Why do I live among the green mountains?
I laugh and answer not,my soul is serene;
It dwells in another heaven and earth belonging to no man.
The peach-trees are in flower, and the water flows on.
His last years were bitter, for he had never stopped to make money, and in the chaos of revolution and war he found no king to keep from that starvation which is the natural reward of poetry. In the end, after imprisonment, condemnation to death, pardon, and every experiment in suffering, he found his way to his childhood home, only to die three years afterward. Legend, unsatisfied with a common end for so extraordinary a soul, told how he was drowned in a river while attempting to embrace the water’s reflection of the moon.
Shall we have one more of his songs?
My ship is built of spice-wood and has a rudder of mulan;
Musicians sit at the two ends with jeweled bamboo flutes and pipes of gold.
What a pleasure it is, with a cask of sweet wine and singing girls beside me,
To drift on the water hither and thither with the waves!
I am happier than the fairy of the air,who rode on his yellow crane,
And free as the merman who followed the sea-gulls aimlessly.
Now with the strokes of my inspired pen I shake the Five Mountains.
My poem is done, I laugh, and my delight is vaster than the sea.
Oh, deathless poetry! The songs of Chu-ping are ever glorious as the sun and moon.
While the palaces and towers of the Chu kings have vanished from the hills.
6. DANTE Europe was passing through her Dark Ages when China, in the T’ang and Sung dynasties, “undoubtedly stood at the very forefront of civilization,” as “the most powerful, the most enlightened, the most progressive, and the best-governed empire on the face of the globe” (Murdoch). How slowly Europe recovered from her long nightmare of Roman degeneration and barbarian invasion!
But at last new cities grew, new wealth, and new poetry; from France to Persia, and from Nijni Novgorod to Lisbon, reawakened trade brought forth the flowers of literature and art. In Naishapur Omar the Tent-maker sang his Rubaiyat of disillusioned joy; in Paris Villon subtracted heads from bodies and added verse to verse; and in Florence, Dante met Beatrice, and was never the same again.
See him, aged nine, at a party, trying to hide in the midst of a multitude, conscious of every limb on his body and of every eye and mind in the room, wincing at the thought that such a man is stronger, and such a girl too beautiful to notice him. Suddenly Beatrice Portinari is before him-only a girl of eight, but at once he is in love with her, to the full depth of his adolescent soul, with a love too young to think of the flesh, and yet mature enough to be flooded with devotion. “At that instant I say truly that the spirit of life, which dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble with such violence that it appeared fearfully in the least pulses, and, trembling, said these words: ‘Behold a God stronger than I, who, coming, shall rule over me.’” So he writes years later, in an idealized account, for nothing in memory is ever so sweet as first love. And he goes on:
My soul was wholly given over to the thought of this most gentle lady;whereby in brief time I fell into so frail and feeble a condition, that my appearance was grievous to many of my friends…. And many sought to know from me that which I wished to conceal. But I, perceiving their questioning, answered that it was Love that had brought me to this pass. I spoke of Love because I bore on my face so many signs that this could not be concealed. But when they asked me,“For whom has Love thus wasted thee?” I, smiling, looked at them and said nothing.
But Beatrice married another, and died at twenty-four, so that it was possible for Dante to love her to the end. To make this love doubly sure he married Gemma dei Donati, and had by her four children and many quarrels. He could never quite forget the face of the girl who had died before time could efface her beauty, or realized desire could dull the edge of imagery.
He plunged into politics, was defeated and exiled, and all his goods were confiscated by the state. After fifteen years of poverty and wandering, he received intimation that he might be reinstated in all his rights of citizenship and property if he would pay a fine to Florence and undergo the humiliating ceremony of “oblation” at the altar as a released prisoner. He refused with the pride of a poet. Thereupon the gentle Florentines—being Christians to a man—decreed that wherever caught, he should be burned alive. He was not caught, but spiritually he was burned alive: he could describe hell later because he went through every realm of it on earth, and if he painted Paradise less vividly, it was for lack of personal experience. He passed from city to city, hunted and friendless, time and again near to starvation.
Perhaps the poem which he now began to write saved him from madness and suicide. Nothing so cleanses the dross out of a man as the creation of beauty or the pursuit of truth, and if the two are merged in one with him, as they were with Dante, he must be purified. This bitter world was unbearable except, as Nietzsche would phrase it, to the eye that considered it a dramatic and aesthetic spectacle; to look at it as a scene to be pictured would take some of its sting away. So Dante resolved to write: he would tell, in terrible allegory, how he had gone through hell, how he had been made clean by the purgatory of suffering, and how he had won a heaven of happiness at last, under the guidance of wisdom and love. And so, aged forty-five, he set his hand to The Divine Comedy, the greatest poem of modern times.
“In the midway of this our life,” he tells us, he stumbled through a dark forest, and then, led by Virgil, found himself before the gates of hell, reading their dour inscription: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!” In the Italian (“Lasciate ogni sper-anza, voi ch’entrate!”), it sounds like a racking of limbs, a tearing of flesh, and a gnashing of teeth on edge. He tells how he saw all the philosophers gathered in hell, and heard Francesca da Rimini recount her love and death with Paolo; and how from these scenes of torment he passed with Virgil to Purgatory, and then, with Beatrice to guide him, into heaven. It would not have been medieval had it not been an allegory: our human life is always a hell, says the poet, until wisdom (Virgil) purges us of evil desire, and love (Beatrice) lifts us to happiness and peace.
Dante himself never knew such peace, but remained to the end an exile, dark of countenance and soul, as Giotto painted him. People remarked that he was never known to smile, and they spoke of him, in awe, as the man who had returned from hell. Broken and worn, and prematurely old, he died at Ravenna in 1321, only fifty-six years of age. Seventy-five years later Florence begged for the ashes of him whom, alive, she would have burned at the stake, but Ravenna refused. His tomb still stands as one of the great monuments of that half-Byzantine city. There, five hundred years after Dante, another exile—Byron—knelt, and understood.
7. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE “Dante,” said Voltaire, “was a madman, and his work is a monstrosity. He has many commentators, and therefore cannot be understood. His reputation will go on increasing, for no one ever reads him.” And he writes: “Shakespeare, who flourished in the time of Lope de Vega … is a barbarian” who composed “monstrous farces called tragedies.” The English of the eighteenth century agreed with the Frenchman. “Shakespeare,” said Lord Shaftesbury, “is a coarse and savage mind.” In 1707 one Nahum Tate wrote a drama called Othello, saying that he had “borrowed the idea of the play from a nameless author.” Alexander Pope, being asked why Shakespeare had written such plays, answered, “One must eat.” Such is fame. A man should never read his reviewers, nor be too curious about the verdict of posterity.