The Bridling of Pegasus Part 4

Auld Nature swears the lovely dears Her n.o.blest work she cla.s.ses, O: Her 'prentice han' she tried on man, An' then she made the la.s.ses, O.

I have no fault to find with these lines. They express a profound and enduring truth; and, if they do so with some little exaggeration, they do it half humorously, and so protect themselves against criticism. But I really think--I hope you will not deem me unchivalrous in saying so--we have, during the present century, heard too much, both in poetry and in prose romance, as we are now hearing too much in newspapers and magazines, of "the la.s.ses, O." Not that we can hear too much of them in their relation to each other, to men, and to life. The "too much" I indicate is the too much of romantic love, that leaves no place for other emotions and other pa.s.sions equally worthy, or relegates these to an inferior position and to a narrower territory. I should say that there is rather too much of the sentimental note in Byron, in Sh.e.l.ley, in Keats, just as I should say that there is not too much of it in Wordsworth or in Scott. To say this is not to decry Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, and Keats--what lover of poetry would dream of decrying such splendid poets as they?--but only to indicate a certain tendency against which I cannot help feeling it is well to be on our guard. The tendency of the times is to encourage writers, whether in prose or verse, to deal with this particular theme and to deal with it too frequently and too pertinaciously. Moreover, there is always a danger that a subject, in itself so delicate, should not be quite delicately handled, and indeed that it should be treated with indelicacy and grossness. That, too, unfortunately, has happened in verse; and when that happens, then I think the Heavenly Muse veils her face and weeps. It must have been through some dread of poetry thus dishonouring itself that Plato in his ideal Republic proposed that poets should be crowned with laurel, and then banished from the city. For my part, I would willingly see such poets banished from the city, but not crowned with laurel. No doubt Plato's notion that poets should chant nothing but hymns to the G.o.ds and praises of virtue is a little narrow and exacting, but if they are to sing songs worthy of themselves, and of mankind, they must be on the side of virtue and of the G.o.ds. Hark with what perfect delicacy a masculine poet like Scott can deal with a feminine theme:

What though no rule of courtly grace To measured mood had trained her pace, A foot more light, a step more true Ne'er from the heath-flower dashed the dew.

Ev'n the light harebell raised its head, Elastic from her airy tread.

What though upon her speech there hung The accents of the mountain tongue?

Those solemn sounds, so soft, so clear, The listener held his breath to hear.

That is how manly poets write and think of women. But they do not dwell over much on the theme; they do not harp on it; and when you turn the page, you read in a totally different key:

The fisherman forsook the strand, The swarthy smith took dirk and brand; With changd cheer the mower blythe Left in the half-cut swathe the scythe.

The herds without a keeper strayed, The plough was in mid-furrow stayed.

The falconer tossed his hawk away, The hunter left the stag at bay.

Prompt at the signal of alarms, Each son of Albion rushed to arms.

So swept the tumult and affray Along the margin of Achray.

Does it not remind you of the pa.s.sage I quoted from Homer, where Hector says to Andromache, "Go! to your house, and see to your loom and distaff, but for war men will provide"? Scott, like Homer, observed the due proportion between love and life, giving love ample room, but not allotting it excessive s.p.a.ce. If again one wants to hear how delicately, how worthily, how manfully, poets can write of love and of women, what can one do better than recall this perfect lyric of Wordsworth's?--

Three years she grew in sun and shower, Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower On earth was never sown; This Child I to myself will take; She shall be mine, and I will make A Lady of my own.

"Myself will to my darling be Both law and impulse: and with me The Girl, in rock and plain, In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, Shall feel an overseeing power To kindle or restrain.

"She shall be sportive as the Fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things.

"The floating Clouds their state shall lend To her; for her the willow bend; Nor shall she fail to see Even in the motions of the Storm Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form By silent sympathy.

"The Stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where Rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pa.s.s into her face.

"And vital feelings of delight Shall rear her form to stately height, Her virgin bosom swell; Such thoughts to Lucy I will give While she and I together live Here in this happy Dell."

Thus Nature spake--The work was done-- How soon my Lucy's race was run!

