The Poetry of Dante

Benedetto Croce, Douglas Ainslie

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367141585
• eBook ISBN: 9780429631788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1922 and partly from periodicals this book provides a methodological introduction to the reading of Dante's The Divine Comedy, with the aim of removing the confusion surrounding much Dantean literature and helping the reader to focus attention on the essential qualities of Dante's work.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Is there any reason why Dante’s poetry should be read and judged differently from other poetry? Considering the severe traditional profile of Dante, poet, philosopher, theologian, judge, preacher of reforms and prophet, and listening to the epigrams in which he is said to be “equally great as man and as poet,” “more than poet,” and his “Divine Comedy” unique in literature, we would be tempted to say yes. Not only was he poet and thinker, representative of the ideas of the Middle Ages, but he was also a man of action and shared in his own way in the Italian and European crisis at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries. His greatest book is very complex, opus poeticum being intertwined with opus philosophicum and opus practicum. In it we find sentiment and imagery, acts of faith and religious acts, instruction, censure of the politics of Florence as well as those of Church and Empire, and of all Italian and foreign sovereigns, condemnations and vendettas, announcements and prophecies; and in each case allegorical and otherwise concealed meanings are superadded to the obvious and literal. Indeed, the tendency to put his poetry in a class by itself is very natural.

But we shall do well to be on our guard here against exaggeration; if Dante were not, as he is, a very great poet, there would be little importance to the details of his life and work. There were many theologians, philosophers, publicists, utopians, and political partisans in his, as in all times. Furthermore, if much of the subject matter is important it cannot be unique. Scientific and philosophical thought and practical tendencies and ends are discoverable in every poet and in every poetical production. We can also find in many works hidden allusions and intentions. In fact, since a poet is a human being, it is always possible to give to any poetical work a distinct philosophical and practical interpretation, such as is made so much of in the case of Dante. This interpretation is different from, and additional to, the true poetic interpretation. We can call it, from our present point of view, “allotrious.” It does not stand to the other in the relation of “historical” to “æsthetic”; both interpretations are historical, only one is concerned with the history of poetry and the other with another and different kind of history. To it, Dante’s work, in its admittedly significant philosophic and practical aspects, affords rich material, far richer than the work of most poets, some of whom present almost no material at all for such interpretation. But the difference between him and the others in this respect is always simply one of quantity, and there is nothing “unique” about him along these lines at all.

Philosophical, ethical and religious interpretation of Dante’s work began in his own time with the notaries, friars, and professors of the university, and with the sons themselves of the poet, and would probably have begun with the poet himself had his life been long enough. The commentator of his own poetry in the “Convivio” would hardly have left the “sacred poem” without commentary. Perhaps he would have developed it along the lines of the much disputed epistle to Scaliger. At any rate it would not be easy to imagine a work of greater usefulness than such a commentary would have been. It would have spared pos terity serious, and in great part useless, labours in the shape of the many great commentaries of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and saved us from the appalling bulk of Italian and foreign exegesis which scholars have been engaged upon from the seventeenth century to the present day. There was a lull of about two centuries, from the early sixteenth to the late seventeenth, but the last ten years have seen the greatest activity of this kind yet known.

The future historian of Dantean exegesis will succeed better than his predecessors if he measure the progress of criticism by the growth and elaboration of historical method. Interpretation has become and tends to become more scientific and critical. At first it was chiefly moral and religious, as it sometimes threatens to become again in ascetic and meditative minds. It has, at various times, assumed that political and national importance, especially in the period of the Italian Risorgimento, which it now enjoys almost solely among professorial and political speechifiers. At all times it has served as an academic exercise for ingenious imagination and subtle sophistry, and serves as such still for idle spirits. But the really fruitful direction was taken when Vincenzo Borghini recognised in the sixteenth century that it was essential to the methodical study of Dante to seek out the authentic documents relating to the thought and knowledge of his time and to study the language and customs of his period. Following the students of the eighteenth century, Carlo Troya, one of the most fruitful of Dante scholars, in the early nineteenth century linked Dante with the history of the Middle Ages and cleared the supporter of Henry VIII from much untimely ideology.

