8

FARINATA AND CAVALCANTE

“O Tosco che per la città del foco

vivo ten vai così parlando onesto,

24 piacciati di restare in questo loco.

La tua loquela ti fa manifesto

di quella nobil patria natìo

27 a la qual forse fui troppo molesto.”

Subitamente questo suono uscìo

d’una de l’arche; però m’accostai,

30 temendo, ut poco più al duca mio.

Ed el mi disse: “Volgiti: che fai?

Vedi là Farinata che s’è dritto:

33 da la cintola in su tutto ’l vedrai.”

I’avea già il mio viso nel suo fitto;

ed el s’ergea col petto e con la fronte

36 com’avesse l’inferno in gran dispitto.

E l’animose man del duca e pronte

mi pinser tra le sepulture a lui,

39 dicendo: “Le parole tue sien conte.”

Com’io al piè de la sua tomba fui,

guardommi un poco, e poi, quasi sdegnoso,

42 mi dimandò: “Chi fur li maggior tui?”

Io ch’era d’ubidir disideroso,

non gliel celai, ma tutto gliel’apersi;

45 ond’ ei levò le ciglia un poco in soso.

Poi disse: “Fieramente furo awersi

a me e a miei primi e a mia parte,

48 sì che per due fiate li dispersi.”

“S’ei fur cacciati, ei tornar d’ogni parte”

rispuosi lui “l’una e l’altra fiata;

51 ma i vostri non appreser ben quell’arte.”

Allor surse a la vista scoperchiata

un’ ombra lungo questa infino al mento:

54 credo che s’era in ginocchie levata.

Dintorno mi guardò, come talento

avesse di veder s’altri era meco;

57 e poi che il sospecciar fu tutto spento

piangendo disse: “Se per questo cieco

carcere vai per altezza d’ingegno,

60 mio figlio ov’è? perchè non è ei teco?”

E io a lui: “Da me stesso non vegno:

colui ch’attende là, per qui mi mena,

63 Forse cui Guido vestro ebbe a disdegno.”

Le sue parole e ’l modo de la pena

m’avean di costui già letto il nome;

66 però fu la risposta così piena.

Di subito drizzato gridò: “Come

dicesti? elli ebbe? non viv’elli ancora?

69 non fiere li occhi suoi il dolce lome?”

Quando s’accorse d’alcuna dimora

ch’io facea dinanzi a la risposta

72 supin ricadde, e più non parve fora.

Ma quell’altro magnanimo a cui posta

restato m’era, non mutò aspetto,

75 nè mosse collo, nè piegò sua costa;

E, “Se,” continuando al primo detto,

“elli han quell’arte,” disse, “mal appresa,

78 ciò mi tormenta più che questo letto. …”

(“O Tuscan! who through the city of fire goest alive, speaking thus decorously; may it please thee to stop in this place. Thy speech clearly shows thee a native of that noble country, which perhaps I vexed too much.” Suddenly this sound issued from one of the chests: whereat in fear I drew a little closer to my Guide. And he said to me: “Turn thee round; what art thou doing? lo there Farinata! who has raised himself erect; from the girdle upward thou shalt see him all.” Already I had fixed my look on his; and he rose upright with breast and countenance, as if he entertained great scorn of Hell; and the bold and ready hands of my Guide pushed me amongst the sepultures to him, saying: “Let thy words be numbered.” When I was at the foot of his tomb, he looked at me a little; and then, almost contemptuously, he asked me: “Who were thy ancestors?” I, being desirous to obey, concealed it not; but opened the whole to him: whereupon he raised his brows a little; then he said: “Fiercely adverse were they to me, and to my progenitors, and to my party; so that twice I scattered them.” “If they were driven forth, they returned from every quarter, both times,” I answered him; “but yours have not rightly learnt that art.” Then, beside him, there rose a shadow, visible to the chin; it had raised itself, I think, upon its knees. It looked around me, as if it had a wish to see whether someone were with me; but when all its expectation was quenched, it said, weeping: “If through this blind prison thou goest by height of genius, where is my son and why is he not with thee?” And I to him: “Of myself I come not: he, that waits yonder, leads me through this place; whom perhaps thy Guido held in disdain.” Already his words and the manner of his punishment had read his name to me: hence my answer was so full. Rising instantly erect, he cried: “How saidst thou: he held? lives he not still? does not the sweet light strike his eyes?” When he perceived that I made some delay in answering, supine he fell again, and shewed himself no more. But that other, magnanimous, at whose desire I had stopped, changed not his aspect, nor moved his neck, nor bent his side. “And if,” continuing his former words, he said, “they have learnt that art badly, it more torments me than this bed. …”) The Inferno of Dante Alighieri. English version by Dr. J. A. Carlyle. “Temple Classics” edition. J. M. Dent, 1922.

This episode from the tenth canto of the Inferno begins with Virgil and Dante walking along a secret pathway among flaming chests whose lids stand open. Virgil explains that they are the tombs of heretics and atheists, and promises Dante fulfillment of his hinted wish to communicate with one of the spirits there confined. Dante is about to reply when he is taken aback by the sound of a voice which rises from one of the chests, beginning with the dark o-sounds of O Tosco. One of the condemned has raised himself erect in his chest and addresses them as they pass. Virgil tells Dante his name; it is Farinata degli Uberti, a Florentine, a Ghibelline party leader and captain, who died shortly before Dante’s birth. Dante stations himself at the foot of the tomb; a conversation begins, only to be interrupted a few lines later (l. 52) as abruptly as the conversation between Dante and Virgil had been. This time again it is one of those condemned to the chests who interrupts, and Dante recognizes him immediately, by his situation and his words: he is Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, the father of Dante’s early friend, the poet Guido Cavalcanti. The scene which now takes place between Cavalcante and Dante is brief (only 21 lines). As soon as it comes to an end with Cavalcante’s sinking back into his chest, Farinata resumes the interrupted conversation.

Within the brief space of about seventy lines we thus have a triple shift in the course of events; we have four scenes crowded together, each full of power and content. None is purely expository—not even the first, a comparatively calm conversation between Dante and Virgil, which I have not included in the passage given above. Here, it is true, the reader, and Dante too, are being acquainted with the new setting which is opening before them, i.e., the sixth circle of Hell; but the scene also contains its own independent theme, the psychological process in which the two speakers are involved. Contrasting most sharply with the theoretical calm and psychological delicacy of this prelude, there follows an exceedingly dramatic second scene, initiated by the sudden sound of Farinata’s voice and the abrupt appearance of his body raising itself in its tomb, by Dante’s alarm and Virgil’s encouraging words and gestures. Here—erect and abrupt as his body—Farinata’s moral stature is developed, larger than life as it were, and unaffected by death and the pains of Hell. He is still the same man he was in his lifetime. It is the Tuscan accents from Dante’s lips which have made him rise and address the passing figure with proudly courteous dignity. When Dante turns toward him, Farinata first inquires into his ancestry, in order to learn with whom he is dealing, whether with a man of noble descent, whether with friend or foe. And when he hears that Dante belongs to a Guelph family, he says with stern satisfaction that he twice drove that hated party from the city. The fate of Florence and the Ghibellines is still uppermost in his mind. Dante replies that the expulsion of the Guelphs did not profit the Ghibellines in the long run, that in the end it was the latter who remained in exile; but he is interrupted by the emergence of Cavalcante, who has heard Dante’s words and recognized him. His peering head comes into sight; it is attached to a much slighter body than Farinata’s. He hopes to see his son with Dante, but when he looks in vain, he breaks into anxious questions which show that he too continues to have the same character and the same passions that he had in his lifetime, though they are very different from Farinata’s: love of life on earth, belief in the autonomous greatness of the human mind, and above all love and admiration for his son Guido. As he asks his urgent questions, he is excited, almost beseeching, thus differentiating himself sharply from Farinata’s imposing greatness and self-discipline; and when he infers (wrongly) from Dante’s words that his son is no longer alive, he collapses; whereupon Farinata, unmoved and without reference to the intervening episode, replies to the last remark Dante had addressed to him, and what he says characterizes him completely: If, as you say, the banished Ghibellines have not succeeded in returning to the city, that is a greater torment to me than the bed on which I lie.