She died, and left to me This heath, this calm and quiet scene; The memory of what has been, And never more will be.

Neither should I like it to be supposed that I think Byron could not write on this same theme in the n.o.blest manner. He did so frequently; he would not have been the great poet he is if he had not done so. Listen to this, for example:

She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies, And all that's best of dark and light Meet in her aspect and her eyes.

Thus mellowed to that tender light Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impaired the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress, Or softly lightens o'er her face, Where thoughts serenely sweet express How pure, how dear, their dwelling place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow, So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow, But tell of days in goodness spent, A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent.

Women are honoured and exalted when they are sung of in that manner. They are neither honoured nor exalted, they are dishonoured and degraded, when they are represented, either in prose or verse, as consuming their days in morbid longings and sentimental regrets, and men are represented as having nothing to do save to stimulate or satisfy such feelings. What is written in prose is not here my theme. I am writing of poets and poetry, and of the readers of poetry. Novelists and novel-readers are a different and separate subject. But I may say in pa.s.sing that poetry and the readers of poetry have suffered somewhat during the present generation from novels and novel-readers. A newer and narrower standard of human interest has been set up; and while the great bulk of readers have turned from poetry to prose romances, writers of verse have too frequently tried to compete with novelists, by treating love as the central interest and the main business of life. Homer did not think it such, neither did Virgil, nor Dante, nor Chaucer, nor Spenser, nor Shakespeare, nor Milton, and let us not think so. I urge every one, every now and again at least, to lay down the novel and open the poem: but let it be a poem that will enlarge one's conception of life, that will help one to think loftily, and to feel n.o.bly, will teach us that there is something more important to ourselves even than _ourselves_, something more important and deserving of attention than one's own small griefs and own petty woes, the vast and varied drama of History, the boundless realm of the human imagination, and the tragic interests and pathetic struggles of mankind. We need not close our ear to the feminine note, but should not listen to it over much. The masculine note is necessarily dominant in life; and the note that is dominant in life should be dominant in literature, and, most of all, in poetry.

MILTON AND DANTE: A COMPARISON AND A CONTRAST

No celebrations in our time have been more serious, more scholarly, or more impressive, than the various gatherings, held during the year lately come to end, in commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Milton. The earliest was held, with peculiar appropriateness, at Christ College, Cambridge, in the month of June. In the hall of the college was given a dinner, presided over by the Master, who had gathered round him men holding high positions alike at Cambridge and Oxford, and poets, scholars, artists, historians, and essayists of true distinction.

On this occasion an admirable eulogium of Milton was p.r.o.nounced by Mr.

Mackail. The dinner was succeeded by a representation of _Comus_ in the theatre of the town, by the students of the University, with all the charm that usually accompanies the efforts of competent amateurs. With the advent of the exact date of the tercentenary the celebrations were many in number and interesting in variety, in which the members of the British Academy took a prominent part. On December 9 a musical celebration was held in the afternoon in the church of St. Mary-le-Bow, at which the Bishop of Ripon delivered an eloquent sermon; and at the same hour the writer of this paper gave a private lecture before the Dante Society, from the notes of which this article is expanded. In the evening he had the honour of attending and responding to the toast of Poetry, proposed by the Italian amba.s.sador, at the banquet given by the Lord Mayor of London at the Mansion House, to the largest and most impressive gathering of men of eminence in letters, the arts, the drama, the law, and the Legislature, that has ever met in that s.p.a.cious hall of traditionally magnificent hospitality. A week later a performance of _Samson Agonistes_ was given in the Burlington Theatre before a large and representative audience. The more serious section of the daily press, moreover, allotted much s.p.a.ce to reports of the celebrations in honour of Milton, the _Times_ maintaining in this respect its best traditions.

No one, therefore, can say that the birth, the poetry and prose, the character and the career and the influence of Milton have not been solemnly celebrated by his countrymen. But it is necessary to add, in the interests of truth, that the celebrations were essentially and exclusively scholarly, and were hardly, if at all, shared in by the nation at large.

