Anima Hominis (Chap.4)

Some thirty years ago I read a prose allegory by Simeon Solomon, long out of print and unprocurable, and remember or seem to remember a sentence, “a hollow image of fulfilled desire.” All happy art seems to me that hollow image, but when its lineaments express also the poverty or the exasperation that set its maker to the work, we call it tragic art. Keats but gave us his dream of luxury; but while reading Dante we never long escape the conflict, partly because the verses are at moments a mirror of his history, and yet more because that history is so clear and simple that it has the quality of art. I am no Dante scholar, and I but read him in Shadwell or in Dante Rossetti, but I am always persuaded that he celebrated the most pure lady poet ever sung and the Divine Justice, not merely because death took that lady and Florence banished her singer, but because he had to struggle in his own heart with his unjust anger and his lust; while unlike those of the great poets, who are at peace with the world and at war with [Pg 27]themselves, he fought a double war. “Always,” says Boccaccio, “both in youth and maturity he found room among his virtues for lechery”; or as Matthew Arnold preferred to change the phrase, “his conduct was exceeding irregular.” Guido Cavalcanti, as Rossetti translates him, finds “too much baseness” in his friend:

“And still thy speech of me, heartfelt and kind,
Hath made me treasure up thy poetry;
But now I dare not, for thy abject life,
Make manifest that I approve thy rhymes.”

And when Dante meets Beatrice in Eden, does she not reproach him because, when she had taken her presence away, he followed in spite of warning dreams, false images, and now, to save him in his own despite, she has “visited ... the Portals of the Dead,” and chosen Virgil for his courier? While Gino da Pistoia complains that in his Commedia his “lovely heresies ... beat the right down and let the wrong go free”:

“Therefore his vain decrees, wherein he lied,
Must be like empty nutshells flung aside;
Yet through the rash false witness set to grow,
French and Italian vengeance on such pride
May fall like Anthony on Cicero.”

Dante himself sings to Giovanni Guirino “at the approach of death”;

“The King, by whose rich grave his servants be
With plenty beyond measure set to dwell,
Ordains that I my bitter wrath dispel,
And lift mine eyes to the great Consistory.”