More is packed together in this passage than in any of the others we have so far discussed in this book; but there is not only more, the material is not only weightier and more dramatic within so short a space; it is also intrinsically much more varied. Here we have the relation not merely of one event but of three different events, the second of which—the Farinata scene—is interrupted and cut in two by the third. There is, then, no unity of action in the ordinary sense. Nor is this comparable with what we found in the scene from Homer discussed in our first chapter, where the reference to Odysseus’ scar occasioned a lengthy, circumstantial, episodic narrative which carried us far from the original subject. In Dante’s case the subject is changed abruptly and in rapid succession. Farinata’s words interrupt Virgil’s and Dante’s conversation subitamente; the allor surse of line 52 cuts without transition through the Farinata scene, which is just as precipitately resumed by ma quell’altro magnanimo. The unity of the passage is dependent upon the setting, the physical and moral climate of the circle of heretics and atheists; and the rapid succession of independent episodes or mutually unrelated scenes is a concomitant of the structure of the Comedy as a whole. It presents the journey of an individual and his guide through a world whose inhabitants remain in whatever place is assigned to them. Despite this rapid succession of scenes, there is no question of any parataxis in Dante’s style. Within every individual scene there is an abundance of syntactic connectives; and when—as in the present instance—the scenes are juxtaposed in sharp contours without transition, the confrontation is managed by means of artistically varied devices of expression which are rather changes of approach than parataxes. The scenes are not set stiffly side by side and in the same key—we are thinking of the Latin legend of Alexis (pp. 116f.) and even of the Chanson de Roland—they rise from the depths as particular forms of the momentarily prevailing tonality and stand in contrapuntal relation to one another.

To make this clearer we shall more closely examine the points at which the scene changes. Farinata interrupts the conversing pair with the words: O Tosco, che per la città del foco vivo ten vai. … This is an address, a vocative introduced by O, with a succeeding relative clause which, in comparison with the vocative, is decidedly weighty and substantial; and only then comes the request, which is again weighted down with reserved courtesy. We hear, not, “Tuscan, stop!” but “O Tuscan, who …, may it please thee to linger in this place.” The construction, “O thou who” is extremely solemn and comes from the elevated style of the antique epic. Dante’s ear remembers its cadence as it remembers so many other things in Virgil, Lucan, and Statius. I do not think the construction occurs before this in any medieval vernacular. But Dante uses it in his own way: with a strong adjuratory element—which is present in antiquity at most in prayers—and with so condensed a content in the relative clause as only he can manage. Farinata’s feeling and attitude toward the passing pair are so dynamically epitomized in the three qualifiers, per la città del foco ten vai, vivo, così parlando onesto, that had the master Virgil really heard those words, he might well have been more dismayed than Dante in the poem; his own relative clauses after a vocative are perfectly beautiful and harmonious, to be sure, but never so concise and arresting. (See for example Aeneid, 1, 436: o fortunati quibus iam moenia surgunt! or, still more interesting because of its full rhetorical swell, 2, 638: vos o quibus integer aevi / sanguis, ait, solidaeque suo stant robore vires, / vos agitate fugam.) Note also how the antithesis “through the city of fire” and “alive” is expressed entirely, and therefore the more effectively, through the position of the word vivo.

After these three lines of address comes the tercet in which Farinata identifies himself as Dante’s fellow countryman, and only then, after he has finished speaking, the statement: Suddenly this sound issued, etc., a statement which one would normally expect to find introducing a surprising event, but which here—where it follows the event—produces a comparatively quiet effect as a mere explanation of what is occurring. So that, in a recitation of the entire passage, these lines would have to be read more softly. There is no question, then, of any straightforward paratactic attaching of the Farinata scene to the conversation of the two travelers. On the one hand we must not forget the fact that Virgil vaguely announced it beforehand in the course of the conversation (lines 16 to 18); on the other hand, it is so strong, so violent, so overpowering an irruption of a different realm—in the local, ethical, psychological, and aesthetic senses—that its connection with what precedes is no mere juxtaposition but the vital relationship of counterpoint, of the sudden breaking in of something dimly foreboded. The events are not—as we put it in connection with the Chanson de Roland and the Legend of Alexis—divided into little parcels; they live together, despite their contrast and actually because of it.

The second change of scene is managed through the words Allor surse, in line 52. It seems simpler and less remarkable than the first. What, after all, is more normal than to introduce a sudden new occurrence with the words, “Then it befel …”? But if we ask ourselves where in pre-Dantean medieval vernacular literature we might find a comparable linguistic maneuver, interrupting the action in course by a dramatically incisive “then,” we should, I think, have a long search before us. I for one know of none. Allora at the beginning of a sentence is naturally quite frequent in Italian literature before Dante. It occurs for instance in the stories of the Novellino but with much less force of meaning. Such sharp breaks are in keeping with neither the style nor the time-sense of pre-Dantean narrative, not even with those of the French epics, where ez vos or atant ez vos occurs in a similar though much weaker sense (for example, Roland 413 and elsewhere). That even extremely dramatic turnings of the tide of action were handled with stiff circumstantiality may be observed for example in Villehardouin when he relates the intervention of the Doge of Venice at the storming of Constantinople. When his men hesitate to land, the aged and blind Doge orders them upon pain of death to set him ashore first, with the flag of Saint Mark. This the chronicler introduces with the words: or porres oir estrange proece. This is just as though Dante, instead of allora, had said, “And then something quite extraordinary happened.” The Old French ez vos may serve to point the way as we try to find the correct Latin term for this abruptly intervening “then.” For it is not tum or tunc; in many cases it is rather sed or iam. But the real equivalent, which gives the full force, is ecce, or still better et ecce. This is found less frequently in the elevated style than in Plautus, in Cicero’s letters, in Apuleius, etc., and especially in the Vulgate. When Abraham takes the knife to sacrifice his son Isaac, we read: et ecce Angelus Domini de caelo clamavit, dicens: Abraham, Abraham. I think this linguistic maneuver, which effects so sharp an interruption, is too harsh to stem from the elevated style of classical Latin; but it corresponds perfectly with the elevated style of the Bible. And furthermore, Dante uses the Biblical et ecce verbatim on another occasion where a state of affairs is interrupted by a sudden, though not quite so dramatic, occurrence (Purg., 21, 7: ed ecco, sì come ne scrive Luca … ci apparve … after Luke 24: 13: et ecce duo ex illis …). I am not prepared to state as a certainty that Dante introduced the linguistic maneuver of this abruptly interrupting “then” into the elevated style and that it was a Biblical echo with him. But this much would seem to be certain: at the time Dante wrote, the dramatically arresting “then” was by no means as obvious and generally available as it is today; and he used it more radically than any other medieval writer before him.

