CANTO I. dy; many of the modern discoveries are supposed to be indicated in it, and some of them are so certainly while as to the fine arts, it really opened a new æra; and, in the same sense that Phidias and Apelles were said to homerize, Michael Angelo and Raphael might be said to dantize; particularly the former, who, according to his scholar, Condivi, knew all the verses of Dante by heart and avowedly imitated two passages of them in those masterpieces of painting and of sculpture, the Last Judgment and the tomb of Julius (1). Dante then is more than a poet, if poetry and science be incompatible, as a polite Critic labours in several dissertations to persuade the World (2). But the first law-givers were poets; and to the chief poets (whatever be the follies and errors of their subalterns) is mankind indebted in every branch of knowledge. It were then both ungrateful and unjust to adopt the theory of M. Merian: and few I imagine, will agree with him in believing, that Ossian is entitled to the highest rank in poetry that Homer and Solomon were quite illiteratethat but four traits of science are to be found in all Virgil-that the sole business of the Epic Muse is to please the fancy and soften the heart. Some there are, I know, who esteem it her duty to invi (1) Vita di M. A. Buonarroti. (2) Comment les Sciences influent sur la poesie. Mem. Berlin 17742 1778, 1784, 1786. CAKTO L. gorate the intellect and inform the judgment; and who are ready to repeat Sir Phillip Sydney's opinion: << these Vates or poets both delight and teach; delight, to move men to take that goodness in hand, which, without delight, they would fly as from a stranger; and teach, to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved; which is the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed » (1). Sic honor et nomen divinis vatibus atque Carminibus venit (2). Having once shown (3) that the poem opens in 1300, and now that the sun is moving in Aries, at dawn, it is clear that the precise time is day-break in the spring of that year; and, descending still more to particulars, we discover (4) it to be Goodfriday-a day sanctified to an Italian by his poetry as well as his creed; for it was on it that not only Dante chose to begin his Divine Comedy, but Petrarch, with somewhat less propriety, his melodious amours. Good-friday in 1300 was April the eighth, Easter- sunday falling on the tenth: to be most minutely exact then, the poem opens at sun-rise, April the eighth, 1300 O. S.-Let this be marked with more emphasis than it seems to merit; for by it we are at once placed in full (1) Defence p. 15. (4) Hell. Canto xxi. CANTO 1. relation with the Florentine chroniclers of that time, and with various legal documents still extant. It was for this I said, that the forest personified not exactly his Friorship, but his political scene in general: for his Priorship only began in June 1300, when he was about a month entered into his thirty sixth year; whereas we here find him in the forest in the preceding April, when consequently he was yet in his thirty-fifth; having been born in May, as I said before. Such precision is not required in a poem, and still less in an allegory; yet when it occurs it may be noticed: and no composition, in prose or metre, with which I am acquainted, is so remarkable for it as this. The minute consistency of its chronology is most characteristic, and singularly accordant with the apparently casual expressions in Dante's own minor works, as well as with the historians and critics nearly, or altogether, his contemporaries: (1) whereas the case is quite the contrary with more modern commentators. Read with the former, the Divine Comedy displays an accuracy, as to dates, unknown to poetry and seldom known even to history; read with the latter, it seems a heap of incongruous anachronisms. (1) Boccaccio, Benvenuti of Imola, the Riccardi M. S., Villani, Dino Compagni, the Priorists and the comments, one in Italian and the other in Latin, of Dante's own sons, Peter and Jacob. 1. XLIII. CANTO I. It is an excellent mode of commenting to compare different passages of this poem with each other; that is, to interpret those which are become a little obscure by those whose meaning is obvious but not, vice versa, to quote a disputed verse when that at present under consideration is quite clear; for this solves not the difficulty where there is one, and introduces a difficulty where there was none. I shall not therefore make any reference here to a paragraph of a future Canto, as is the custom; and then what is there in the text to puzzle us? Verbally it runs thus: 'the gay skin of that wild beast, the hour of the day and the sweet season all gave me cause to hope'. And who ever took a walk of a spring morning without feeling hope? And was it not still more natural at sight of a lovely creature personifying home? I do not however reject the suspicion of this hope, whose date is so carefully noted, alluding to some political appearances then well known, but long since irreparably sunk into oblivion. The lion is held by some commentators to represent ambition in the abstract; and by some the ambition of Dante himself. But neither of them can be maintained without the introduction of much mysticism, or without turning away our RANTO I. heads from History, instead of always looking towards it as a guide. The fact is, that Dante, far from avowing himself to be an ambitious citizen, always took care to aver the contrary: and, as to allegorising at length an abstract affection of the mind, it is not his style at all; for we shall find his poetry remarkable for its evidence. To say nothing of the monstrous egotism of a person pretending that his own ambition appeared to terrify the very air, or the hardship of making him accuse himself of a vice, which were sufficient cause for the exile, of which he always complained as unjust; to describe an ambitious man as scared by his own ambition, is a dubious, if not a contradictory position. Such a one were rather pusillanimous than ambitious. To represent him as frightened by ambition in the abstract, is, to me at least, little less unintelligible. To strike terror, that passion seems to require embodying, and, since the shape of a lion is merely figurative, we must seek for the real body in which it was inten ded to be drawn. If we look at that passage in the Bible, of which, as I have observed, this whole allegory is a copy: — « A lion out of the forest shall slay them, a wolf of the deserts shall spoil them, a leopard (or panther) shall watch over their cities; every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces >>: we find the lion interpreted King Nebuchadnezzar and army (1). Elsewhere in the (1) Jeremiah v. 6. |