Quelli ch’ anticamente poetaroL’ età del’ oro e suo stato felice—[136]and Dante looks round on them and sees them smiling.Io mi volsi in dietro allora tuttoA’ miei poeti, e vidi che con risoUdito avevan l’ ultimo costrutto.[137]The smiles which wreathe the lips of the denizens of the Heavenly Paradise, like that which gleams in Beatrice’s eyes,[138]are something ineffably solemn and sublime: like theGloriachanted in the Starry Heaven, of which the Poet exclaims—... mi sembiavaUn riso de l’ universo.[139]But there is a touch of the more distinctively human in the suggestion thrown out in the following Canto that St. Gregory woke up in heaven to the true facts about the Angelic Hierarchy, and “smiled at his own mistake” in departing from the Dionysian scheme.Onde, sì tosto come li occhi aperseIn questo ciel, di sè medesmo rise.[140]The passages we have touched upon in theDivina Commediaare those most obviously to the point. Prof. Sannia’s Italian mind can discern subtleties of humour in places where the foreigner cannot always hope to follow. But there is one point on which he lays much stress, namely the importance, for our purpose, of observing Dante’s attitude towards himself throughout the mystical journey, and especially as he passes through the dismal regions of the First Kingdom. The Dante so graphically depicted to us in theDivine Comedyis altogether different from the cold, abstract Dante of tradition. He is an impatiently curious child, in whom the passion of curiosity even conquers fear. And while the pilgrim is depicted to us in veryhuman guise, and his motions and his attributes described in terms which presuppose not only a remarkable degree of self-knowledge, and a striking power of psychological analysis, but also a very real sense of humour; the poet who sings of the pilgrim, reveals to us by the way, a whole group of characteristics which claim the humorous gift as their inevitable associate. Such are his broad humanity, his sympathy, his reverence even for the noble damned, his very modern type of tenderness shown by interest in the ways of children, animals, birds, insects, from whose life he loves to draw his similes. “True humour,” says Carlyle, “is sensibility in the most catholic and deepest sense.” Virgil—the Virgil of history—had this in a pre-eminent degree—and so has his mystic companion of the Eternal World.[141]Popular tradition has imagined him as a heartless, unfeeling judge, without that indulgence towards human frailty which the gift of humour presupposes: but the entirePurgatoriobelies this calumny, and not a few episodes in theInfernoitself.To pass from theDivina Commediato theConviviois in any case a drop down. If it is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, the sublimity of theDivina Commediashould bring us very close to the regions where laughter is generated. TheConvivio, with all its manifold interest is obviously far below the level on which thought and feeling habitually move in theDivine Comedy. Has it therefore less promise in the matter of our quest?I venture to think that there is a strain of playfulness underlying a good deal of the argument of this work; and that even if we can bring ourselves to believe Dante’s own solemnly elaborate interpretation of his love-songs to be quite serious in the main.And apart from this, if we take theConviviowiththe utmost seriousness, we may remember for our comfort that πορίζεσθαι τὰ γέλοια[142]is one of the qualifications of Aristotle’s εὐτράπελος and the willingness to be laughed at another; and see in Dante (with all reverence) an example of those who, more or less unconsciously provide matter for amusement to posterity. Nay, we may treat him as he treats St. Gregory, and look upon him as laughing now at his own certitude about the ten heavens and the angelic hierarchy, from his place in the mystic rose—or are we to say on the terrace of Pride?But to return to theConvivio. It is here, as we have already suggested, that Dante gives us his description of the ideal nature of Laughter. “Ridere,” he says, “è una corruscazione della dilettazione de l’ anima.”[143]On the Aristotelian principle of the Mean (though his actual reference is not to Aristotle, but to Pseudo-Seneca “On the Four Cardinal Virtues”), he urges that laughter should be moderate and modest, with no violent movement (such as convulses the pages, e.g. of Franco Sacchetti) and no “cackling” noise. Laughter is, in fact—like little children—“best seen and not heard.”From each of the four extant treatises, quotations may be adduced which at any rate show the writer’s sympathy with that view of life which fastens on the incongruous and sees in it matter for genial irony or for bitter sarcasm, according to the moral context.Tratt. I.Chapter xi. opens with a delicious satire on the “sheep-like opinion” of the multitude, which I have elsewhere compared to the charmingly nonsensical scene—“Less Bread, More Taxes!”