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Norton has satisfied himself better in his prose version of the 'Commedia' than in this of the 'Vita Nuova', but I do not believe he could have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets and canzonets. I am sure he might have done this if he had chosen. He has always pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are never impossible in the right hands.
We know how, at the end of a long day's work, Lodovico loved to listen to the reading of the "Divina Commedia" in his wife's boudoir, and ponder the meaning of that great vision of heaven and hell.
That is the doctrine which you will find stated most fully and clearly in the immortal poem of John Milton the English Divina Commedia "Paradise Lost."
'Merely receptive European Chinese, says, in effect, Mommsen, the great Roman historian: to me, that judgment, though true in some small degree, seems harsh indeed on a wider view, when applied to a people who begot at last the 'Divina Commedia, the campanile of Florence, the dome of St. Peter's, and the glories of the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace.
Norton has satisfied himself better in his prose version of the 'Commedia' than in this of the 'Vita Nuova', but I do not believe he could have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets and canzonets. I am sure he might have done this if he had chosen. He has always pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are never impossible in the right hands.
But in each case, while the occurrence of regular epic was seeming so improbable, it nevertheless happened that poetry was written which was certainly nothing like epic in form, but which was strongly charged with a profound pressure of purpose closely akin to epic purpose; and De Rerum Natura and La Divina Commedia are very suggestive to speculation now.
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.
Teresa's Autobiography, properly speaking, is not an autobiography at all, though it ranks with The Confessions, and The Commedia, and The Grace Abounding, and The Reliquiae, as one of the very best of that great kind of book. It is not really Teresa's Life Written by Herself, though all that stands on its title-page. It is only one part of her life: it is only her life of prayer.
In literary works of the highest order, such as the Divina Commedia, we admire the continual recurrence to the mind of the supreme poet of material and tangible things which illustrate by comparison the things imagined: As doves By fond desire invited, on wide wings And firm to their sweet nest returning home, Cleave the air, wafted by their will along; Thus issued from that troop where Dido ranks, They, through the ill air speeding.
It was out of Dante's suffering came the sublime "Divina Commedia," and out of John Milton's blindness came "Paradise Lost," and out of miserable infidel attack came the "Bridgewater Treatise" in favor of Christianity, and out of David's exile came the songs of consolation, and out of the sufferings of Christ came the possibility of the world's redemption, and out of your bereavement, your persecution, your poverties, your misfortunes, may yet come an eternal heaven.
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