There is no poet whose intellectual and moral character are so closely connected.The great source, as it appears to me, of the power of the Divine Comedy is the strong belief with which the story seems to be told.In this respect, the only books which approach to its excellence are Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe.The solemnity of his asseverations, the consistency and minuteness of his details, the earnestness with which he labours to make the reader understand the exact shape and size of everything that he describes, give an air of reality to his wildest fictions.I should only weaken this statement by quoting instances of a feeling which pervades the whole work, and to which it owes much of its fascination.This is the real justification of the many passages in his poem which bad critics have condemned as grotesque.I am concerned to see that Mr Cary, to whom Dante owes more than ever poet owed to translator, has sanctioned an accusation utterly unworthy of his abilities."His solicitude," says that gentleman, "to define all his images in such a manner as to bring them within the circle of our vision, and to subject them to the power of the pencil, renders him little better than grotesque, where Milton has since taught us to expect sublimity." It is true that Dante has never shrunk from embodying his conceptions in determinate words, that he has even given measures and numbers, where Milton would have left his images to float undefined in a gorgeous haze of language.Both were right.Milton did not profess to have been in heaven or hell.He might therefore reasonably confine himself to magnificent generalities.Far different was the office of the lonely traveller, who had wandered through the nations of the dead.Had he described the abode of the rejected spirits in language resembling the splendid lines of the English Poet,--had he told us of--"An universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds Perverse all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, unutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived, Gorgons, and hydras, and chimaeras dire"--this would doubtless have been noble writing.But where would have been that strong impression of reality, which, in accordance with his plan, it should have been his great object to produce?
It was absolutely necessary for him to delineate accurately "all monstrous, all prodigious things,"--to utter what might to others appear "unutterable,"--to relate with the air of truth what fables had never feigned,--to embody what fear had never conceived.And I will frankly confess that the vague sublimity of Milton affects me less than these reviled details of Dante.We read Milton; and we know that we are reading a great poet.When we read Dante, the poet vanishes.We are listening to the man who has returned from "the valley of the dolorous abyss;"("Lavalle d'abisso doloroso."--Inferno, cantoiv.)--we seem to see the dilated eye of horror, to hear the shuddering accents with which he tells his fearful tale.Considered in this light, the narratives are exactly what they should be,--definite in themselves, but suggesting to the mind ideas of awful and indefinite wonder.They are made up of the images of the earth:--they are told in the language of the earth.--Yet the whole effect is, beyond expression, wild and unearthly.The fact is, that supernatural beings, as long as they are considered merely with reference to their own nature, excite our feelings very feebly.It is when the great gulf which separates them from us is passed, when we suspect some strange and undefinable relation between the laws of the visible and the invisible world, that they rouse, perhaps, the strongest emotions of which our nature is capable.How many children, and how many men, are afraid of ghosts, who are not afraid of God! And this, because, though they entertain a much stronger conviction of the existence of a Deity than of the reality of apparitions, they have no apprehension that he will manifest himself to them in any sensible manner.While this is the case, to describe superhuman beings in the language, and to attribute to them the actions, of humanity may be grotesque, unphilosophical, inconsistent; but it will be the only mode of working upon the feelings of men, and, therefore, the only mode suited for poetry.Shakspeare understood this well, as he understood everything that belonged to his art.Who does not sympathise with the rapture of Ariel, flying after sunset on the wings of the bat, or sucking in the cups of flowers with the bee? Who does not shudder at the caldron of Macbeth? Where is the philosopher who is not moved when he thinks of the strange connection between the infernal spirits and "the sow's blood that hath eaten her nine farrow?"But this difficult task of representing supernatural beings to our minds, in a manner which shall be neither unintelligible to our intellects nor wholly inconsistent with our ideas of their nature, has never been so well performed as by Dante.I will refer to three instances, which are, perhaps, the most striking:--the description of the transformations of the serpents and the robbers, in the twenty-fifth canto of the Inferno,--the passage concerning Nimrod, in the thirty-first canto of the same part,--and the magnificent procession in the twenty-ninth canto of the Purgatorio.