—with which Lewis Carroll inaugurates hisSylvie and Bruno.The “man in the street,” says Dante, is ready to follow any cry that is raised. Thus the populace will befound exclaiming “Viva la lor morte! Muoia la lor vita!—purchè alcuno cominci.” They are for all the world like sheep who follow their leader blindly over a high precipice or down a well. He goes on to rail at “a bad workman who blames his tools,” the many who “sempre danno colpa alla materia dell’ arte apparecchiata, overo alo strumento; siccome lo mal fabro biasima ferro appresentato a lui.”[144]Nor can we fail to find in the next chapter (I, xii.) a touch of the drily humorous spirit; in the passage which Dr. Toynbee in his Anthology entitlesOf Silly Questions.“If flames were plainly to be seen issuing from the windows of a house, and a bystander were to enquire whether that house were on fire, and another man to reply that it was, I should find it difficult to decide which of the two was the more ridiculous.”[145]What are we to say of theTrattato II? Here, if anywhere, Dante poses as the unconscious humorist; here, if anywhere, in his elaborately solemn disquisition upon arrangement of the heavens and their analogues in thetriviumandquadrivium, he is qualifying himself to play therôleof St. Gregory in the other world! But even here he finds leisure to cast occasionally a satirist’s eye on the contemporary world—l’ aiuolo che ci fa tanto feroci;and the naïveté of his references to it is delightful. They sometimes come in incidentally in the form of similes. In Chapter vii.,[146]for instance, is an illusion to the perennial banishments and sieges with which the factions of Guelf and Ghibelline, Black and White, harassed the cities ofthe peninsula: “When we speak of ‘the city,’” he says, “we are wont to mean those who are in possession of it, not those who are attacking it, albeit the one and the other be citizens.” Or again, in Chapter xi.,[147]a reference to the decline of good taste and culture is ingeniously worked into a question of etymology. “Cortesia” is equivalent to “onestade,” and “because in courts of old time virtuous and fair manners were in use (as now the contrary), this word was derived from courts, and ‘courtesy’ was as much as to say ‘after the usage of courts.’ If the word had been derived in modern days from the same origin, it could have signified nothing else thanturpezza.”InTratt. III, as elsewhere, the playfulness is for the most part so spread out that it is difficult to quote. There is, however, a touch of real satire in such passages as that in which Dante twits the lawyers, physicians, and members of religious orders with their disqualification for the reputation of a true philosopher.[148]“We are not to call him a real philosopher who is a friend of wisdom for profit’s sake, as are lawyers, physicians, and almost all the members of the religious orders, who do not study in order to know, but in order to get money or office; and if any one would give them that which it is their purpose to acquire, they would linger over their study no longer.”Trattato IVis more obviously fruitful. Here again he girds at the lawyers and doctors, suggesting that they might at least giveunprofessional advice gratis, and, in another place, ventures timidly to assert that it may be possible “to be religious though married.”[149]Again, in Ch. xvi., ifnobilesimply meantnotus, then the Obelisk ofSt. Peter would be the noblest stone on earth, and Asdente the cobbler (of whom Salimbene gives us so lively a sketch) would be noblest among the citizens of Parma.[150]Some arguments are so senseless, he says a little earlier, that they deserve to be answered not with a word, but with a knife. “Risponder si vorrebbe non colle parole ma col coltello a tanta bestialità.”[151]Lastly, he has in this treatise the audacity to depict to us the sublimest sage, “il maestro di color che sanno,” as indulging in a burst of hypothetical laughter at the idea of a double origin of the human race. “Senza dubbio, forte riderebbe Aristotile”; and, he adds, “those who would divide mankind into two separate species like horses and asses are (with apologies to Aristotle) themselves the asses.”