy star, _Se tu segui tua
stella_,"--so could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in his extreme need,
still say to himself: "Follow thou thy star, thou shalt not fail of a
glorious haven!" The labor of writing, we find, and indeed could know
otherwise, was great and painful for him; he says, This Book, "which has
made me lean for many years." Ah yes, it was won, all of it, with pain and
sore toil,--not in sport, but in grim earnest. His Book, as indeed most
good Books are, has been written, in many senses, with his heart's blood.
It is his whole history, this Book. He died after finishing it; not yet
very old, at the age of fifty-six;--broken-hearted rather, as is said. He
lies buried in his death-city Ravenna: _Hic claudor Dantes patriis
extorris ab oris_. The Florentines begged back his body, in a century
after; the Ravenna people would not give it. "Here am I Dante laid, shut
out from my native shores."

I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it "a mystic
unfathomable Song;" and such is literally the character of it. Coleridge
remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a sentence
musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is
something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and soul, word and
idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song: we said before, it
was the Heroic of Speech! All _old_ Poems, Homer's and the rest, are
authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are;
that whatsoever is not _sung_ is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose
cramped into jingling lines,--to the great injury of the grammar, to the
great grief of the reader, for most part! What we wants to get at is the
_thought_ the man had, if he had any: why should he twist it into jingle,
if he _could_ speak it out plainly? It is only when the heart of him is
rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to
Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his
thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a
Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,--whose speech is Song.
Pretenders to this are many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is for
most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business, that of
reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be rhymed;--it ought
to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what it was aiming at. I
would advise all men who _can_ speak their thought, not to sing it; to
understand that, in a serious time, among serious men, there is no vocation
in them for singing it. Precisely as we love the true song, and are
charmed by it as by something divine, so shall we hate the false song, and
account it a mere wooden noise, a thing hollow, superfluous, altogether an
insincere and offensive thing.

I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his _Divine Comedy_ that it
is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there is a
_canto fermo_; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple _terza
rima_, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along naturally with a sort
of _lilt_. But I add, that it could not be otherwise; for the essence and
material of the work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion
and sincerity, makes it musical;--go _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 l' uom ch' e 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 labor 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 forever
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 of 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 worldwide, 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 forever! It is as 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 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. 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
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.

I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the
_Inferno_ to the two other parts of the Divine _Commedia_. Such preference
belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and is like to be a
transient feeling. Thc _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_, especially the former,
one would almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing
that _Purgatorio_, "Mountain of Purification;" an emblem of the noblest
conception of that age. If sin is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so
rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the
grand Christian act. It is 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; never-dying Hope, if in company
still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of demons and reprobate is
underfoot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher, to the
Throne of Mercy itself. "Pray for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain
all say to him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me," my daughter Giovanna;
"I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil painfully up by that
winding steep, "bent down like corbels of a building," some of
them,--crushed together so "for the sin of pride;" yet nevertheless in
years, in ages and aeons, they shall have reached the top, which is
heaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of
all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a
psalm of praise rises, when one soul has perfected repentance and got its
sin and misery left behind! I call all this a noble embodiment of a true
noble thought.

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are
indispensable to one another. The _Paradiso_, a kind of inarticulate music
to me, 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 forever memorable, forever true in
the essence of it, to all men. It was perhaps delineated in no human soul
with such depth of veracity as in this of Dante's; a man _sent_ to sing it,
to keep it long memorable. Very notable with what brief simplicity he
passes out of the every-day reality, into the Invisible one; and in the
second or third stanza, we find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and
dwell there, as among things palpable, indubitable! To Dante they _were_
so; the real world, as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold
to an infinitely higher Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as
_preternatural_ as the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only
be a 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.

Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic
representation of his Belief about this Universe:--some Critic in a future
age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased altogether
to 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! Everlasting Justice, yet
with Penitence, with 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 helpless utterance 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 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.

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