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God, and of a meaning for human life, trusting the 'larger hope' that springs out of the daily struggle of conscience, and the garnered experience of feeling. Both in Friedland and his wife there breathed a true spiritual dignity and peace' (p. 403).

We cannot quite grasp Dr. Friedland's precise meaning when he declaims:

"The figure of the Church-spouse or captive, bride or martyr -as she has become personified in Catholic imagination, is surely among the greatest, the most ravishing of human conceptions. . . And yet behind her, as she moves through history, the modern sees the rising of something more majestic still-the free human spirit in its contact with the infinite sources of things!-the Jerusalem which is the Mother of us all-the Greater, the Diviner Church' (p. 387). Or when he makes the following peroration:

'The mass of men who read and think, and lead straight lives to-day, are often conscious of a dignity and range their fathers never knew. The spiritual stature of civilized man has risen-like his physical stature. We walk to-day a nobler earth. We come—not as outcasts, but as sons and freemen, into the House of God. But all the secrets and formulæ of a new mystical union have to be worked out. And so long as pain and death remain, humanity will always be at heart a mystic' (p. 390).

But we rejoice to find that Mrs. Humphry Ward records with evident approval that 'the grey-haired scholar was in truth one of the most religious of men and optimists' (p. 390); and we venture to prophesy that, if he is a religious man, he will in the long run not follow the perennial human instinct and build anew the Civitas Dei' (p. 390), but find the true satisfaction of his spiritual and intellectual nature in the old Civitas Dei, built long ago 'upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the head corner-stone.'

ART. VII. STUDIES ON THE PARADISO' BY GARDNER AND HASELFOOT.

1. Dante's Ten Heavens. A Study of the Paradiso. By EDMUND G. GARDNER, M.A. (Westminster, 1898.) 2. Chiosa Dantesca. An article on the true interpretation of Par. xiii. 52-87. By F. K. H. HASELFOOT, published in the Giornale Dantesco. (Firenze, 1898.)

On the summit of the Purgatorial Mountain, in the Earthly Paradise, through 'sweet draughts of the most sacred wave' of the river Eunoë, Dante has received that wondrous regeneration which enables human nature to 'mount to the stars.' Following the direction of Beatrice's eyes he gazes at the sun, and is drawn upwards through the lower spheres of air1 and fire, and now is about to be received into the 'eternal pearl' the moon. It is here, ere he enters the first heaven, that the poet utters his memorable warning :

'O ye, who, following in slight bark, have gone,
Anxious to listen, in my vessel's track,
That onward in the voyage of song is borne,
Here for revisiting your shores turn back ;
Launch not upon the deep, lest unawares,
In losing me, you should all guidance lack.'

(Par. ii. 1. Haselfoot's translation.)

It is not the 'general reader' who, as a rule, needs this warning. In the vast majority of cases he has long since of his own accord turned back to revisit his own shores. Nor surely was the caution directed (as some commentators, including Mr. Butler, seem to imagine) against imitators of the Divine Comedy. It is addressed, if not exclusively still with special force, to such of us who, presuming with more or less right on our 'lungo studio' and 'grande amore,' venture to believe that we are indeed among those 'altri pochi' who are competent to come forward as expounders of the Paradise, or as reviewers of its expounders.

The interpenetration of Philosophy, Science, and Poetry' which, as Schelling tells us, characterizes the Paradise, probably accounts both for the repulsion that it sometimes exercises on men of undoubted literary talent, and also for

1 Miss Rossetti states that the elemental sphere of air ceases at the gate of Purgatory. We know of no evidence for this, and the words questi corpi lievi' (Par. i. 99) evidently mean the two lightest elements, viz. air and fire.

the attraction that it possesses for minds so essentially diverse as are usually that of the poet and that of the metaphysician. Though we may disregard as inappreciable the contempt of a Voltaire, to whom the whole Poem, with the exception of some sixty or eighty lines, was a mere 'salmigondis' of 'bizarreries,' we cannot disregard or explain away by our general Byronism of taste' (as Carlyle calls it) the fact that even such an accomplished littérateur as Macaulay damns the Paradise with faint praise.

'To appreciate the Paradise rightly,' says Mr. Symonds, 'we require a portion of Shelley's or Beethoven's soul.' With this we entirely agree. The true greatness of Dante's Poem lies in its poetic presentment of truth. But we would add that to appreciate it fully we need the soul of Plato or Dante himself the double-star, as it were, of the poet-philosopher's soul; and as few or none of us can hope for this, it behoves us to be careful in denying to mere intellectualism what we would fain reserve exclusively for poetic insight, and perhaps still more careful lest in the pride of erudition and analytical acumen we should forget the words of Goethe: '

'Wer will was Lebendig's erkennen und beschreiben,

Sucht erst den Geist herauszutreiben ;

Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand

Fehlt leider nur das geistige Band.'