But we must also consider the meaning and the sound of the word surse, which Dante uses in at least one other passage with telling effect to describe a sudden emergence (Purg. 6, 72-73: e l’ombra tutta in se romita / surse vêr lui …). The allor surse of line 52, then, has hardly less weight than the words of Farinata which bring in the first interruption; this allor is one of those paratactic forms which establish a dynamic relationship between the members they connect. The conversation with Farinata is interrupted—once he has heard part of it, Cavalcante cannot wait for it to end, he simply loses his self-control. And the part he plays—his peering expression, his whining words, and his precipitate despair when he sinks back—forms a sharp contrast with Farinata’s weighty calm when he resumes speaking after the third shift (ll. 73ff.).

The third shift, ma quell’altro magnanimo, etc., is much less dramatic than the first two. It is calm, proud, and weighty. Farinata alone dominates the scene. But the contrast with what precedes is thus only the more striking. Dante calls Farinata magnanimo, employing an Aristotelian term which may have come to life in his vocabulary through its use by Thomas Aquinas or, more probably, by Brunetto Latini and which is applied in an earlier passage to Virgil. This is doubtless a conscious contrast to Cavalcante (costui); and the three identically constructed cola which express Farinata’s aloofness (non mutò aspetto, nè mosse collo, nè piegò sua costa) are undoubtedly designed not only to describe Farinata himself but also to contrast his attitude with Cavalcante’s. This is aurally apparent from the regularly constructed clauses which come to the listener while he is still conscious of the irregular and plaintively thronging questions of the other. (The wording of these questions, ll. 58 to 60 and 67 to 69, Dante may well have modeled after Andromache’s appearance, Aeneid, 3, 310, that is, after a woman’s lamentations.)

Abruptly, then, as these events succeed one another, this is no paratactic construction. The most vital continuity of movement vibrates through the entire passage. Dante has at his disposal an abundance of stylistic devices which no European vernacular before him could equal. And he does not use them singly; he connects them in an uninterrupted relationship. Virgil’s encouraging words (ll. 31-33) consist exclusively of principal clauses without any formal connection by conjunctions. There is a short imperative, a short question, then another imperative with an object and an explanatory relative, and a future clause of adhortative import with an adverbial qualifier. But the quick succession, the concise formulation of the individual parts, and their mutual balance exhibit to perfection the natural vitality of spoken discourse: “Turn around! What are you doing? etc.” Withal there are semantic connections of the most subtle kind. There is the ordinary causal relation (però), but in addition to it we have the connective onde hovering between temporal and causal value, and the hypothetically causal forse che, which some early commentators consider to be courteously softening. There are the most varied temporal, comparative, and graduated hypothetical connections, supported by the greatest possible elasticity of verbal inflections and verbal order. Note, for instance, the ease with which Dante keeps syntactic control of the scene of Cavalcante’s appearance so that it runs smoothly on through three tercets to the end of his first speech (l. 60). The unity of the construction here rests upon three verbal pillars, surse, guardò, disse. The first supports the subject, the adverbial qualifiers, and, in addition, the explanatory parenthesis credo che; the second, guardò, carries the first lines of the second tercet with the as-if clause; while the third line of this same tercet points toward the disse and Cavalcante’s direct discourse, which marks the climax of the whole movement from an initial forte through a decrescendo to a renewed crescendo beginning with line 57.

Should this analysis find any readers but little versed in medieval vernacular literature, they may well be surprised that I here emphasize and praise the extraordinary character of syntactic constructions which are today used by every halfway talented literary man and indeed by many who, though they write nothing but letters, have had a modicum of literary training. But if we start from his predecessors, Dante’s language is a well-nigh incomprehensible miracle. There were great poets among them. But, compared with theirs, his style is so immeasurably richer in directness, vigor, and subtlety, he knows and uses such an immeasurably greater stock of forms, he expresses the most varied phenomena and subjects with such immeasurably superior assurance and firmness, that we come to the conclusion that this man used his language to discover the world anew. Very often it is possible to demonstrate or to conjecture where he acquired this or that device of expression; but his sources are so numerous, his ear hears them, his intellect uses them, so accurately, so simply, and yet so originally, that demonstrations and conjectures of this sort can only serve to increase our admiration for the power of his linguistic genius. A text such as the one we are considering may be approached at any point, and every point will yield a surprise, something unimaginable in the vernacular literatures at an earlier date. Let us take something as insignificant-looking as the clause, da me stesso non vegno. Is it conceivable that so short and yet complete a formulation of such a thought in particular, that so incisive a semantic organization in general, and a da used in this sense, should occur in the work of an earlier vernacular author? Dante uses da in this sense in several other passages (Purg., 1, 52: da me non venni; also Purg., 19, 143: buona da sè; and Par., 2, 58: ma dimmi quel che tu da te ne pensi). The meaning “of one’s own motion,” “of one’s own free will,” “by oneself,” would seem to have been a further development of the meaning “(coming) from.” Guido Cavalcanti writes in the canzone Donna mi prega: [Amore] non è vertute ma da quella vene. It is of course not possible to claim that Dante created this new semantic turn, for even if no single passage of the sort could be found in earlier texts, that still might mean no more than that no such passage happens to be extant; and even if nothing of the sort was ever written before his time, it still may have been current in spoken language. Indeed, the latter possibility strikes me as likely, because a scholarly background would more naturally have suggested per. What is certain, however, is that in adopting or creating this short expression, Dante gave it a vigor and depth previously inconceivable—the effect, in our passage, being further enhanced by a twofold opposition: on the one hand to per altezza d’ingegno and on the other to colui ch’attende là, both rhetorical circumlocutions avoiding the real name, haughtily in one instance and respectfully in the other.

The da me stesso perhaps stems from the spoken language; and elsewhere too it may be observed that Dante by no means scorns colloquialisms. The Volgiti: che fai?, especially from Virgil’s mouth and coming immediately after Farinata’s solemnly composed apostrophe, has the ring of spontaneous and unstylized speech, of everyday conversation among ordinary speakers. The case is not very different with the harsh question chi fur li maggior tui? unadorned as it is with any of the graces of circumlocution, and with Cavalcante’s Come dicesti? elli ebbe? etc. Reading further through this canto, we come, toward the end, upon the passage where Virgil asks, perchè sei tu si smarrito? (l. 125). All these quotations, detached from their context, could well be imagined in any ordinary conversation on the familiar level of style. Beside them we find formulations of the highest sublimity, which are also stylistically “sublime” in the antique sense. There is no doubt that the stylistic intent in general is to achieve the sublime. If this were not clear from Dante’s explicit statements, we could sense it directly from every line of his work, however colloquial it may be. The weightiness, gravitas, of Dante’s tone is maintained so consistently that there can never be any doubt as to what level of style we find ourselves upon. Nor is it possible to doubt that it was the poets of antiquity who gave Dante the model of the elevated style—which he was the first to adopt. He himself acknowledges in many passages, both in the Comedy and in the De vulgari eloquentia, how much he owes them in regard to the elevated style of the vernacular. It may well be that he does so in the very passage we are discussing, for the much-disputed line about Virgil “whom perhaps … Guido held in disdain” permits this interpretation among many others; almost all the early commentators took it in an aesthetic sense. Yet there is no denying that Dante’s conception of the sublime differs essentially from that of his models, in respect to subject matter no less than to stylistic form. The themes which the Comedy introduces represent a mixture of sublimity and triviality which, measured by the standards of antiquity, is monstrous. Of the characters which appear in it, some belong to the recent past or even to the contemporary present and (despite Par., 17, 136-138), not all of them are famous or carefully chosen. Quite often they are frankly represented in all the humble realism of their spheres of life. And in general, as every reader is aware, Dante knows no limits in describing with meticulous care and directness things which are humdrum, grotesque, or repulsive. Themes which cannot possibly be considered sublime in the antique sense turn out to be just that by virtue of his way of molding and ordering them. His mixture of stylistic levels has already been noted. One need but think of the line, “and let them scratch wherever they itch,” which occurs in one of the most solemn passages of the Paradiso (17, 129), in order to appreciate all the immense difference between Dante and let us say Virgil.