Studies of the philosophy of Dante, and of all the speculative currents which he mingled with his usually Thomistic views, belong to the “allotrious” researches above described, as also do those relating to his political ideal. The same may be said of the resemblances to, and the differences from, the other ideals proposed or longed for in his time; his public and private affairs; his varying thoughts and hopes; the chronology of his works, and of the different parts of the “Comedy,” in connection with their historical inspiration; his literary, classical and mediæval inheritance; what he knew of past and contemporary history; what he believed to be real in the facts to which he alluded, and what he held to be simply probable or imagined altogether for his own purposes; his views on allegory in general and that form of it which was particular or incidental to the poem; whether he considered the end of the poem to be ethico-religious, or political, or both, and so on. Research along these lines has now gone very far in the hands of the best scholars engaged in it. But, in my opinion, it should go a good deal farther and thus get free of a methodological defect which injures and renders it more or less frivolous throughout, especially where it is concerned with allegory.

It is well known that the work which has been done and is being done in the sphere of allegory is as little conclusive or fruitful as it is extensive and cumbrous. Allegory, for him who does not lose sight of its true and simple nature, is nothing but a sort of cryptography, and therefore a practical product, an act of the will, which decrees that this is to mean one thing and that something else; by “sky” (writes Dante in the “Convivio”) “I wish to mean science and by skies, sciences; and by eyes, demonstrations.” When an author does not leave an explicit document to declare what act of will he has accomplished, supplying the reader with the “key” to his allegory, it is useless to seek or hope to fix definitely the meaning of his work. The “true meaning” cannot be seen unless the author tells it, as is also remarked in the “Convivio.” Wanting the key, which is the express declaration of the composer of the allegory, we may, by basing our conclusions upon other passages in the author’s works, and in the books we know him to have read, arrive in the most favourable case at a probable interpretation. But we can never be certain. For certainty we need, strictly speaking, the ipse dixit. If in the matter of poetry the author is often the worst of critics, in the matter of allegory he is always the best. But the majority of the students of Dante’s allegories forget this principle, which is proper to the matter of which they treat, and claim to reach the hidden meaning by acuteness of intelligence and industrious reasoning, which they would do better to reserve for other arguments. Thus they enter, often without being aware of it, upon a misleading highway of conjectures (though, and indeed because, it is so very wide). Here one destroys the other and convinces no one, except perhaps its author, who has allowed himself to be fascinated by his own conjectures, and then has reinforced them with his self-love (with “the affection which binds the intellect”), and has put faith in them all the more passionately, the more an obscure consciousness has warned him that he cannot found them on solid ground.

The overvaluation referred to above, or the misunderstanding of the particular importance of Dante as philosopher and politician, is to be referred to this error of method, which gives a truly dilettante character to a great part of such researches. But indeed, even where it at first seems possible to speak with the greatest truth of the originality of Dante’s thought, that originality, under proper criticism, becomes gradually attenuated, or ceases to exist. Such is the case with the treatise “De Monarchia.” The much praised conception of a world monarchy with universal peace proves to have been a pious hope entertained in all ages. The other original idea believed to be discoverable in it, the idea of a lay state, proves to be only a dualism of the spiritual and temporal powers, implying due reverence for the former by the latter, and ultimately a certain subordination. In fact, the “De Monarchia” is rather the work of a publicist than of a political scientist, although it reveals in its very contradictions the difficulties and the expedients in which the mind of the Middle Ages was engaged, and which paved the way for the future political science of Machiavelli. Approximately the same is to be said of the “De Vulgari Eloquentia” which did not inaugurate modern philology, though it is a work of great importance for the account of the various dialects of Italy which it contains. Modern philology is due, on the contrary, to modern historical sentiment. The “De Eloquentia” contains nothing of a revolutionary character or even of importance for the philosophy of language. It is to be looked upon as a document of value for the study of the artistic formation of Dante, who used it to lay down an ideal of language and of style in conformity with his own way of feeling, the “illustrious common speech” (just as the Florentine speech was the ideal for Manzoni in recent times and in a different sense). The like is true of his metaphysics and ethics in general, where it is only possible, by the exercise of much good will, to find here and there some detail not derived from the books which he had studied.