[152]In theDe Vulgari Eloquentia, as we have already hinted, the “idioma incomptum et ineptum” of various localities, alike on the right and on the left of the Apennines, gives play for pleasantry of which does Dante not fail to take advantage. It is with evident relish that he puts on record typical uncouth phrases of each dialect: the RomanMezzure quinto dici, theChignamente,frate,sc-tateof the Marches of Ancona, the MilaneseMes d’ ochiover, theÇes fastúwhich men of Aquileja and Istria “crudeliter accentuando, eructuant.” The feminine softness of the Romagna, and especially of Forlì, with itscorada mea;[153]the more than masculine roughness of the men of Verona, Vicenza, Brescia—all those who say “Magara”; thenofandvifof Treviso.In Chapter xi. he has his knife into mediaeval Rome,the proud and corrupt. “Sicut ergo Romani se cunctis preponendos extimant, in hac eradicatione sive discerptione non immerito eos aliis preponamus, protestantes eosdem in nulla vulgaris eloquentie ratione fore tangendos.” The primacy which the Romans claim in all things may certainly be theirs in this. In our eliminating process they shall be first to be rejected from the candidature to furnish a classical vernacular for all Italy!Their dialect (he goes on), like their morals, is the most degraded in the whole peninsula, and has spread its corrupting influence into neighbouring districts. It is indeed not worthy to be called avulgare(vernacular), but rather a depraved misuse of speech (tristiloquium), and is “italorum vulgarium omnium ... turpissimum.”[154]At the end of Chapter xiii. he tilts at the Genoese Z—an ugly sound in itself, but one which, if lost or mislaid by defect of memory, would leave the poor people of Genoa without a means of transmitting their thoughts! The loss of this one letter would leave them dumb, or impose on them the necessity of inventing an entirely new mode of speech. “Si per oblivionem Ianuenses ammitterentzlitteram, vel mutire totaliter eos vel novam reperare oporteret loquelam: est enimzmaxima pars eorum locutionis: que quidem littera non sine multa rigiditate profertur.”[155]On a different plane is Dante’s lamentation in Ch. xii. over the decay of literary culture in Sicily since the glorious days of Frederic and Manfred, which gave the title “Sicilianum” to the work of Dante’s predecessors in the vernacular: a passage (to me at least) somewhat obscure, in which Frederic II of Sicily, Charles II of Naples, Azzo Marquis of Este, and John Marquis of Montferrat are accused of blood-thirstiness, treachery and avarice:“Venite carnifices; venite attriplices; venite avaritiae sectatores....”[156]Turning to Bk. II we find the same Azzo ironically praised in Chapter vi., in a “copy-book phrase” of which the incidental introduction gives point to the satire: “Laudabilis discretio marchionis Estensis et sua magnificentia preparata cunctis, cunctis illum facit esse dilectum.”More delightful still is a sentence which closely follows, quoted solemnly like the former merely as an example of good phraseology appropriate to a lofty subject, in which Charles of Valois plays therôleof a “second Totila,” and his calamitous dealings with Florence (including, presumably, Dante’s own banishment) are adduced as a fitting prelude to his futile descent upon Sicily. “Ejecta maxima parte florum de sinu tuo, Florentia, nequicquam Trinacriam Totila secundus adivit.”[157]Earlier in the book there is another humorous touch with which we may conclude our list, at the risk, perchance, of an anti-climax. A passage near the end of Chapter i. recalls, in a curious way, a line from theEpistlesof Horace.Dante, having premised that every one should adorn (exornare) his verses as far as possible, goes on to point out that there are limits beyond which adornment becomes incongruous and absurd. “We do not speak of an ox caparisoned like a horse or a belted pig asornatus; we laugh at them, and would rather apply the worddeturpatus.” Thisbos ephippiatusmost aptly typifies incongruity of adornment. In Horace’s well-known line—Optat ephippia bos piger, optat arare caballus,[158]the point of the satire is different. It is the Roman poet’s favourite theme of universal discontent—each envying another’s lot.In Dante’s phrase we may perhaps detect an unconscious or semi-conscious adoption or adaptation of a classical image: parallel, in a humble way, with those splendid thefts from Virgil and Ovid with which he has enriched theDivina Commedia: conceptions too unquestionably original in their new form to be classed as mere plagiarisms.