Many important critics—and indeed whole epochs of classicistic taste—have felt ill at ease with Dante’s closeness to the actual in the realm of the sublime—that is, as Goethe put it in his Annals for the year 1821, with his “repulsive and often disgusting greatness.” This is not surprising. For nowhere could one find so clear an instance of the antagonism of the two traditions—that of antiquity, with the principle of the separation of styles, and that of the Christian era, with its mingling of styles—as in Dante’s powerful temperament, which is conscious of both because its aspiration toward the tradition of antiquity does not imply for it the possibility of abandoning the other; nowhere does mingling of styles come so close to violation of all style. During the later phases of antiquity the educated saw in the Bible a violation of style. And the later Humanists could not but have precisely the same reaction to the work of their greatest predecessor, the man who was first to read the poets of antiquity again for the sake of their art and to assimilate their tone, the man who was the first to conceive the idea of the volgare illustre, the idea of great poetry in the vernacular, and to carry it out; no other reaction was possible for them, precisely because Dante had done all that. The mixture of styles in the literary works of the earlier Middle Ages, as for instance in the Christian drama, seemed pardonable because of their naïveté; those works could not lay claim to high poetic dignity; their popular purpose and popular character justified or at any rate excused their being what they were; they did not really enter the realm of things that need be taken into account and judged seriously. With Dante, however, it was impossible to speak of naïveté and the absence of higher claims. His numerous explicit statements, all his references to Virgil as his model, his invocations of the Muses, of Apollo, and of God, his tensely dramatic relationship to his own work—so clearly apparent from many passages—and finally and above all, the very tone of every line of the poem itself, bear witness to the fact that the claims he makes are of the highest order. It is not surprising that the tremendous phenomenon which the Comedy represents should have made later Humanists and men of humanistic training ill at ease.

In his theoretical utterances Dante himself betrays a certain indecision in regard to the question of the stylistic category in which the Comedy might fall. In his De vulgari eloquentia—a treatise on the canzone, which would still seem to be wholly uninfluenced by the Comedy—the demands which Dante makes upon the elevated and tragic style are very different from those with which, in the Comedy, he later complies—they are much narrower in respect to choice of subject matter, and much more puristic and concerned with separation of styles in respect to choice of forms and words. He was then under the influence of Provençal poetry and of the poetry of the Italian stil nuovo—both excessively artificial and intended for an initiated elite; and with these he connected the antique doctrine of the separation of styles which the medieval theorists of the art of rhetoric refused to let die. Dante never freed himself completely from these views; otherwise he could not have called his great work a comedy in clearest opposition to the term alta tragedia which he applied to Virgil’s Aeneid (Inf., 20, 113). He seems, then, not to claim the dignity of the elevated tragic style for his great poem. And here we must also consider the justification he adduces for his choice of the designation comedy in the tenth paragraph of his letter to Cangrande. There he says: Tragedy and comedy are distinguished firstly by the course of their action, which, in tragedy, progresses from a noble and quiet beginning to a terrible conclusion, and, in comedy, inversely from a bitter beginning to a happy conclusion; and secondly (a point of greater importance to us) by their style, their modus loquendi: elate et sublime tragedia; comedia vero remisse et humiliter; and so, he says, his poem must be called a comedy, on the one hand because of its unhappy beginning and happy conclusion, and on the other hand because of its modus loquendi: remissus est modus et humilis, quia locutio vulgaris in qua et muliercule communicant. At first one is inclined to assume that this is a reference to his use of the Italian language. In that case the style would be low simply because the Comedy is written in Italian and not in Latin. But it is difficult to attribute such an assertion to Dante, who defended the noble dignity of the vernacular in his De vulgari eloquentia, who was himself the founder of the elevated style in the vernacular through his canzoni, and who had finished the Comedy at the time when he wrote his letter to Cangrande. For these reasons several modern students have taken locutio to mean not language but style. In that case Dante merely wished to say that the style of his work was not that of an elevated Italian or—as he himself described it (De vulg. el., 1, 17)—of the vulgare illustre, cardinale, aulicum et curiale, but of the common everyday language of the people.

In any event, here too he does not claim for his work the dignity of an elevated tragic style, it is at best an intermediate style; and even this he does not express very clearly but merely quotes the passage from Horace’s Ars poetica (93ff.) where Horace says that comedy too sometimes makes use of tragic strains and vice versa. On the whole he classifies his work as being of the low style—although, shortly before, he had discussed its multiplicity of meanings (which certainly does not agree with the idea of the low style); and although he more than once describes that portion of it which he sends to Cangrande with his dedicatory letter, that is, the Paradiso, as cantica sublimis, and qualifies its materia as admirabilis. This uncertainty persists in the Comedy itself, but here the consciousness that both subject and form may claim the highest poetic dignity predominates. Within the poem itself he continues to call it a comedy, but we have already had occasion to enumerate the various points which indicate that he was fully conscious of its stylistic character and rank. Yet although he chooses Virgil as his guide, although he invokes Apollo and the Muses, he avoids ever referring to his poem as sublime in the antique sense. To express its particular kind of sublimity, he coins a special phrase: il poema sacro, al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra (Par., 25, 2-3). It is not easy to see how Dante, after having found this formula and after having completed the Comedy, could still have expressed himself upon its character with the pedantry exhibited in the passage from the letter to Cangrande just referred to. However, so great was the prestige of the classical tradition, obscured as it still was by pedantic schematization, so strong was the predilection for fixed theoretical classifications of a kind which we can but consider absurd, that such a possibility cannot be gainsaid after all. The contemporary or rather immediately succeeding commentators likewise took up the question of style in a purely pedantic vein. There were, to be sure, a few exceptions: Boccaccio for example, whose analysis, however, cannot satisfy us, since it avoids facing the question squarely; and especially the extremely vivid Benvenuto da Imola, who, having explained the threefold division of classical styles (the elevated tragic, the intermediate polemico-satiric, the low comic), continues as follows:

Modo est hic attente notandum quod sicut in isto libro est omnis pars philosophiae [“every division of philosophy”], ut dictum est, ita est omnis pars poetriae. Unde si quis velit subtiliter investigare, hic est tragoedia, satyra et comoedia. Tragoedia quidem, quia describit gesta pontificum, principum, regum, baronum, et aliorum magnatum et nobilium, sicut patet in toto libro. Satyra, id est reprehensoria; reprehendit enim mirabiliter et audacter omnia genera viciorum, nec parcit dignitati, potestati vel nobilitati alicuius. Ideo convenientius posset intitulari satyra quam tragoedia vel comoedia. Potest etiam dici quod sit comoedia, nam secundum Isidorum comoedia incipit a tristibus et terminatur ad laeta. Et ita liber iste incipit a tristi materia, scilicet ab Inferno, et terminatur ad laetam, scilicet ad Paradisum, sive ad divinam essentiam. Sed dices forsan, lector: cur vis mihi baptizare librum de novo, cum autor nominaverit ipsum Comoediam? Dico quod autor voluit vocare librum Comoediam a stylo infimo et vulgari, quia de rei veritate est humilis respectu litteralis [sic], quamvis in genere suo sit sublimis et excellens. … (Benvenuti de Rambaldis de Imola Comentum super D. A. Comoediam … curante Jacobo Philippo Lacaita. Tomus Primus, Florentiae, 1887, p. 19.)