Researches into the thought and doctrine of Dante consequently, and of necessity, centre around minute details, to which are attributed a greater value than really belongs to them. The eagerness with which studies of the Dantean allegories are pursued is the most evident proof of this tendency to exaggerate. Even if it were possible to determine the allegories with certainty, as it is not, and if the elements of an authentic interpretation did at last make themselves evident, what else could be revealed but repetitions or, if you like, slight varieties of concepts, beliefs, designs, expectations, already known from those places in his works where Dante speaks without allegory, and from other contemporary or anterior texts? It is not to be believed that we should obtain astonishing revelations, of the kind announced by Rossetti and some of his followers. But even if we did, such revelations would be interesting merely as historical curiosities. They would, too, reveal a Dante by no means healthy in a certain region of his mind. We owe it in part to these inflations, to these subtleties, to this disputing about trifles, and still more to the empty conjectures of the allegory-hunters, that “Dantist” has come to mean in ordinary Italian speech “Danto-maniac.” Such things are certainly inevitable, and are always found in the cult which gathers round a great man; but we should be glad to dispense with them.

It remains true nevertheless, after making this necessary protest against the too much that is too much, and against partial defects of method, that the “allotrious” interpretation of Dante is not only legitimate, as for any poet, but possesses in his case a particular appropriateness. Equally legitimate is the æsthetic or æsthetico-historical interpretation. Its rights have not, as a matter of fact, been disputed, and could not be disputed save by those who intentionally or involuntarily do not admit art as a reality and treat it as though it were an appearance, resolving it into other spiritual forms or into altogether materialistic conceptions. It too has its long history, which this time does begin with Dante, that is to say with the theory by means of which he explained and judged poetry, and with the definition which he gives of himself as the poet of “rectitude,” or the “sacred” poet. In its course it flows into the history of æsthetic and of æsthetic criticism from the Middle Ages up to the present time; and here too progress was effected by means of the perfecting of the concept of art, and the ever greater ex actness and firmness of historical intuition. Praise of Dante as the theologian-poet, knowing dogmas and learned in ethics, was succeeded by the discussions of the sixteenth century about the “Comedy,” as to whether or not it would fit into the classification of the Aristotelian Poetic and how it did so, or whether it were not an altogether new class in itself,—and so on, throughout the eighteenth century, to the refutation, negation, and satirising directed against it in the name of rationalistic good taste. Thence followed the reaction and correction that gave warning of the necessity, before judging the “Comedy,” of first placing it in the medium of the ideas and customs and passions of the times when it appeared; and this again was followed, in the romantic period, with a more lofty and free consideration of the poem, in conformity with a loftier and more liberal conception of art.

If the “allotrious” and æsthetico-historical modes of interpretation are both legitimate, their conjunction is on the other hand illegitimate, although a scholastic formula often repeated and here directly refuted, asserts that the condition and foundation of the æsthetic interpretation of the “Comedy” is its philosophic, moral, political and otherwise allegorical interpretation. This formula once assumed an appearance of truth owing to the false identification which, as we have observed, used to be made of the “allotrious” with the historical interpretation in general; and the æsthetic interpretation used to be made to follow this, conceived as non-historical in itself and finding its premise or historical basis in the other. But since both are in their own way historical, that is to say, correspond to different and complete histories or forms of history, it is clear that their conjunction as desired is without the necessary justification. The history of Dante’s poetry and that of his philosophy or his politics have their roots equally in all the history preceding that æsthetic creation, that acceptance or reform of doctrine, that practical action; but each one of them completes its own synthesis of historical material, in conformity with its own internal principle, ad modum percipientis or appercipientis.

Let truth prevail. In the history of philosophy the doctrines of Dante must be rethought in their logic and dialectic and linked with anterior and posterior doctrines, in such a way as to cause their truth and error to become apparent and to make clear the place they held and the function they exercised in the general development of thought. But in the history of poetry, as in the simple reading and enjoyment of poetry, this does not matter; were it introduced, it would cause disturbance, because those doctrines are there, not in so far as thought, but only in so far as they are imagined, and cannot therefore be dialecticised as true and false. They should be known, but in the same way as we know a myth or fable, or any other fact, that is to say, as elements or parts of poetry, from which and not from logic, they derive their significance.

