Delphi Complete Works of Walter Pater

by Walter Pater

  One of the points then, a point of manner, so to speak, at which Dante repelled the last century while he directly attracts our own, is the minuteness of his handiwork, of his habits of observation, and of the equivalent expression, or fine shade of expression. Such care for the elaboration of detail in Dante’s work had something in common with the art of that day, with what must be called its naivete, as we feel it when Dante writes:

  As birds that seek to Nilus warm

  In winter, now in squadron form,

  Now swifter flight design

  And lengthen into line:

  XXIV. 64-66. or

  Folk beneath its branches there

  Crying I know not what there were,

  With hands uplifted all,

  As eager children call

  To one who grants not their request:

  But still to give their longing zest

  Upholds aloft the prize

  Nor hides it from their eyes:

  XXIV. 106-111.

  and again in the so circumstantial note he takes of the fact that Dante’s still mortal body casts a shadow among the shadowless people of the other world: —

  That very flesh is this

  Whereof his body is.

  V.33.

  In Dante’s minuteness of touch there was in fact something of that art of miniature painting, Ch’ alluminare é chiamata in Parisi.

  Our own delight in it, the welcome we give to minute detail of that kind, uncompromising “realists” as we must needs be, connects itself with the empirical character of our science, our philosophic faith in the concrete, the particular. To the age of Johnson; — abstraction, generalisation, seemed to be of the essence of art and poetry, a principle which the taste of the nineteenth century has inverted in favour of that circumstantial manner of which every Canto of the Divina Commedia would afford illustration.

  But the modern artist, the modern student of art, of Dante’s art, while he demands it in any record of the external world, will value this minuteness, this minute perfection, even more perhaps in the treatment of mental phenomena, when the intelligence which touched so finely the niceties of visible colour and outline turns to the invisible world, noting there also with a like subtlety the intimacies of the soul. The modern, as such, is undeni? ably a somewhat skilful psychologist — We have lived so long with ourselves! And just here surely we find another link between the peculiarities of Dante’s genius and the “subjectivities” of the characteristic student of to-day. Amid the larger outlooks of the Divina Commedia we are again and again reminded that its author is also the poet of the Vita Nuova. His own sensibility, already so strongly in evidence there, makes him now an equally delicate interpreter of the mental or spiritual ways of others.

  And in the hour, before the morn,

  When wakes the swallow’s note forlorn,

  Haply amid her singing

  Her woes to memory bringing,

  The hour when loosed from thought our mind

  Leaves pilgrim-like her flesh behind,

  And borne along in dreams

  Almost a prophet seems,

  Even then to me was vision given:

  IX. 13-19.

  And in accordance with what we might have expected, the sensibility, the fineness of touch, there indicated, is at its height in the placid and temperate regions of the Purgatorio — a realm of grey but clear light: — it is there that-the delicacies, alike of the visible and the invisible world, really tell.

  And there is another reason why for the modern student the Purgatorio should be the favourite section of the Dwina Commedia. An age of faith, if such there ever were, our age certainly is not: an age of love, all its pity and self pity notwithstanding, who shall say? — in its religious scepticism, however, especially as compared with the last century in its religious scepticism, an age of hope, we may safely call it, of a development of religious hope or hopefulness, similar in tendency to the development of the doctrine of Purgatory in the church of the Middle Age: —

  quel secondo regno

  Ove l’ umano spirito si purga: —

  a world of merciful second thoughts on one side, of fresh opportunities on the other, useful, serviceable, endurable, in contrast alike with that mar si crudele of the Inferno, and the blinding radiancy of Paradise. In our own century protestantism itself would seem to have become conscious of a certain want in regard to the “hope of immortality”: conscious that it has lost something in passing from the doctrinal symmetry and completeness of Dante’s position; from his assurance that nothing can hinder Love’s eternal will

  So long as hope is seen

  To wear a shied of green.

  III. 134-5.

  that boundless grace

  Hath arms of such a large embrace,

  That they will straight admit

  Whatever turns to It.

  III. 122-3.

  It would take too much space to follow out the sentiment here suggested. The reader of this translation may be interested in doing that for himself, in connexion with the belief in a constant, helpful, beneficent interaction between the souls of the living and the dead, in the immense grace still obtainable for the departed by prayer here.

  If for our weal their word be said,

  Were it not ours to lend them aid

  By deed, by speech, the fruit

  That comes of kindly root?

  Yea, well it were with helpful love

  Their earthly blemish to remove,

  That light and clean from stain

  The star-set spheres they gain.

  XI. 31-36.

  And the breadth of Dante’s theological horizon connects itself with that generous eclecticism which finds in “the house of many mansions,” due place for Virgil and other sublime spirits of the Pagan world amid the infants unbaptised of the dispensation of Christ; as also with a certain mundane sense, throughout his great work, of poetry and scholarship, of classic or Pagan poesy holding its own beside the poetry of inspiration, as the Empire subsists side by side with the Church. —

  La morta poesl risurga!

  Awake dead Poesy and inspire

  The servant of the Muses’ choir.