(Now here it must be carefully noted that just as in this book there is every division of philosophy, as we said, so there is every division of poetry. So that, if one look narrowly, here is tragedy, satire, and comedy. Tragedy first, because it describes the deeds of pontiffs, princes, kings, barons, and other magnates and great lords, as appears throughout the whole book. Satire, that is reprehension; for it admirably and boldly reprehends all kinds of vice, without sparing anyone’s dignity, power, or nobility. Hence it could be more properly entitled satire than tragedy or comedy. But it can also be said to be a comedy, for according to Isidore comedy begins with sad things and ends with joyous ones. And thus this book begins with a sad subject, that is with Hell, and ends with a joyous one, that is with Paradise, or the Divine Being. But perhaps, reader, you will say: Why do you want to rebaptize the book for me, when the author called it a Comedy? I say that the author wished to call it a comedy because of its low and vernacular style, and in fact, speaking literally, it is low in style, but in its kind it is sublime and exalted. …)

Benvenuto’s temperament cuts right through the thicket of didactic theory: this book, he says, contains every kind of writing just as it does every kind of knowledge; and if its author called it a comedy because its style is low and popular, he was right in a literal sense, but in its way it is a sublime and great style.

The abundance of subjects treated in the Comedy suffices in itself to pose the problem of the elevated style in a wholly new way. For the Provençals and the poets of the “new style,” there was but one great theme: courtly love. It is true that in his De vulgari eloquentia Dante enumerates three themes (salus, venus, virtus, i.e., deeds of valor, love, and virtue), yet in almost all the great canzoni the two others are subordinated to the theme of love or are clothed in an allegory of love. Even in the Comedy this pattern is preserved through the figure of Beatrice and the role assigned to her, yet here the pattern has a tremendous scope. The Comedy, among other things, is a didactic poem of encyclopedic dimensions, in which the physico-cosmological, the ethical, and the historico-political order of the universe is collectively presented; it is, further, a literary work which imitates reality and in which all imaginable spheres of reality appear: past and present, sublime grandeur and vile vulgarity, history and legend, tragic and comic occurrences, man and nature; finally, it is the story of Dante’s—i.e., one single individual’s—life and salvation, and thus a figure of the story of mankind’s salvation in general. Its dramatis personae include figures from antique mythology, often (but not always) in the guise of fantastic demons; allegorical personifications and symbolic animals stemming from late antiquity and the Middle Ages; bearers of specific significations chosen from among the angels, the saints, and the blessed in the hierarchy of Christianity; Apollo, Lucifer, and Christ, Fortuna and Lady Poverty, Medusa as an emblem of the deeper circles of Hell, and Cato of Utica as the guardian of Purgatory. Yet, in respect to an attempt at the elevated style, all these things are not so new and problematic as is Dante’s undisguised incursions into the realm of a real life neither selected nor preordained by aesthetic criteria. And indeed, it is this contact with real life which is responsible for all the verbal forms whose directness and rigor—almost unknown in the elevated style—offended classicistic taste. Furthermore, all this realism is not displayed within a single action, but instead an abundance of actions in the most diverse tonalities follow one another in quick succession.

And yet the unity of the poem is convincing. It is due to its all-inclusive subject, which is the status animarum post mortem. Reflecting God’s definitive judgment, this status must needs represent a perfectly harmonious whole, considered both as a theoretical system and as a practical reality and hence also as an aesthetic entity; indeed it must needs express the unity of God’s universal order in a purer and more immediate form than this earthly sphere or anything that takes place within it, for the beyond—even though it fail of perfection until Judgment Day—is not, at least not to the same extent as the earthly sphere, evolution, potentiality, and provisionality, but God’s design in active fulfillment. The unified order of the beyond, as Dante presents it to us, can be most immediately grasped as a moral system in its distribution of souls among the three realms and their subdivisions. On the whole the system follows Aristotelian-Thomist ethics. It groups the sinners in Hell first according to the degree of their evil will, and within those categories according to the gravity of their misdeeds; the penitents in Purgatory according to the evil impulses of which they must purify themselves; and the blessed in Paradise according to the measure of their participation in the vision of God. This ethical system is, however, interwoven with other hierarchical systems of a physico-cosmological or historico-political order. The location of the Inferno, of the Mount of Purgatory, and of the circles of Paradise constitute a physical as well as an ethical picture of the universe. The doctrine of souls which underlies the ethical order is. at once a physiological and a psychological anthropology; and there are many other ways in which the ethical and physical orders are basically connected. The same holds true for the historico-political order. The community of the blessed in the white rose of the Empyrean is at the same time also the goal of the historical process of salvation, which is both the guiding principle for all historico-political theories and the standard of judgment by which all historico-political events are measured. In the course of this poem this is constantly expressed, at times most circumstantially (as for instance in the symbolic occurrences on the summit of Purgatory, the Earthly Paradise); so that the three systems of order—the ethical, the physical, and the historico-political—always present and always demonstrable, appear as one single entity.

In order to show how the unity of the transcendental order operates as a unity of the elevated style, we return to our quoted text. Farinata’s and Cavalcante’s lives on earth are over; the vicissitudes of their destinies have ceased; their state is definitive and immutable except that it will be affected by one single change, their ultimate recovery of their physical bodies at the Resurrection on the Last Day. As we find them here, then, they are souls parted from their bodies. Dante does, however, give them a sort of phantom body, so that they can be seen and can communicate and suffer (cf., in this connection, Purg., 3, 31ff.). Their only link to life on earth is memory. In addition they have—as Dante explains in the very canto with which we are concerned—a measure of knowledge of past and future which goes beyond the earthly norm. Their vision is hyperopic: they clearly see earthly events of the somewhat distant past or future, and hence can foretell the future, but they are blind to the earthly present. (This explains Dante’s hesitation when Cavalcante asks him whether his son is still alive; Cavalcante’s ignorance surprises him, the more so because other souls had prophesied future events to him.) Their own earthly lives, then, they still possess completely, through their memories, although those lives are ended. And although they are in a situation which differs from any imaginable situation on earth not only in practical terms (they lie in flaming tombs) but also in principle by virtue of their temporal and spatial immutability, the impression they produce is not that they are dead—though that is what they are—but alive.

Here we face the astounding paradox of what is called Dante’s realism. Imitation of reality is imitation of the sensory experience of life on earth—among the most essential characteristics of which would seem to be its possessing a history, its changing and developing. Whatever degree of freedom the imitating artist may be granted in his work, he cannot be allowed to deprive reality of this characteristic, which is its very essence. But Dante’s inhabitants of the three realms lead a “changeless existence.” (Hegel uses the expression in his Lectures on Aesthetics in one of the most beautiful passages ever written on Dante.) Yet into this changeless existence Dante “plunges the living world of human action and endurance and more especially of individual deeds and destinies.” Considering our text again, we ask how this may come about.

The existence of the two tomb-dwellers and the scene of it are certainly final and eternal, but they are not devoid of history. This Hell has been visited by Aeneas and Paul and even by Christ; now Dante and Virgil are traveling through it; it has landscapes, and its landscapes are peopled by infernal spirits; occurrences, events, and even transformations go on before our very eyes. In their phantom bodies the souls of the damned, in their eternal abodes, have phenomenal appearance, freedom to speak and gesture and even to move about within limits, and thus, within their changelessness, a limited freedom of change. We have left the earthly sphere behind; we are in an eternal place, and yet we encounter concrete appearance and concrete occurrence there. This differs from what appears and occurs on earth, yet is evidently connected with it in a necessary and strictly determined relation.