“Cicero hath observed,” says theSpectatorof Nov. 5, 1714,[159]“that a jest is never uttered with a better grace than when it is accompanied with a serious countenance.”If this be true, our quest may perhaps modestly congratulate itself on the avoidance of undue levity. Nor need we take it seriously to heart if we have failed to vindicate for Dante the character of a humorist in the modern sense, and of the American type. The most that our investigation can be said to have proved is that Dante, embittered as he was by his exile, and emaciated by long and serious study, was not devoid of that sense of humour whereby man is able to wring matter for cheerfulness and mirth out of the most unlikely material, and, going through this vale of misery—“questo aspro disorto”—to “use it for a well.” But neither is he the cold abstraction, both less and more than human, which tradition, of a sort, has handed down to us. His works display, for those who care to look for them, a breadth of sympathy, a capacity for observation and discernment, a keenness of interest, an eye for the incongruous, a richness and sureness of self-expression that are guarantees of the possession of the sense of humour.[160]The manifoldplay of the forces of one of the most picturesque ages of human history found a sympathetic response in Dante’s genius, though the sublimity and the restraint of his work has obscured this. This side of his genius is well summed up by Sannia.[161]“La coscienza lucidissima di sè stesso, l’ attitudine all’ analisi psicologica, la febbrile curiosità del mondo esterno, naturale ed umano, lo spirito d’ osservazione, il senso più squisito dell’ arte, la divina serenità, la multiforme impressionabilità dell’ artista, il senso del tenero, la pietà umana, il pessimismo furono note spiccatissime, eminenti del suo genio.”
Quelli ch’ anticamente poetaroL’ età del’ oro e suo stato felice—[136]
Quelli ch’ anticamente poetaroL’ età del’ oro e suo stato felice—[136]
Quelli ch’ anticamente poetaroL’ età del’ oro e suo stato felice—[136]
Quelli ch’ anticamente poetaro
L’ età del’ oro e suo stato felice—[136]
and Dante looks round on them and sees them smiling.
Io mi volsi in dietro allora tuttoA’ miei poeti, e vidi che con risoUdito avevan l’ ultimo costrutto.[137]
Io mi volsi in dietro allora tuttoA’ miei poeti, e vidi che con risoUdito avevan l’ ultimo costrutto.[137]
Io mi volsi in dietro allora tuttoA’ miei poeti, e vidi che con risoUdito avevan l’ ultimo costrutto.[137]
Io mi volsi in dietro allora tutto
A’ miei poeti, e vidi che con riso
Udito avevan l’ ultimo costrutto.[137]
The smiles which wreathe the lips of the denizens of the Heavenly Paradise, like that which gleams in Beatrice’s eyes,[138]are something ineffably solemn and sublime: like theGloriachanted in the Starry Heaven, of which the Poet exclaims—
... mi sembiavaUn riso de l’ universo.[139]
... mi sembiavaUn riso de l’ universo.[139]
... mi sembiavaUn riso de l’ universo.[139]
... mi sembiava
Un riso de l’ universo.[139]
But there is a touch of the more distinctively human in the suggestion thrown out in the following Canto that St. Gregory woke up in heaven to the true facts about the Angelic Hierarchy, and “smiled at his own mistake” in departing from the Dionysian scheme.
Onde, sì tosto come li occhi aperseIn questo ciel, di sè medesmo rise.[140]
Onde, sì tosto come li occhi aperseIn questo ciel, di sè medesmo rise.[140]
Onde, sì tosto come li occhi aperseIn questo ciel, di sè medesmo rise.[140]
Onde, sì tosto come li occhi aperse
In questo ciel, di sè medesmo rise.[140]
The passages we have touched upon in theDivina Commediaare those most obviously to the point. Prof. Sannia’s Italian mind can discern subtleties of humour in places where the foreigner cannot always hope to follow. But there is one point on which he lays much stress, namely the importance, for our purpose, of observing Dante’s attitude towards himself throughout the mystical journey, and especially as he passes through the dismal regions of the First Kingdom. The Dante so graphically depicted to us in theDivine Comedyis altogether different from the cold, abstract Dante of tradition. He is an impatiently curious child, in whom the passion of curiosity even conquers fear. And while the pilgrim is depicted to us in veryhuman guise, and his motions and his attributes described in terms which presuppose not only a remarkable degree of self-knowledge, and a striking power of psychological analysis, but also a very real sense of humour; the poet who sings of the pilgrim, reveals to us by the way, a whole group of characteristics which claim the humorous gift as their inevitable associate. Such are his broad humanity, his sympathy, his reverence even for the noble damned, his very modern type of tenderness shown by interest in the ways of children, animals, birds, insects, from whose life he loves to draw his similes. “True humour,” says Carlyle, “is sensibility in the most catholic and deepest sense.” Virgil—the Virgil of history—had this in a pre-eminent degree—and so has his mystic companion of the Eternal World.[141]
Popular tradition has imagined him as a heartless, unfeeling judge, without that indulgence towards human frailty which the gift of humour presupposes: but the entirePurgatoriobelies this calumny, and not a few episodes in theInfernoitself.