The intellectual sympathies of the educated were warmly touched, but the heart of the British people was not reached.

Now let us turn--for the subject of this paper is not Milton alone, but Milton and Dante--to the s.e.xcentenary of the birth of Dante in the city of Florence, the month and year of his birth having been May 1265. I had been spending the winter in the City of Flowers, and I could not leave it, in order to journey northward, till after the Dante Commemoration had been held. I shall never forget it. From dawn to dusk the entire Florentine people held joyous festival; and, with the coming of night, not only the entire city, its palaces, its bridges, its Duomo, its Palazzo Vecchio, that n.o.blest symbol of civic liberty, but indeed all its thoroughfares and the banks of its river broke into lovely light produced by millions of little cressets filled with olive oil, and every villa round was similarly illuminated. The pavement of the famous square of the Uffizi Palace was boarded over; and overhead was spread a canvas covering dyed with the three Italian national colours. Thither thronged hundreds of peasant men and women, who danced and made merry till the early hours of the morning.

At the Pagliano Theatre were given _tableaux vivants_ representing the most famous episodes in the _Divina Commedia_, Ristori, Salvini, and Rossi reciting the corresponding pa.s.sages from that immortal poem.

What a comparison, what a contrast it suggests between the solemn, serious, but limited honour done by us to Milton, and the exultant, universal, national honour paid by his countrymen to Dante! I should add that eight thousand Italian munic.i.p.alities sent a deputation carrying their local pennons to the square of Santa Croce, where a statue of Dante was unveiled, amid thunderous applause, to popular gaze.

Now let us turn to a more personal contrast between the two poets. To many persons, probably to most in these days, the most interesting feature in the life of a poet is his relation to the s.e.x that is commonly a.s.sumed, perhaps not quite correctly, to be the more romantic of the two. In comparing Dante and Milton in that respect one is struck at once by the fact that, while with Dante are not only a.s.sociated, but inseparably interwoven, the name and person of Beatrice, so that the two seem in our minds but one, knit by a spiritual love stronger even than any bond sanctioned by domestic law for happiness and social stability, Milton had no Beatrice. It would be idle to contend that the absence of such love has not detracted, and will not continue to detract, from the interest felt in Milton and his poetry, not perhaps by scholars, but by the world at large, and the average lover of poetry and poets. For just as women can do much, to use a phrase of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, towards "making a poet out of a man," so can they do even more, either by spiritual influence or by consummate self-sacrifice, to widen the field and deepen the intensity of his fame. No poet ever enjoyed this advantage so conspicuously as Dante.

It will perhaps be said that this was effected more by himself than by her. Let us not be too sure of that. In Italy, far more than in northern climes, first avowals of love are made by the eyes rather than by the tongue, by tell-tale looks more than by explicit words. What says Shakespeare, who knew men and women equally well?

A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon Than love that would seem hid. Love's night is noon.

Dante's own account of his first meeting with Beatrice confirms this surmise. This is what he himself says, after Beatrice, as Boccaccio relates, "very winning, very graceful, in aspect very beautiful," had turned her gaze on Dante from time to time at their first meeting. "At that moment the spirit of life which abides in the most secret chamber of the heart began to tremble, and tremulously it spake these words, 'Behold a G.o.d stronger than I, who cometh to lord it over me.'" These may perhaps seem strange words in which to record the first meeting of a boy of nine with a girl of eight. But, over and above the fact that they are the record, written several years later, of the feeling aroused by that first meeting, allowance must be made for the proverbial precocity of genius, and also for that of southern over northern temperaments. Its genuineness is confirmed by the whole sequel, as testified by the _Vita Nuova_ and the _Divina Commedia_; the presiding presence of Beatrice in both having long before been antic.i.p.ated by the words, "If it shall please Him, by whom all things live, to spare my life for some years longer, I hope to say that of her which never yet hath been said of any lady." How completely that hope was attained is to be seen in the closing canto of the _Purgatorio_ and in the whole of the _Paradiso_.