The craving for what Mr. Gardner calls the 'beauty of intellectual satisfaction' seems to demand at the present time something very different from what Dante calls the food of angels.' By the laborious exploration of facts, and their phenomenal causes, we of these latter days not only endeavour to comprehend the living reality of artistic creation, but expect to finally solve even the mystery of existence, rejecting as 'a waste of immense human power for no discoverable use' the vast monuments of audacious speculation and imaginative ingenuity in which mediaval scholasticism has left us nought but a legacy of barren amazement.' 2 Whether or not many a modern pyramid of commentary and criticism will leave a like legacy to posterity, there can be no doubt that all patient and unpretentious accumulation of facts and investigation of secondary causes-though they can never of themselves lead one step towards the true cause and meaning of

1 He who will understand and describe anything living tries first to expel the spirit from it. Then he has the parts in his hand, and the only thing lacking is, alas, the spiritual bond' (Faust). Goethe, Sämmtl. Werke, vol. xi. p. 71.

2 Milman's Hist. Lat. Chr. Bk. xiv.

anything-should be welcomed. Mr. Gardner's Ten Heavens, with its copious quotations from scholastic and mystical writers, forms a welcome supplement to the terse and scholarly notes in which Mr. Butler has not only collected from divers sources many apt extracts, but has traced much to its original sources in the works of Aristotle. Any such commentary must draw largely from previous writers, and Mr. Gardner is to no small extent indebted to the compilations of Italian and German annotators. Judicious selection is often of no less value than original research. We have no fault to find with Mr. Gardner's judgment, and fully allow his claims to intimacy with Schoolmen and Mystics, but when not drawing discreetly from the encyclopædic Scartazzini or other such sources he is, we think, sometimes a little too expansive, and a little too inclined to estimate above its value the treasure that he has unearthed.

The seven essays that form the volume-of which, however, the sixth, on 'Dante's Letters,' has only a slight connexion with the main subject—are intended to serve as an introduction to the study of the Paradise. As such, although they do not cover quite the same ground, they challenge comparison with Mr. Symonds's Introduction, and with Miss Rossetti's Shadow of Dante, and a reperusal of these two delightful books while occupied with the study of Mr. Gardner's volume has confirmed us in the opinion that, whereas for readers already conversant with the subject, and especially for such as have a metaphysical tendency, the Ten •Heavens cannot fail to prove very interesting and suggestive, its want of graphic power and its rather unattractive style put it out of competition as a honied cup or crustulum' for inciting in the novice any desire to make further acquaintance with the Poem, while those who have already mastered the preceding Cantiche will surely prefer to gain their impressions from the original rather than from the most erudite handbook.

It is not our intention to recapitulate the description of Dante's wondrous journey as given in the Ten Heavens, with the general accuracy of which no fault can be found. Nor have we anything but sympathy with the somewhat rare expressions of admiration which Mr. Gardner evidently has, not only for Dante's intellectual greatness, but also for his supreme poetic genius. Where we venture to differ with him. is not in such matters, but (as also with Mr. Haselfoot) in his interpretations; and to make our criticisms intelligible to readers who may not be thoroughly versed in the subject, or

for those with whom 'la passione impressa rimane, e l'altro alla mente non riede' (Par. xxxiii. 59), it may be well to give a slight outline of the intellectual framework on which Dante's Ten Heavens are constructed.

Without attempting to discriminate between the moral and the essential Paradise, or between literal, allegorical, anagogical, and tropological interpretations of Dante's polysensous' Poem, we may perhaps say that his Paradise is the bodying forth in thought and word of a vision in which human nature is drawn upward by innate thirst,' under the guidance of revelation, from sphere to sphere of beatitude, not only into the intellectual light, and love, and joy' of the Empyrean, but into the Divine Presence itself, where in contemplation3 the soul is united with God and experiences a joy and peace passing all understanding and merging thought and desire in the 'Love which moves the sun and the other stars.'

Formally, at least, Dante agrees with Plato in holding that it is by means of a rational faculty that we gain knowledge of ideal truth-of the One-of God. His intellectual soul' is apparently identical with what Plato calls the 'rational part of the soul,' or the pure or unrefracting reason a faculty essentially spiritual but acting under the conditions of the intellect; and in Plato no less than in Dante the knowledge thus attained is no mere 'true opinion with reason' (the highest that the mind unaided can attain, and the only knowledge recognized by scientific thought) but a knowledge whose fruition is love and joy, attainable only in contemplation, when thought 'is laid asleep, and we become a living soul.'

Such knowledge is ideally one with love; but for the mind they are distinct, and can be identified by no monistic jugglery. As matter and informing spirit, so knowledge and love are only intelligible as correlates-inseparable, but not identical; for the ideal faculty they are one.

It is by the acceptance of this mystery-this truth under intellectual contradiction-that Dante transcends the dualism of Plato. He saw more clearly than Plato the One in the Many; he saw that to love is indeed to know, and that to

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letizia,' Par. xxx. 40.

3 Symbolized by St. Bernard, to whom Beatrice surrenders her office

in the highest heaven.

4 Thus we venture to translate εἰλικρινής. 5 Δόξα ἀληθὴς μετὰ λόγου (Plat. Theat.).

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