The reality of the appearances of Farinata and Cavalcante is perceived in the situation in which they are placed and in their utterances. In their position as inhabitants of flaming tombs is expressed God’s judgment upon the entire category of sinners to which they belong, upon heretics and infidels. But in their utterances, their individual character is manifest in all its force. This is especially striking with Farinata and Cavalcante because they are sinners of the same category and hence find themselves in the same situation. Yet as individuals of different personalities, of different lots in their former lives, and of different inclinations, they are most sharply contrasted. Their eternal and changeless fate is the same; but only in the sense that they have to suffer the same punishment, only in an objective sense. For they accept their fate in very different ways. Farinata wholly disregards his situation; Cavalcante, in his blind prison, mourns for the beauty of light; and each, in gesture and word, completely reveals the nature proper to each, which can be and is none other than that which each possessed in his life upon earth. And still more: from the fact that earthly life has ceased so that it cannot change or grow, whereas the passions and inclinations which animated it still persist without ever being released in action, there results as it were a tremendous concentration. We behold an intensified image of the essence of their being, fixed for all eternity in gigantic dimensions, behold it in a purity and distinctness which could never for one moment have been possible during their lives upon earth.

There can be no doubt that this too is part of the judgment which God has pronounced upon them; God has not only grouped the souls in categories and distributed them accordingly among the various divisions of the three realms; He has also given each soul a specific eternal situation, in that He has never destroyed an individual form but on the contrary has fixed it in his eternal judgment—nay more, not until He has pronounced that judgment has He fully perfected it and wholly revealed it to sight. Here in Hell Farinata is greater, stronger, and nobler than ever, for never in his life on earth had he had such an opportunity to prove his stout heart; and if his thoughts and desires center unchanged upon Florence and the Ghibellines, upon the successes and failures of his former endeavors, there can be no doubt that this persistence of his earthly being in all its grandeur and hopeless futility is part of the judgment God has pronounced upon him. The same hopeless futility in the continuance of his earthly being is displayed by Cavalcante; it is not likely that in the course of his earthly existence he ever felt his faith in the spirit of man, his love for the sweetness of light and for his son so profoundly, or expressed it so arrestingly, as now, when it is all in vain. We must also consider that, for the souls of the dead, Dante’s journey represents their only chance in all eternity to speak to one from among the living. This is an aspect of the situation which impels many to express themselves with the utmost intensity and which brings into the changelessness of their eternal fate a moment of dramatic historicity. And finally, one more distinguishing characteristic of the situation in which the dwellers in Hell find themselves is their strangely restricted and expanded range of knowledge. They have forfeited the vision of God participated in to various degrees by all beings on earth, in Purgatory, and in Paradise; and with it they have lost all hope; they know the past and the future in the passing of time on earth and hence the hopeless futility of their personal existence, which they have retained without the prospect of its finally flowing into the divine community; and they are passionately interested in the present state of things on earth, which is hidden from them. (A striking case in point is, with Cavalcante and several others, the figure of Guido da Montefeltro in Canto 27. Speaking with difficulty through the flames which shoot from his head, he implores Virgil to stop and speak to him, in a long adjuration, permeated with memories and grief, which reaches its climax in the words of line 28: dimmi se i Romagnuoli han pace o guerra!)

Dante, then, took over earthly historicity into his beyond; his dead are cut off from the earthly present and its vicissitudes, but memory and the most intense interest in it stirs them so profoundly that the atmosphere of the beyond is charged with it. This is less pronounced on the Mount of Purgatory and in Paradise, because there the souls do not look back upon life on earth, as they do in Hell, but forward and up; as a result, the farther we ascend the more clearly is earthly existence seen together with its divine goal. But earthly existence remains always manifest, for it is always the basis of God’s judgment and hence of the eternal condition of the soul; and this condition is everywhere not only a matter of being assigned to a specific subdivision of the penitent or blessed but is a conscious presentment of the soul’s previous life on earth and of the specific place it duly occupies in the design of God’s order. For it is precisely the absolute realization of a particular earthly personality in the place definitively assigned to it, which constitutes the Divine Judgment. And everywhere the souls of the dead have sufficient freedom to manifest their individual and particular nature—at times, it is true, only with considerable difficulty, for often their punishment or their penitence or even the clear light of their bliss makes it hard for them to appear and to express themselves; but then, overcoming the obstacle, self-expression breaks out only the more effectively.

These ideas are found in the passage from Hegel referred to above. Over twenty years ago I used them as the basis of a study of Dante’s realism (Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt, 1929). Since then I have been concerned with the question what conception of the structure of events, in other words what conception of history, is the foundation for Dante’s realism, this realism projected into changeless eternity. It has been my hope that in the process I might learn something further and more exact about the basis of Dante’s elevated style, for his elevated style consists precisely in integrating what is characteristically individual and at times horrible, ugly, grotesque, and vulgar with the dignity of God’s judgment—a dignity which transcends the ultimate limits of our earthly conception of the sublime. Obviously Dante’s conception of what happens, of history, is not identical with that commonly accepted in our modern world. Indeed he does not view it merely as an earthly process, a pattern of earthly events, but in constant connection with God’s plan, toward the goal of which all earthly happenings tend. This is to be understood not only in the sense of human society as a whole approaching the end of the world and the advent of the millennium in a constant forward motion (with all history, then, directed horizontally, into the future); but also in the sense that every earthly event and every earthly phenomenon is at all times—independently of all forward motion—directly connected with God’s plan; so that a multiplicity of vertical links establish an immediate relation between every earthly phenomenon and the plan of salvation conceived by Providence. For all of creation is a constant reduplication and emanation of the active love of God (non è se non splendor di quella idea che partorisce amando il nostro Sire, Par., 13, 53-54), and this active love is timeless and affects all phenomena at all seasons. The goal of the process of salvation, the white rose in the Empyrean, the community of the elect in God’s no longer veiled presence, is not only a certain hope for the future but is from all eternity perfect in God and prefigured for men, as is Christ in Adam. It is timelessly or at all times that Christ’s triumph and Mary’s coronation take place in Paradise; at all times the soul whose love has not been drawn toward a false goal goes unto Christ, its beloved, who wedded it with his blood.

In the Comedy there are numerous earthly phenomena whose theoretical relation to the divine plan of salvation is set forth in detail. From the point of view of modern readers the most astounding instance, and in political and historical terms at the same time the most important one, is the universal Roman monarchy. It is in Dante’s view the concrete, earthly anticipation of the Kingdom of God. Aeneas’ journey to the underworld is granted as a special grace in view of Rome’s earthly and spiritual victory (Inf., 2, 13ff.); from the beginning, Rome is destined to rule the world. Christ appears when the time is fulfilled, that is, when the inhabited world rests in peace in Augustus’ hands. Brutus and Cassius, the murderers of Caesar, suffer beside Judas in the jaws of Lucifer. The third Caesar, Tiberius, is the legitimate judge of Christ incarnate and as such the avenger of original sin. Titus is the legitimate executor of the vengeance upon the Jews. The Roman eagle is the bird of God, and in one passage Paradise is called quella Roma onde Cristo è Romano (cf. Par., 6; Purg., 21, 82ff.; Inf., 34, 61ff.; Purg., 32, 102; etc., also numerous passages in the Monarchia). Furthermore, Virgil’s role in the poem can only be understood on this premise. We are reminded of the figure of the earthly and heavenly Jerusalem, and indeed the whole concept is an example of figural thinking. Just as the Judaeo-Christian method of interpretation, consistently applied to the Old Testament by Paul and the Church Fathers, conceives of Adam as a figure of Christ, of Eve as a figure of the Church, just as generally speaking every event and every phenomenon referred to in the Old Testament is conceived as a figure which only the phenomena and events of Christ’s Incarnation can completely realize or “fulfill” (to use the conventional expression), so the universal Roman Empire here appears as an earthly figure of heavenly fulfillment in the Kingdom of God.