  I. 7.

  Like his persuasion that earthly and personal gifts will not lose their charm and purpose in another life, that, “though we know not what we shall be,” Casella will still exercise there his wonted musical skill, Dante’s large-minded

  Know ye not we are but the worm

  Born the angelic moth to form?

  X. 124-5.

  treatment of all forms of classic power and achievement marks a stage of progress, from the narrower sentiment of the Middle Age, towards “humanism,” towards the mental attitude of the Renaissance and of the modern world.

  A minute sense of the external world and its beauties, a minute sense of the phenomena of the mind, of what is beautiful and of interest there, a demand for wide and cheering outlooks in religion, for a largeness of spirit in its application to life: — these are the special points of contact between Dante and the genius of our own century. And withal Dante is a great poet, one of the greatest of poets, great like Sophocles and Shakespeare by a certain universality in his appeal to men’s minds, and independent therefore of the special sensibilities of a particular age. If the characteristic minds of the last century, for instance, were apt to undervalue him, that was because they were themselves of an age not of cosmopolitan genius, but of singularly limited gifts, gifts temporary and local, so to speak, the products of which survive, for the most part, only indirectly by efforts of historic rehabilitation. And as Dante is not only popular but has intelligible reasons for his popularity with us, there have been in our day translations of him excellent in various ways. With the exception however of some portions of Longfellow’s, and in considerable degree of Cayley’s, they fail in the “mysticity” which is so characteristic of the original, a quality in which Rossetti would have done justice to the Dwina Commedia, if we may judge by his
version of the Vita Nuova, so studiously close yet so spontaneous, so much the converse of second-hand in its effect upon us.

  The writer of the translation here presented to English readers, having allowed me the pleasure of seeing his work from time to time during its growth, has now asked me to say a few candid words by way of preface. His reproduction of a poem full certainly of “the patience of genius” is itself a work of rare patience and scholarship, conspicuously free from the haste —

  By which all action is disgraced. la fretta

  Che l’ onestade ad ogni atto dismaga.

  III. 11.

  I speak of his version however as but a general reader, having no special knowledge of Dante such as his. Still, interesting as I know his has been and will be to scholars, it is for the general reader after all that translations are made. Such general readers then will, I believe, find here a translation made in the sense of what I have tried to indicate as characteristic of the Dwina Commedia, a version singular in its union of minute and sensitive fidelity almost to the very syllables of the original, with that general sense of composure and breadth of effect which gives to the great mediæval poem the air of a “classic.” It is this note which the metre of Marvell’s Ode itself strikes, the note of a dignified plain-song, capable however on demand of a high degree of expressiveness. The translator has explained in detail his reasons for adopting it; its essential equivalence to Dante’s terza rima. With a writer whose vocabulary is so significant and searched through as that of Dante, whose words withal are so sensitive and picturesque, there can be no fidelity which does not include a certain literal exactness. Partly because he is so minute a “realist,” he is one of those artists whose general effect largely depends on vocabulary, on the minute particles of which his work is wrought, on the colour and outline of single words and phrases, and this must obviously be lost in anything like free or haphazard translation. It seems obvious that to convey the impression of such work into another language, translation must be true in detail, and supposing rhythm and vernacular effect secured, the more literal it is the better. The translator’s business with Dante, then, may be likened to the copying of a drawing or other design upon transparent tracing-paper. Let the eye be true, the hand steady, the pencil fine, and, making sure of the fidelity of its movement from point to point, the translator, hardly less than his reader, will be surprised at the large and general faithfulness of the reproduction thus assured. In such way the reader of this translation will, I think, from time to time have a pleasant sense of the reproductive capacity of our language, as he compares the opposite pages of the Cantos which follow. Let him turn for instance to Canto V. 52-57, XII. 16-69 and XIV. 97-123.

  So far as I know, nothing quite like this has yet been done for presenting Dante to English readers, in union with the attractiveness of metrical form, and a scholarly care for English style. Out of the very literality here maintained has come an evenness, a dignity of manner, a poetic effect, wholly unarchaic, and true to what must be called the un-provincial or cosmopolitan air of the Divina Commedia — cosmopolitan, though Dante’s work be nevertheless the peculiar and perfect flower of the Middle Age. Dante has his varieties of power and appeal to the reader; some readers may think that he rises and falls; he argues, narrates, pauses, surprises us with sudden heat of feeling, as in the grand outburst against Italy, drawn from him at the sight of Sordello’s generous welcome of Virgil: be has his patient moods, he permits himself much harshness of imagery and vocabulary, though this too is subdued by the repose natural to the width and greatness of his theme. His translator following him, with humble scholarly purpose, has really trod in his steps; rising and falling with him, if so it be; and he has been perhaps not least successful in the speculative or philosophic passages (Canto IV. I-12, for example, and XVIII. 19-75), so difficult, yet so fascinating to the modern student of earlier modes of thought than our own.

  The true test of a work of imagination, and therefore of any veritable presentment of it in the way of translation, is that it should enfold one, so to speak, in its own atmosphere, that one should feel able to breathe in it. I have had such a feeling in reading what follows. The translator has explained why he left off with a sense of completeness at the end of the twenty-seventh Canto, but studious readers will, I think, regret with me that he found reason so to do.

