The Poetry of the Individual

THE POETRY OF THE INDIVIDUAL jOHN ARTHOS T HE Divine Comedy, which is, in one view, Dante's judgment of himself most terribly pursued, has a special individuality in each line. No character speaks merely for himself; none has the tone or idiom of any other than Dante. Here there is not the free play of the imagination we marvel at in Shakespeare, the deliberate surrender of Euripides and Racine, the half-detachment of Dickens. It is not merely that Dante is always present in each scene, but th·at each character is answering questions Dante himself needs to have answered. They give the answers he must ultimately find for himself. The very vividness of Capaneus untouched by the thunderbolt, of Sordello in the midst of the gold light that lies across the grass, is the sign of the poetls own condition. In the beautiful incident of Paolo and Francesca the final pity of the story is not in their fate but in his: e caddi come corpo morto oade. 1nferno, V, 142 The point is not only that Dante fainted, but that·he said he did-and the epithet is the terrible word morto. Yet his characters, speaking as Dante might, still achieve their own remarkable distinctness because as individuals they are the object of the hatred of the evil in himself, hatred so complete it follows each distortion~ La f.accia sua era faccia d' nom giusto, tanto benigna avea di fuor Ia pelle, e d' un serperrte tutto I' altro fusto. . . 1 Inferno, XVII, 10~12 They are vivid because the hatred is discriminating, and because· Dante understands the evil within himself. The vividness extends to gestures, and when we see Farinata rising from his tomb, by his very silence showing his disdain of Hell, we know 1hat Dante understands this proud contempt of Hell because he shares it. And there is the question Beatrice bitterly puts to him in Purgatory: "Come degnasti d' accedere al monte? non sapei tu.che qui e1' uom felice?"2 Purgatorio, XXX, 74-5 This complete fidelity in confession, this merciless attention to himself in his journey through horror and ·half-destroyed humanity and even· in Heaven, gives us our first understanding of the man himself. Ultimately we are moved to the most noble comprehension in recognizing that this· lHe had the face of a just man, the skin itself the tone of virtue, and for the rest· was a serpent. 2"How did you dare climb to the mountain? Did you not know that here man is.: happy?" 358 THE POETRY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 359 is Dante rising from a tomb, that this is also he who is defeated in a race, and that he is even like Satan, grotesquely unworthy of his role. Similarly, the sight of Matilda in the Garden of Eden is the discovery of his ovm capacity for delight. What he saw in the world he saw in himself; he hated and loved as the need demanded. The reader is struck with wonder, not only at the depth of evil and the nature of its punishment, or at the splendour and tolerance of God. He is amazed at the effort of this man to judge himself. But in all this we understand something more than self-criticism. For if Dante is in some sense Farinata, his hatred means tha:t he is something more than the evil in Farinata. He is all that he sees, and he is something else besides; he is himself. This we could not know if he did not see others so clearly. We ourselves understand that ordinarily our own affirmations are obscure, our sincerity uncertain, and the objects of our hatred murky. But we see that the life of all these people rang clearly in Dante's mind, with a clarity, I think, that comes only when a man knows his danger·fully. In reading Dante we do more than criticize because we are persuaded that what is true of him is true of us. Persuaded by the vividness of these scenes to recognize their reality, we are persuaded of the judgments by recognizing ourselves in Dante, the traveller confronting himself...