To pass from theDivina Commediato theConviviois in any case a drop down. If it is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, the sublimity of theDivina Commediashould bring us very close to the regions where laughter is generated. TheConvivio, with all its manifold interest is obviously far below the level on which thought and feeling habitually move in theDivine Comedy. Has it therefore less promise in the matter of our quest?
I venture to think that there is a strain of playfulness underlying a good deal of the argument of this work; and that even if we can bring ourselves to believe Dante’s own solemnly elaborate interpretation of his love-songs to be quite serious in the main.
And apart from this, if we take theConviviowiththe utmost seriousness, we may remember for our comfort that πορίζεσθαι τὰ γέλοια[142]is one of the qualifications of Aristotle’s εὐτράπελος and the willingness to be laughed at another; and see in Dante (with all reverence) an example of those who, more or less unconsciously provide matter for amusement to posterity. Nay, we may treat him as he treats St. Gregory, and look upon him as laughing now at his own certitude about the ten heavens and the angelic hierarchy, from his place in the mystic rose—or are we to say on the terrace of Pride?
But to return to theConvivio. It is here, as we have already suggested, that Dante gives us his description of the ideal nature of Laughter. “Ridere,” he says, “è una corruscazione della dilettazione de l’ anima.”[143]On the Aristotelian principle of the Mean (though his actual reference is not to Aristotle, but to Pseudo-Seneca “On the Four Cardinal Virtues”), he urges that laughter should be moderate and modest, with no violent movement (such as convulses the pages, e.g. of Franco Sacchetti) and no “cackling” noise. Laughter is, in fact—like little children—“best seen and not heard.”
From each of the four extant treatises, quotations may be adduced which at any rate show the writer’s sympathy with that view of life which fastens on the incongruous and sees in it matter for genial irony or for bitter sarcasm, according to the moral context.
Tratt. I.Chapter xi. opens with a delicious satire on the “sheep-like opinion” of the multitude, which I have elsewhere compared to the charmingly nonsensical scene—“Less Bread, More Taxes!”—with which Lewis Carroll inaugurates hisSylvie and Bruno.
The “man in the street,” says Dante, is ready to follow any cry that is raised. Thus the populace will befound exclaiming “Viva la lor morte! Muoia la lor vita!—purchè alcuno cominci.” They are for all the world like sheep who follow their leader blindly over a high precipice or down a well. He goes on to rail at “a bad workman who blames his tools,” the many who “sempre danno colpa alla materia dell’ arte apparecchiata, overo alo strumento; siccome lo mal fabro biasima ferro appresentato a lui.”[144]
Nor can we fail to find in the next chapter (I, xii.) a touch of the drily humorous spirit; in the passage which Dr. Toynbee in his Anthology entitlesOf Silly Questions.
“If flames were plainly to be seen issuing from the windows of a house, and a bystander were to enquire whether that house were on fire, and another man to reply that it was, I should find it difficult to decide which of the two was the more ridiculous.”[145]
What are we to say of theTrattato II? Here, if anywhere, Dante poses as the unconscious humorist; here, if anywhere, in his elaborately solemn disquisition upon arrangement of the heavens and their analogues in thetriviumandquadrivium, he is qualifying himself to play therôleof St. Gregory in the other world! But even here he finds leisure to cast occasionally a satirist’s eye on the contemporary world—
l’ aiuolo che ci fa tanto feroci;
l’ aiuolo che ci fa tanto feroci;
l’ aiuolo che ci fa tanto feroci;
l’ aiuolo che ci fa tanto feroci;
and the naïveté of his references to it is delightful. They sometimes come in incidentally in the form of similes. In Chapter vii.,[146]for instance, is an illusion to the perennial banishments and sieges with which the factions of Guelf and Ghibelline, Black and White, harassed the cities ofthe peninsula: “When we speak of ‘the city,’” he says, “we are wont to mean those who are in possession of it, not those who are attacking it, albeit the one and the other be citizens.” Or again, in Chapter xi.,[147]a reference to the decline of good taste and culture is ingeniously worked into a question of etymology. “Cortesia” is equivalent to “onestade,” and “because in courts of old time virtuous and fair manners were in use (as now the contrary), this word was derived from courts, and ‘courtesy’ was as much as to say ‘after the usage of courts.’ If the word had been derived in modern days from the same origin, it could have signified nothing else thanturpezza.”