In my essay “Figura” (referred to above, p. 73), I have shown—convincingly, I hope—that the Comedy is based on a figural view of things. In the case of three of its most important characters—Cato of Utica, Virgil, and Beatrice—I have attempted to demonstrate that their appearance in the other world is a fulfillment of their appearance on earth, their earthly appearance a figure of their appearance in the other world. I stressed the fact that a figural schema permits both its poles—the figure and its fulfillment—to retain the characteristics of concrete historical reality, in contradistinction to what obtains with symbolic or allegorical personifications, so that figure and fulfillment—although the one “signifies” the other—have a significance which is not incompatible with their being real. An event taken as a figure preserves its literal and historical meaning. It remains an event, does not become a mere sign. The Church Fathers, especially Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine, had successfully defended figural realism, that is, the maintenance of the basic historical reality of figures, against all attempts at spiritually allegorical interpretation. Such attempts, which as it were undermine the reality of history and see in it only extrahistorical signs and significations, survived from late antiquity and passed into the Middle Ages. Medieval symbolism and allegorism are often, as we know, excessively abstract, and many traces of this are to be found in the Comedy itself. But far more prevalent in the Christian life of the High Middle Ages is the figural realism which can be observed in full bloom in sermons, the plastic arts, and mystery plays (cf. the preceding chapter); and it is this figural realism which dominates Dante’s view.

The world beyond—as we put it earlier—is God’s design in active fulfillment. In relation to it, earthly phenomena are on the whole merely figural, potential, and requiring fulfillment. This also applies to the individual souls of the dead: it is only here, in the beyond, that they attain fulfillment and the true reality of their being. Their career on earth was only the figure of this fulfillment. In the fulfillment of their being they find punishment, penance, or reward. That man’s existence on earth is provisional and must be complemented in the world beyond, is a concept in keeping with Thomist anthropology, if E. Gilson’s observations on the subject are valid. He writes (Le thomisme, 3rd ed., Paris, 1927, p. 300): une sorte de marge nous tient quelque peu en deçà de notre propre définition; aucun de nous ne réalise plénièrement l’essence humaine ni même la notion complète de sa propre individualité. It is precisely this notion complète de leur propre individualité which the souls attain in Dante’s beyond by virtue of God’s judgment; and specifically, they attain it as an actual reality, which is in keeping with the figural view and the Aristotelian-Thomist concept of form. The relation of figure fulfilled, which the dead in Dante represent in reference to their own past on earth, is most readily demonstrable in those cases in which not only character and essential being, but also a signification apparent in the earthly figure, are fulfilled: as for example in the case of Cato of Utica, whose merely figural role as the guardian of earthly political freedom is fulfilled in the role he plays at the foot of the Mount of Purgatory as the guardian of the eternal freedom of the elect (Purg., 1, 71ff.: libertà va cercando; cf. also Archiv. Roman., 22, 478-481). In this instance the figural approach can explain the riddle of Cato’s appearance in a place where we are astonished to find a pagan. Such a demonstration is not often possible. Yet the cases where it is possible suffice to let us see Dante’s basic conception of the individual in this world and in the world beyond. The character and the function of a human being have a specified place in God’s idea of order, as it is figured on earth and fulfilled in the beyond.

Both figure and fulfillment possess—as we have said—the character of actual historical events and phenomena. The fulfillment possesses it in greater and more intense measure, for it is, compared with the figure, forma perfectior. This explains the overwhelming realism of Dante’s beyond. When we say, “This explains …,” we do not of course overlook the genius of the poet who was capable of such a creation. To put it in the words of the old commentators, who distinguish between causa efficiens, materialis, formalis, and finalis of the poem: Causa efficiens in hoc opere, velut in domo facienda aedificator, est Dantes Allegherii de Florentia, gloriosus theologus, philosophus et poeta (Pietro Alighieri; in a similar vein also Jacopo della Lana). But the particular way in which his realistic genius achieved form, we explain through the figural point of view. This enables us to understand that the beyond is eternal and yet phenomenal; that it is changeless and of all time and yet full of history. It also enables us to show in what way this realism in the beyond is distinguished from every type of purely earthly realism. In the beyond man is no longer involved in any earthly action or entanglement, as he must be in an earthly representation of human events. Rather, he is involved in an eternal situation which is the sum and the result of all his actions and which at the same time tells him what were the decisive aspects of his life and his character. Thus his memory is led along a path which, though for the inhabitants of Hell it is dreary and barren, is yet always the right path, the path which reveals what was decisive in the individual’s life. In this condition the dead present themselves to the living Dante. The suspense inherent in the yet unrevealed future—an essential element in all earthly concerns and their artistic imitation, especially of a dramatic, serious, and problematic kind—has ceased. In the Comedy only Dante can feel this suspense. The many played-out dramas are combined in one great play, involving his own fate and that of all mankind; they are but exempla of the winning or losing of eternal bliss. But passions, torments, and joys have survived; they find expression in the situations, gestures, and utterances of the dead. With Dante as spectator, all the dramas are played over again in tremendously concentrated form—sometimes in a few lines, as in the case of Pia de’ Tolomei (Purg., 5, 130). And in them, seemingly scattered and fragmented, yet actually always as parts within a general plan, the history of Florence, of Italy, of the world, unfolds. Suspense and development, the distinguishing characteristics of earthly phenomena, are no more. Yet the waves of history do reach the shores of the world beyond: partly as memories of the earthly past; partly as interest in the earthly present; partly as concern for the earthly future; in all cases as a temporality figurally preserved in timeless eternity. Each of the dead interprets his condition in the beyond as the last act, forever being played out, of his earthly drama.

In the first canto of the poem Dante says to Virgil: “Thou alone art he to whom I owe the beautiful style which has done me honor.” This is doubtless correct—and even more in respect to the Comedy than to his earlier works and canzoni. The motif of a journey to the underworld, a large number of individual motifs, many stylistic turns—for all these he is indebted to Virgil. Even the change in his theory of style from the time of his treatise De vulgari eloquentia—a change which took him from the merely lyrico-philosophical to the great epic and hence to full-dimensional representation of human events—cannot be accounted for by anything but the influence of classical models and in particular of Virgil. Of the writers we know, he was the first to have direct access to the poet Virgil. Virgil, much more than medieval theory, developed his feeling of style and his conception of the sublime. Through him he learned to break the all too narrow pattern of the Provençal and contemporary Italian suprema constructio. Yet as he approached the problem of his great work, which was to come into being under the sign of Virgil, it was the other, the more immediately present, the more living traditions which overwhelmed him. His great work proved to be in the mixed style and figural, and indeed in the mixed style as a result of the figural approach. It proved to be a comedy; it proved to be—also in terms of style—Christian. After all that we have said on the subject in the course of these interpretations, there can be no need for again explaining that (and why) conceiving all earthly occurrences through the medium of a mixed style—without aesthetic restriction in either subject matter or form—as an entity sublimely figural, is Christian in spirit and Christian in origin. Hence too the unity of the whole poem, in which a wealth of themes and actions is organized in a single universal pattern which embraces both heaven and earth: il poema sacro, al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra. And, on the other hand, it was again Dante who first felt and realized the gravitas proper to the antique elevated style, and even surpassed it. Let him say what he will; let it be as vulgar, grotesque, horrible, or sneering as may be: the tone remains that of the elevated style. It is impossible to imagine that the realism of the Comedy could ever sink to the level of farce and serve the purposes of popular entertainment as the realism of the Christian drama so often does. Dante’s level of tone is unthinkable in medieval epics before his time; and he learned it, as can be shown by many examples, from antique models. Before Dante, vernacular literature—especially that of Christian inspiration—is on the whole rather naive so far as questions of style are concerned, and that despite the influence of scholastic rhetoric—an influence which of late has been rather heavily emphasized. But Dante, although he takes his material from the most living and sometimes from the humblest vernacular, has lost this naive quality. He subdues every turn of expression to the gravity of his tone, and when he sings of the divine order of things, he solves his problem by using periodic articulations and devices of sentence structure which command gigantic masses of thought and concatenations of events; since antiquity nothing comparable had existed in literature (one example may stand for many: Inf., 2, 13-36). Is Dante’s style still a sermo remissus et humilis, as he calls it himself and as Christian style should be even in the sphere of the sublime? The question could perhaps be answered in the affirmative; the Fathers themselves did not scorn the conscious employment of the art of rhetoric, not even Augustine. The crux of the matter is what purpose and what attitude the artistic devices serve.

