The 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth has come and gone without giving rise to much dancing in the streets, or formal eulogy in the reviews ; and yet, if centenaries are important at all, this one was worthier of celebration than the 400th of Shakespeare, amply honoured in 1964. We should have been reading and talking about books whether Shakespeare had lived or not—differently, no doubt, in some ways, but still reading and talking about books, belonging to the club that does so. But Dante founded the club, and if you belong to it you cannot leave him to the Italianist, or simply be grateful that he proved useful to Shelley or Eliot. A parallel text of the Commedia will convince you that he was a great poet; but even that isn’t enough. One needs, somehow, to reach an understanding of the fact that what most of us think of as literature—modern as opposed to ancient literature—and also the reading public of which one is a member, are in large measure Dante’s invention. He ought therefore to have been praised by layman as well as by scholar ; and the scholar should have tried to explain why.
A number of celebratory books did appear in English. Thomas Bergin’s1 is an introductory study by a Yale professor, and its tone, despite the long encomium in Time, is the tone of the graduate school. It sets out with more patience than grace to sketch the political, ecclesiastical, linguistic and literary backgrounds, and studies each of the major works in turn—most interestingly, as far as I can judge, the Convivio, which is treated as a sort of digestive exercise for the Commedia, and the work in which the famous vernacular manner, ‘robust and severe,’ was beaten out.
The English contributions come from Oxford and Cambridge, and each is a collection of papers. The Oxford Dante Society is august and exclusive, and these papers1 aren’t intended for the profane ; in fact this book is as much a celebration of the Society as of Dante. Yet there is one paper, no less learned than the others, which speaks to the condition of outsiders in our larger, less exclusive club: this is Cecil Grayson’s ‘Nobilior est vulgaris: Latin and Vernacular in Dante’s Thought.’ Dante spent much thought on the topic of nobility; he held that in men it was not something integral that you inherited, but an innate quality that flourished or did not, according to how you fostered it. About language he felt in a similar way: the vernacular—in his case, a variety of Italian—can and ought to have a nobility greater than that of Latin. The argument is complicated by the difficulty of determining what the vernacular is, and what may be its relation to Latin; but it can be said that before he wrote the Commedia Dante had felt the possibility of a European culture—to be defined politically as well as linguistically—continuous with that of Rome and yet consistent with political and linguistic nationality. Such a culture survives not in the immutability of the old empire and the old language, but in the changingness of the new.
All manner of difficulties surround Dante’s exposition of these and related matters. Nevertheless it seems clear enough that some such modern attitude helped to determine his choice of a language for the Commedia, so that he seems to have predicted the conditions under which the literature of Europe (which is, for most of us, quite simply ‘literature’) could be established. If we are to have our essential great literature we must have it coloured by our nationality and our language, and vulgar languages are, unlike grammatica (a language of artifice, occasionally synonymous with Latin), subject to change.
These topics are raised also in the much more humane, much more vernacular Cambridge collection of lectures.2 It is the recognition of mutability in our cultural elements that predisposes us towards the historical in scholarship, and the Cambridge volume opens appropriately with a notable essay by Natalino Sapegno on the modern reaction from Croce’s anti-historical appraisal. To the poetry of a grammatica the most suitable critical method would be, no doubt, rhetoric; to the poetry of the vernacular, the illustrious vulgar, history is essential. No poet, perhaps, has ever been more conscious of transition than Dante; and an essay in this volume, by Kenelm Foster, extends the significance of this to matters of doctrine. Dante assumed that by speaking about the particular historical crisis he knew—in detail ranging from the merely municipal to the imperial—he could speak about everything important; and it is part of his achievement that we, in reading him, may make the same assumption.
Not only scholars, but laymen also, belong to the popolo santo, the continuity of the imperial people. Of course the popolo santo is a myth, as Professor Limentani says; so is the Monarch, and this was clear by Dante’s own day. Yet it is a myth we need; and Dante himself was not at all a vague idealist. What he wanted, it seems, was an internationalism compounded of nationalisms, an approach, based on the illustrious vernacular, to some ‘universal human civility’; and so far as it is to be had he prefigured it. He knew, as we do, that the illustrious vulgar is as near as we shall get to a lost ‘language of grace.’ And he provided the great example: we are always having to remind ourselves of the need to emulate that robustness and severity, that transparency.
More than anything else, in fact, it is this doctrine of a vulgar language capable of an imperial civility and grace—a doctrine enforced by marvellous instances—that binds us, after an interval of 700 years, to Dante. It was he who elevated the vernacular to the dignity of grammatica; and he did it not so much by writing the De Vulgari Eloquentia as by writing the Commedia. To Dante, the illustrious vulgar was an Italian language; but we can borrow the expression for all the languages of Europe which have experienced the translation to civility or to grace: all the languages which, changing in time and in space, accommodate that transfigured natural speech by which, in the modern world, the work of the more artful, less mutable Latin must be done.