InTratt. III, as elsewhere, the playfulness is for the most part so spread out that it is difficult to quote. There is, however, a touch of real satire in such passages as that in which Dante twits the lawyers, physicians, and members of religious orders with their disqualification for the reputation of a true philosopher.[148]
“We are not to call him a real philosopher who is a friend of wisdom for profit’s sake, as are lawyers, physicians, and almost all the members of the religious orders, who do not study in order to know, but in order to get money or office; and if any one would give them that which it is their purpose to acquire, they would linger over their study no longer.”
Trattato IVis more obviously fruitful. Here again he girds at the lawyers and doctors, suggesting that they might at least giveunprofessional advice gratis, and, in another place, ventures timidly to assert that it may be possible “to be religious though married.”[149]Again, in Ch. xvi., ifnobilesimply meantnotus, then the Obelisk ofSt. Peter would be the noblest stone on earth, and Asdente the cobbler (of whom Salimbene gives us so lively a sketch) would be noblest among the citizens of Parma.[150]
Some arguments are so senseless, he says a little earlier, that they deserve to be answered not with a word, but with a knife. “Risponder si vorrebbe non colle parole ma col coltello a tanta bestialità.”[151]
Lastly, he has in this treatise the audacity to depict to us the sublimest sage, “il maestro di color che sanno,” as indulging in a burst of hypothetical laughter at the idea of a double origin of the human race. “Senza dubbio, forte riderebbe Aristotile”; and, he adds, “those who would divide mankind into two separate species like horses and asses are (with apologies to Aristotle) themselves the asses.”[152]
In theDe Vulgari Eloquentia, as we have already hinted, the “idioma incomptum et ineptum” of various localities, alike on the right and on the left of the Apennines, gives play for pleasantry of which does Dante not fail to take advantage. It is with evident relish that he puts on record typical uncouth phrases of each dialect: the RomanMezzure quinto dici, theChignamente,frate,sc-tateof the Marches of Ancona, the MilaneseMes d’ ochiover, theÇes fastúwhich men of Aquileja and Istria “crudeliter accentuando, eructuant.” The feminine softness of the Romagna, and especially of Forlì, with itscorada mea;[153]the more than masculine roughness of the men of Verona, Vicenza, Brescia—all those who say “Magara”; thenofandvifof Treviso.
In Chapter xi. he has his knife into mediaeval Rome,the proud and corrupt. “Sicut ergo Romani se cunctis preponendos extimant, in hac eradicatione sive discerptione non immerito eos aliis preponamus, protestantes eosdem in nulla vulgaris eloquentie ratione fore tangendos.” The primacy which the Romans claim in all things may certainly be theirs in this. In our eliminating process they shall be first to be rejected from the candidature to furnish a classical vernacular for all Italy!