  GIORDANO BRUNO, PARIS: 1586.

  “Jetzo, da ich ausgewachsen,

  Viel gelesen, viel gereist,

  Schwillt mein Herz, und ganz von Herzen,

  Glaub’ ich an den Heilgen Geist.” — Heine+

  IT was on the afternoon of the Feast of Pentecost that news of the death of Charles the Ninth went abroad promptly. To his successor the day became a sweet one, to be noted unmistakably by various pious and other observances; and it was on a Whit-Sunday afternoon that curious Parisians had the opportunity of listening to one who, as if with some intentional new version of the sacred event then commemorated, had a great deal to say concerning the Spirit; above all, of the freedom, the independence of its operation. The speaker, though understood to be a brother of the Order of St. Dominic, had not been present at the mass — the usual university mass, De Spiritu Sancto, said to-day according to the natural course of the season in the chapel of the Sorbonne, by the Italian Bishop of Paris. It was the reign of the Italians just then, a doubly refined, somewhat morbid, somewhat ash-coloured, Italy in France, more Italian still. Men of Italian birth, “to the great suspicion of simple people,” swarmed in Paris, already “flightier, less constant, than the girouettes on its steeples,” and it was love for Italian fashions that had brought king and courtiers here to-day, with great eclat, as they said, frizzed and starched, in the beautiful, minutely considered dress of the moment, pressing the university into a perhaps not unmerited background; for the promised speaker, about whom tongues had been busy, not only in the Latin quarter, had come from Italy. In an age in which all things about which Parisians much cared must be Italian there might be a hearing for Italian philosophy. Courtiers at least would understand Italian, and this speaker was rumoured to possess in perfection all the curious arts of his native language. And of all the kingly qualities of Henry’s youth, the single one that had held by him was that gift of eloquence, which he was able also to value in others — inherited perhaps; for in all the contemporary and subsequent historic gossip about his mother, the two things certain are, that the hands credited with so much mysterious ill-doing were fine ones, and that she was an admirable speaker.

  Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it, that the monastic life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its silence and self-concentration. The prospect of such freedom sufficiently explains why a young man who, however well found in worldly and personal advantages, was conscious above all of great intellectual possessions, and of fastidious spirit also, with a remarkable distaste for the vulgar, should have espoused poverty, chastity, obedience, in a Dominican cloister. What liberty of mind may really come to in such places, what daring new departures it may suggest to the strictly monastic temper, is exemplified by the dubious and dangerous mysticism of men like John of Parma and Joachim of Flora, reputed author of the new “Everlasting Gospel,” strange dreamers, in a world of sanctified rhetoric, of that later dispensation of the spirit, in which all law must have passed away; or again by a recognised tendency in the great rival Order of St. Francis, in the so-called “spiritual” Franciscans, to understand the dogmatic words of faith with a difference.

  The three convents in which Bruno lived successively, at Naples, at Citta di Campagna, and finally the Minerva at Rome, developed freely, we may suppose, all the mystic qualities of a genius in which, from the first, a heady southern imagination took the lead. But it was from beyond conventional bounds he would look for the sustenance, the fuel, of an ardour born or bred within them. Amid such artificial religious stillness the air itself becomes generous in undertones. The vain young monk (vain of course!) would feed h
is vanity by puzzling the good, sleepy heads of the average sons of Dominic with his neology, putting new wine into old bottles, teaching them their own business — the new, higher, truer sense of the most familiar terms, the chapters they read, the hymns they sang, above all, as it happened, every word that referred to the Spirit, the reign of the Spirit, its excellent freedom. He would soon pass beyond the utmost limits of his brethren’s sympathy, beyond the largest and freest interpretation those words would bear, to thoughts and words on an altogether different plane, of which the full scope was only to be felt in certain old pagan writers, though approached, perhaps, at first, as having a kind of natural, preparatory kinship with Scripture itself. The Dominicans would seem to have had well-stocked, liberally-selected, libraries; and this curious youth, in that age of restored letters, read eagerly, easily, and very soon came to the kernel of a difficult old author — Plotinus or Plato; to the purpose of thinkers older still, surviving by glimpses only in the books of others — Empedocles, Pythagoras, who had enjoyed the original divine sense of things, above all, Parmenides, that most ancient assertor of God’s identity with the world. The affinities, the unity, of the visible and the invisible, of earth and heaven, of all things whatever, with each other, through the consciousness, the person, of God the Spirit, who was at every moment of infinite time, in every atom of matter, at every point of infinite space, ay! was everything in turn: that doctrine — l’antica filosofia Italiana — was in all its vigour there, a hardy growth out of the very heart of nature, interpreting itself to congenial minds with all the fulness of primitive utterance. A big thought! yet suggesting, perhaps, from the first, in still, small, immediately practical, voice, some possible modification of, a freer way of taking, certain moral precepts: say! a primitive morality, congruous with those larger primitive ideas, the larger survey, the earlier, more liberal air.