In like manner, in a history of culture in the Middle Ages and in the age of Dante especially, it is important to learn what was known and believed as to certain personages and certain myths, and to discern in the judgments regarding them what comes from criticism, more or less well directed, and what from traditions or fancies or, indeed, misunderstandings: the Roman Empire, Cæsar, Brutus, Cato, Virgil, Minos, Pluto. But in poetry, and therefore in the history of Dante’s poetry, these facts and personages become images or metaphors of the different modes of feeling of the poet. It is certainly necessary to know how he thought them, but only in relation to the use he made of them, their colouring of reverence, admiration, love or terror. Dante, either ill-informed or forgetful, may have confused the characters of Cato of Utica and Cato the Censor; but the figure of the guardian of Purgatory is not the fruit of a confusion, it is a poetical creation. The name and certain traits are taken from a remembered Roman hero, who thus contributes a sort of aureole to the character. In this same way we give a name full of dear memories or propitious augury to a beloved daughter. The history of the name certainly does not affect the reality of the person to whom it has been given.

In a political history of Florence, it is indispensable to start from economic and juridicial conceptions and to follow the industries, the commerce, the class struggles, the treaties and the wars, the actions of the King of France, of the Emperor and of the Church, and to understand what problems of a social and international character were then debated, what were the institutions that were losing ground and what were the new ones arising and growing stronger, and on which side lay the greater political sagacity and wisdom. It is also possible to touch upon the personal actions of Dante, to the extent allowed by extant documents. We say he was inscribed as prior of the Art Guild, was an orator, was condemned to exile, that he was both actor and sufferer in that process of demolition and construction, of offence and defence. But all this has no direct connection with the poetry of Dante. The passionate expressions which seem to be due to the historical events, and therefore to be intelligible and capable of being judged only in relation to them, are in the poem in the same way as what is derived from philosophical and historical culture. They are essential parts which we may not abstract from the images to which they belong, and examine as social and political history, unless we wish to destroy rather than throw light upon the whole. The “new folk” and the “unexpected gains” are not in the verse of Dante, as in political history, cause and effect of the industrial and commercial rise of Florence, but an expression of disgust and abhorrence in the mind of the poet. Political history will judge “the boor of Aguglione and he of Signa,” as Troya suggested, to have been more sensible or instinctively better directed than the factious white Guelf, Alighieri, and the “shameless Florentine women” to have been more patriotic than he; but in the poetry, whatever those characters may have been in reality, they are the object of contempt and indignation, and the boor of Aguglione and he of Signa certainly have “a sharp eye for cheating” and the Florentine women continue to show “both breast and nipples”,—let the priest shame them by pointing to them from the pulpit! In writing history or anecdote, we should examine the truth of the tragic death of the lovers of Rimini, or of the greatness and ruin of Count Ugolino, as recounted by the poet; and it may be that in judging them, as one of the interpreters suggests, Dante allowed himself to be to some extent dominated by his hatred of the Pisans and of the Malatestas, “those black Guelfs.” But when reading the episodes, beware of separating what cannot be separated and substituting the results of such researches for the living qualities of Dante’s characters! If you do, whatever the characters have of piteous or of tragic disappears at once. Horror at the ferocity of the Pisans vanishes before the recorded crimes of Ugolino, and the love of a Francesca over thirty for a cousin over forty, appears, as indeed it has appeared to one critic, to be nothing but an ignoble intrigue. It appears connected with an intrigue which Dante is supposed to have begun, or to have wished to begin, with his own sister-in-law: and this of that Francesca about whom the god-like power of poetry has woven a new history, a history which made Byron in Ravenna feel such keen delight to breathe the air and made Carducci long for the cypressed hill where she “softened her ardent eyes to smile!”

Finally, to dwell for a moment upon a point that is wont to cause the greatest difficulties, allegory certainly existed among the forms of expression or rather of communication and writing, usual or preferred, during the Middle Ages. It was a hidden mode of communication and writing, a propounding and guessing of riddles, and in order to understand certain thoughts, it is sometimes necessary to decipher allegorical cryptograms, if the means at our disposal permit of their being deciphered. But whatever the investigators and conjecturers as to Dante’s allegory may boast or claim, explanations of the allegories are always entirely useless, and in so far as useless, harmful, when considered in connection with the enjoyment of history or poetry. In poetry, allegory never occurs; it is certainly talked about, but when one goes in search of it and hopes to find it, one does not find it,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Chapter I. Introduction
• Chapter II. The Young Dante and The Dante of the Comedy
• Chapter III. The Structure and Poetry of the Comedy
• Chapter IV. The Inferno
• Chapter V. The Purgatorio
• Chapter VI. The Paradiso
• Chapter VII. The Character and Unity of Dante’s Poetry
• Chapter VIII. Historical Survey of Dantean Criticism
• Index