In our passage two of the damned are introduced in the elevated style. Their earthly character is preserved in full force in their places in the beyond. Farinata is as great and proud as ever, and Cavalcante loves the light of the world and his son Guido not less, but in his despair still more passionately, than he did on earth. So God had willed; and so these things stand in the figural realism of Christian tradition. Yet never before has this realism been carried so far; never before—scarcely even in antiquity—has so much art and so much expressive power been employed to produce an almost painfully immediate impression of the earthly reality of human beings. It was precisely the Christian idea of the indestructibility of the entire human individual which made this possible for Dante. And it was precisely by producing this effect with such power and so much realism that he opened the way for that aspiration toward autonomy which possesses all earthly existence. In the very heart of the other world, he created a world of earthly beings and passions so powerful that it breaks bounds and proclaims its independence. Figure surpasses fulfillment, or more properly: the fulfillment serves to bring out the figure in still more impressive relief. We cannot but admire Farinata and weep with Cavalcante. What actually moves us is not that God has damned them, but that the one is unbroken and the other mourns so heartrendingly for his son and the sweetness of the light. Their horrible situation, their doom, serves only, as it were, as a means of heightening the effect of these completely earthly emotions. Yet it seems to me that the problem with which we are here concerned is not conceived broadly enough if, as has frequently been done, it is formulated exclusively in terms of Dante’s admiration or sympathy for a number of individuals encountered in Hell. The essence of the matter, what we have in mind, is not restricted to Hell nor, on the other hand, to Dante’s admiration or sympathy. All through the poem there are instances in which the effect of the earthly figure and its earthly destiny surpasses or is subserved by the effect produced by its eternal situation. Certainly, the noble souls among the damned, Francesca da Rimini, Farinata, Brunetto Latini, or Pier della Vigna, are also good examples in support of my view; but it seems to me that the emphasis is not where it belongs if only such instances are adduced, for a doctrine of salvation in which the eternal destiny depends upon grace and repentance can no more dispense with such figures in Hell than it can with virtuous pagans in Limbo. But as soon as we ask why Dante was the first who so strongly felt the tragic quality in such figures and expressed it with all the overwhelming power of genius, the field of speculation immediately broadens. For it is with the same power that Dante treats all earthly things of which he laid hold. Cavalcante is not great, and figures like Ciacco the glutton or the insanely irate Filippo Argenti he handles now with sympathetic contempt, now with disgust. Yet that does not prevent the portrayal of earthly passions in these instances from far surpassing, in their wholly individual fulfillment in the beyond, the portrayal of a collective punishment, nor the latter from frequently only heightening the effect of the former. This holds true even of the elect in Purgatory and Paradise. Casella singing one of Dante’s canzoni and those who listen to him (Purg., 2), Buonconte telling of his death and what became of his body (Purg., 5), Statius kneeling before his master Virgil (Purg., 21), the young King of Hungary, Carlo Martello of Anjou, who so charmingly expresses his friendship for Dante (Par., 8), Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida, proud, old-fashioned, and full of the civic history of Florence (Par., 15-17), even the Apostle Peter (Par., 27), and how many others, open before us a world of earthly-historical life, of earthly deeds, endeavors, feelings, and passions, the like of which the earthly scene itself can hardly produce in such abundance and power. Certainly they are all set fast in God’s order, certainly a great Christian poet has the right to preserve earthly humanity in the beyond, to preserve the figure in its fulfillment and to perfect the one and the other to the best of his capabilities. But Dante’s great art carries the matter so far that the effect becomes earthly, and the listener is all too occupied by the figure in the fulfillment. The beyond becomes a stage for human beings and human passions. Think of the earlier figural forms of art—of the mysteries, of religious sculpture—which never, or at best most timidly, ventured beyond the immediate data supplied by the Bible, which embarked upon the imitation of reality and the individual only for the sake of a livelier dramatization of Biblical themes—think of these and contrast them with Dante who, within the figural pattern, brings to life the whole historical world and, within that, every single human being who crosses his path! To be sure, this is only what was demanded from the first by the Judaeo-Christian interpretation of the phenomenal; that interpretation claims universal validity. But the fullness of life which Dante incorporates into that interpretation is so rich and so strong that its manifestations force their way into the listener’s soul independently of any interpretation. When we hear Cavalcante’s outburst: non fiere li occhi suoi il dolce lome? or read the beautiful, gentle, and enchantingly feminine line which Pia de’ Tolomei utters before she asks Dante to remember her on earth (e riposato de la lunga via, Purg., 5, 131), we experience an emotion which is concerned with human beings and not directly with the divine order in which they have found their fulfillment. Their eternal position in the divine order is something of which we are only conscious as a setting whose irrevocability can but serve to heighten the effect of their humanity, preserved for us in all its force. The result is a direct experience of life which overwhelms everything else, a comprehension of human realities which spreads as widely and variously as it goes profoundly to the very roots of our emotions, an illumination of man’s impulses and passions which leads us to share in them without restraint and indeed to admire their variety and their greatness.

And by virtue of this immediate and admiring sympathy with man, the principle, rooted in the divine order, of the indestructibility of the whole historical and individual man turns against that order, makes it subservient to its own purposes, and obscures it. The image of man eclipses the image of God. Dante’s work made man’s Christian-figural being a reality, and destroyed it in the very process of realizing it. The tremendous pattern was broken by the overwhelming power of the images it had to contain. The coarse disorderliness which resulted during the later Middle Ages from the farcical realism of the mystery plays is fraught with far less danger to the figural-Christian view of things than the elevated style of such a poet, in whose work men learn to see and know themselves. In this fulfillment, the figure becomes independent: even in Hell there are great souls, and certain souls in Purgatory can for a moment forget the path of purification for the sweetness of a poem, the work of human frailty. And because of the special conditions of man’s self-fulfillment in the beyond, his human reality asserts itself even more strongly, concretely, and specifically than it does, for example, in antique literature. For this self-fulfillment, which comprises the individual’s entire past—objectively as well as in memory—involves ontogenetic history, the history of an individual’s personal growth; the resultant of that growth, it is true, lies before us as a finished product; but in many cases we are given a detailed portrayal of its several phases; it is never entirely withheld from us. More accurately than antique literature was ever able to present it, we are given to see, in the realm of timeless being, the history of man’s inner life and unfolding.