Their dialect (he goes on), like their morals, is the most degraded in the whole peninsula, and has spread its corrupting influence into neighbouring districts. It is indeed not worthy to be called avulgare(vernacular), but rather a depraved misuse of speech (tristiloquium), and is “italorum vulgarium omnium ... turpissimum.”[154]
At the end of Chapter xiii. he tilts at the Genoese Z—an ugly sound in itself, but one which, if lost or mislaid by defect of memory, would leave the poor people of Genoa without a means of transmitting their thoughts! The loss of this one letter would leave them dumb, or impose on them the necessity of inventing an entirely new mode of speech. “Si per oblivionem Ianuenses ammitterentzlitteram, vel mutire totaliter eos vel novam reperare oporteret loquelam: est enimzmaxima pars eorum locutionis: que quidem littera non sine multa rigiditate profertur.”[155]
On a different plane is Dante’s lamentation in Ch. xii. over the decay of literary culture in Sicily since the glorious days of Frederic and Manfred, which gave the title “Sicilianum” to the work of Dante’s predecessors in the vernacular: a passage (to me at least) somewhat obscure, in which Frederic II of Sicily, Charles II of Naples, Azzo Marquis of Este, and John Marquis of Montferrat are accused of blood-thirstiness, treachery and avarice:“Venite carnifices; venite attriplices; venite avaritiae sectatores....”[156]
Turning to Bk. II we find the same Azzo ironically praised in Chapter vi., in a “copy-book phrase” of which the incidental introduction gives point to the satire: “Laudabilis discretio marchionis Estensis et sua magnificentia preparata cunctis, cunctis illum facit esse dilectum.”
More delightful still is a sentence which closely follows, quoted solemnly like the former merely as an example of good phraseology appropriate to a lofty subject, in which Charles of Valois plays therôleof a “second Totila,” and his calamitous dealings with Florence (including, presumably, Dante’s own banishment) are adduced as a fitting prelude to his futile descent upon Sicily. “Ejecta maxima parte florum de sinu tuo, Florentia, nequicquam Trinacriam Totila secundus adivit.”[157]
Earlier in the book there is another humorous touch with which we may conclude our list, at the risk, perchance, of an anti-climax. A passage near the end of Chapter i. recalls, in a curious way, a line from theEpistlesof Horace.
Dante, having premised that every one should adorn (exornare) his verses as far as possible, goes on to point out that there are limits beyond which adornment becomes incongruous and absurd. “We do not speak of an ox caparisoned like a horse or a belted pig asornatus; we laugh at them, and would rather apply the worddeturpatus.” Thisbos ephippiatusmost aptly typifies incongruity of adornment. In Horace’s well-known line—
Optat ephippia bos piger, optat arare caballus,[158]
Optat ephippia bos piger, optat arare caballus,[158]
Optat ephippia bos piger, optat arare caballus,[158]
Optat ephippia bos piger, optat arare caballus,[158]
the point of the satire is different. It is the Roman poet’s favourite theme of universal discontent—each envying another’s lot.
In Dante’s phrase we may perhaps detect an unconscious or semi-conscious adoption or adaptation of a classical image: parallel, in a humble way, with those splendid thefts from Virgil and Ovid with which he has enriched theDivina Commedia: conceptions too unquestionably original in their new form to be classed as mere plagiarisms.
“Cicero hath observed,” says theSpectatorof Nov. 5, 1714,[159]“that a jest is never uttered with a better grace than when it is accompanied with a serious countenance.”
If this be true, our quest may perhaps modestly congratulate itself on the avoidance of undue levity. Nor need we take it seriously to heart if we have failed to vindicate for Dante the character of a humorist in the modern sense, and of the American type. The most that our investigation can be said to have proved is that Dante, embittered as he was by his exile, and emaciated by long and serious study, was not devoid of that sense of humour whereby man is able to wring matter for cheerfulness and mirth out of the most unlikely material, and, going through this vale of misery—“questo aspro disorto”—to “use it for a well.” But neither is he the cold abstraction, both less and more than human, which tradition, of a sort, has handed down to us. His works display, for those who care to look for them, a breadth of sympathy, a capacity for observation and discernment, a keenness of interest, an eye for the incongruous, a richness and sureness of self-expression that are guarantees of the possession of the sense of humour.[160]The manifoldplay of the forces of one of the most picturesque ages of human history found a sympathetic response in Dante’s genius, though the sublimity and the restraint of his work has obscured this. This side of his genius is well summed up by Sannia.[161]
“La coscienza lucidissima di sè stesso, l’ attitudine all’ analisi psicologica, la febbrile curiosità del mondo esterno, naturale ed umano, lo spirito d’ osservazione, il senso più squisito dell’ arte, la divina serenità, la multiforme impressionabilità dell’ artista, il senso del tenero, la pietà umana, il pessimismo furono note spiccatissime, eminenti del suo genio.”