The life and poetry of Milton contain nothing (if exception be made of his beautiful and lofty sonnet, written in the very spirit of the _Divina Commedia_, on his second wife, "Methought I saw my late espousd Saint") to compare with Dante's love, at once real and ideal, masculine yet mystical, for Beatrice. The language used by Eve in addressing Adam, in _Paradise Lost_--

My author and disposer, what thou bidst Unargued I obey, so G.o.d ordains.

G.o.d is thy law, thou mine--

and the very choice of a subject the dominating incident of which is described by the well-known words, "The woman did give me, and I did eat,"

would almost seem to indicate that Milton's conception of woman, and his att.i.tude towards her, were such as can be attributed to no other poet. It is the att.i.tude of unqualified masculine domination. Again, in _Samson Agonistes_ the very centre and pith of the poem is the incorrigible frailty and inferiority of women--a thesis that would be extraordinary, even if true, for a poet. Samson starts with a reproval of himself for weakly revealing the secret of his strength to the persistent subtlety of a woman, "that species monster, my accomplished snare," as he calls Dalila, since "yoked her bond-slave by foul effeminacy"--a servitude he stigmatises as "ignominious and infamous," whereby he is "shamed, dishonoured, quelled." When Dalila, profoundly penitent for what she has done, thereby incurring his displeasure, prostrates herself before him, and sues for pardon, he spurns her from him with the words,

Out, out, hyna! these are thy wonted arts,

and goes on to say they are the arts of every woman, "to deceive, betray,"

and then to "feign remorse." With abject humility she confesses that curiosity to learn all secrets, and then to publish them, are "common female faults incident to all our s.e.x." This only causes him to insult and spurn her yet more fiercely; and he declares that G.o.d sent her to "debase him"--one of those theological peculiarities which apparently made G.o.d an accomplice with "this viper," for which the non-Calvinistic Christian finds it difficult to account.

Nor can it be said that Milton is here, like Shakespeare, speaking only dramatically and objectively. The Chorus in _Samson Agonistes_ is of his opinion, declaring that the man is favoured of heaven who discovers "one virtuous woman, rarely found"; and that is why

G.o.d's universal law Gave to the man despotic power Over his female in due awe, Nor from that right to part, an hour, Smiles she or lour.

After delivering itself of these opinions, the Chorus suddenly exclaims, "I see a storm," which, in the circ.u.mstances, is perhaps scarcely wonderful.

What a different note is this from that struck by Dante, when he speaks of "that blessed Beatrice, who now dwells in heaven with the angels, and on earth in my heart, and with whom my soul is still in love." Far from thinking that severe command on the part of the one and unquestioning submission on the part of the other form the proper relation of lover and maiden, husband and wife, Dante avers that

Amor e cor gentil son' una cosa,

that love and a gracious gentle heart are one and the same thing; and in the _Paradiso_, shortly before the close of the poem, he exclaims:

O Beatrice! dolce guida e cara.

It may perhaps be thought that one might be more lenient towards Milton's foibles, especially at such a time as the present, in contrasting his att.i.tude towards woman with that of Dante. But in Milton there was so much that was n.o.ble, so pathetic, and even so attractive, that he can well afford to have the truth told concerning him; and to omit his view of the most important of all personal relations in life, as depicted for and bequeathed to us in his poetry, would be to leave an obvious gap of the utmost import in comparing and contrasting him with Dante.

But now let us ask, in order to redress the balance, what has Dante to show, in kind, against _Il Penseroso_, _L'Allegro_, _Lycidas_, and _Comus_? I put the prose works of both poets aside; and there remains on the side of Dante only the self-same Dante from first to last, the Dante of the _Vita Nuova_ and the _Divina Commedia_. Milton, as a poet, had, on the contrary, a brilliant, an attractive, and a poetically productive youth. If Dante ever was young in the same sense, he has left no trace of it in his poetry. Save for Beatrice, there is an austerity even in the most tender pa.s.sages of his verse. He seems never to relax in his gravity, I had almost said in his severity. His very love for Florence is expressed, for the most part, in harsh upbraiding. An unrelenting awe dominates his poetry. For Virgil he entertains a humble far-off reverence.