It is precisely because the invention of the illustrious vulgar, and of the modern reading public, is our greatest debt to Dante, that of all the books to appear in 1965 the most profound and important is an old one, now translated into English: Auerbach’s study of the birth of literary language and a literary public.1 Erich Auerbach died in 1957, and his fame outside the academies is largely posthumous; his celebrated book Mimesis did not appear in English until 1953, and has steadily grown in influence. Of this work, subtitled ‘The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,’ one may say with some envy that no living Englishman could possibly have attempted it. The peers of Auerbach are Curtius, and perhaps, for all their political differences, Lukacs. The opening chapter of Mimesis contrasts Homeric with Old Testament methods of ordering and representing reality—the first all foreground, the second at once mysterious and historical, absolute yet dark and incomplete, calling for constant reinterpretation, not merely fact but also figura, and the root of centuries of European representation of the world and its history. Auerbach goes on to study in a similar way texts by a great diversity of authors—Petronius, Ammianus Marcellinus, the Chanson de Roland, Dante, Cervantes (a brilliant central essay), Stendhal, and so on. Behind the method employed in Mimesis is a conviction that Christianity rendered absurd the classical levels of style and, in the language of its scriptures, provided a new basis for human representations of reality.
The present book is in one sense a vast supplement to Mimesis, and it explains in detail what this new basis consists of. On a long philological view it might be said that Christianity, which in matter and language identifies the sublime with the humble, made the high and middle styles mere functions of the low style. Hence the long tradition of sermo humilis; educated pagans despised the style of the scriptures, the Latin of the Vulgate, but the Holy Ghost managed with the humble style and even with vulgarisms; and from Augustine it was seen to have the possibility of profounder sublimities than the Latin of the schools. Classical revivalists will sort out the common words and restore grand ones; but an equally strong impulse in our tradition is to upset such revivals, and restore the humble word. Fanciful etymologies for humilis (‘of the earth’ etc.) suggest that somebody should have brought in sermo humilis at the Lady Chatterley trial: Lawrence was trying to restore it.
The existence of a reading public is a necessary condition of literature; and Auerbach’s book is an attempt to describe its formation. It is the audience of the high vernacular, and it came to being after 500 years during which Europe had no literature because it had no language for it. A new Latin might, says Auerbach, have developed; but this was prevented by the success of the Carolingian classical revival. So the sublime was confined to religion, and literature was the preserve of the church schools. And this state of affairs continued until love provided the topic of the secular sublime, and the vernacular assumed the power and authority of Latin. This was, largely, Dante’s work; at a moment and in a place peculiarly favourable to the operation, he created not only great modern literature but a public for himself and his successors—a public as indispensable to literature as its language, cultivated but not learned, a public of many languages but one common European spirit.
Auerbach’s view of Europe is long, and he says it could be had only now, when we are near the end of the story and can see the nature of an epoch or a great work in relation to the tradition of 3,000 years. We may question the need for this eschatological justification of the author’s immense synoptic inquiries, but this will not affect the argument that Dante represents a great crisis in the development of Europe and its literary public, or the validity of Auerbach’s Hochsprache—the many-tongued vernacular, nobler than Latin, which has been the medium for all fruitful collaboration between writer and literary public. Mimesis neglected the period 600–1100 (when there was virtually no literature because there was no such language, except in England) and it also omitted a very Dantesque strain in Auerbach’s thinking, a kind of linguistic imperialism which, as the European tradition draws to an end, sees the power of Virgil’s Rome translated to the Florence of Dante, and thence to other vernacular Romes, much as the imperial power became German or French.
I do not know whether, given the necessary learning, one would accept all the implications of this book and of Mimesis. They raise the question as to where historiography ends and apocalyptic begins. But I suppose one may be uncommitted on some of the sublimer issues and yet still accept what Auerbach says of Dante as the creator of the literary language and the literary public which made possible the great vernacular literature. It is a literature of change, if only in the currents of resistance to what Auerbach thinks of as its Christian ‘figural’ basis, and it may not always be easy to see its languages as aspiring to an ideal Hochsprache; but when we need, as we sometimes do, to think about literature as a whole—as having, like the imperium itself, a perpetuity defying change—we may also think of Dante as, of this literature, the principal patron.
(1966)
1 An Approach to Dante. Bodley Head.
1 Centenary Essays on Dante. Oxford.
2 The Mind of Dante. Edited by U. Limentani. Cambridge.
1 Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Routledge.