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In her poem Le Chemin de long Estude a title taken from Dante’s appeal to Virgil at the opening of the Inferno Christine begins by acknowledging her debt to the immortal poet, saying that much that she has to tell has already been told by “Dante of Florence in his book.” Virgil as guide is replaced by the Cumean Sibyl, who appears to Christine in a dream, and offers to conduct her to another and a more perfect world, one where there is no pain and misery.
I found the French by far the most difficult, chiefly on account of the accent, which my master himself possessed in no great purity, being a Norman by birth. The Italian was my favourite. ‘Vous serez un jour un grand philologue, mon cher,’ said the old man, on our arriving at the conclusion of Dante’s Hell.
Few could forget, after once hearing them, the stanzas at the close of “Deutschland,” in which he warns the King of Prussia not to incur the irredeemable hell which the injured poet can create for him—the singing flames of a Dante’s terza rima! “Kennst du die Hölle des Dante nicht, Die schrecklichen Terzetten? Wen da der Dichter hineingesperrt Den kann kein Gott mehr retten.
My province is to preside over the hell of books; and if you will only take the trouble to accompany me a little way, I will show you some of the wonders of that world.” As my imagination had lately been much excited by perusing Dante’s Inferno, I was delighted with an adventure which promised to turn out something like his wonderful journey, and I readily consented to visit my new friend’s dominions, and we sallied forth together.
If we take into account, moreover, that it is only by the lucky chapter of accidents that we now possess the earlier forms of the three plays mentioned above, and that most likely the other plays were once in a like condition, we shall come to the conclusion that there was no more vigilant worker with Dante’s sieve than Shakespeare.
He was still, indeed, doing penance for it. I remember vividly another evening, when something led us to talk of Dante’s veneration for Virgil. Cleric went through canto after canto of the “Commedia,” repeating the discourse between Dante and his “sweet teacher,” while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his long fingers.
It seems a thousand pities to throw doubt upon so picturesque a tradition, for the date of the invention of the compass has been fixed as 1302, two years only after the holding of the famous Papal Jubilee in Rome which Dante’s verse has described for us.
And as regards temporal power she adds perhaps borrowing the idea from Dante’s De Monarchia, and anticipating Napoleon’s dream that in order to ensure peace on earth, it is necessary that one supreme ruler should reign over the whole world. “La sua volontade e nostra pace,” sang a soul in Dante’s heaven of the Moon the lowest in the celestial system when questioned whether it was content with its lowly place.
Orators and preachers are by their very profession known persons, and the personal is laid down by the Philosopher of antiquity as the source of their greatest persuasiveness. Virgil and Horace are ever bringing into their poetry their own characters and tastes. Dante’s poems furnish a series of events for the chronology of his times.
Does any one want to know what kind of a man was the painter of ‘Dante’s Dream’ and the poet of ‘The Blessed Damosel,’ let him wipe out of his mind most of what has been written about him, let him forget if he can most of the Rossetti letters that have been published, and let him read the poet’s poems and study the painter’s pictures, and he will know Rossetti—not, indeed, so thoroughly as we know Shakespeare and Æschylus and Sophocles, but as intimately as it is possible to know any man whose biography is written only in his works.
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