Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 7.djvu/471

 IIS. VII. June 14,1913.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 463 and the Bible, Dante is over-commentatored. More reading of and less reading about him would result in a more plentiful yield of secrets solved. Dean Kitchin in his charm- ing paper quoted above (read before the Congress of Science, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1900) is satisfied that the yield has been vouchsafed to him :— " How came he [Dante] to turn to Virgil as friend and master ? Virgil was never a Christian ; they did not even traditionally feign that, as the mediaeval writers made Statins to be, he was a baptized Christian ; and yet it is made out that through Virgil's influence Statins was converted. ... .In Dante's days Virgil oscillates between the noblest part of a Prophet, of an inspired fore- runner of Christ, and, on the other hand, the base part of a conjurer, a dabbler in the black arts. ... .There was also a desire to enrol him among the saints.* This led to a marvellous legend, one so popular that it actually found a place in a hymn sung at the Mass on St. Paul's Day in Mantua. It runs that St. Paul, when he landed in Italy, turned aside to see Virgil's tomb at Parthenope (now Naples); there he lamented that he had come too late to find him still living, for then he would have taught him the faith. Ad Maronis Mausoleum Ductus fudit super eum Piae rorem lacrimal :— Si te vivum invenissem Quam te vivum reddidissem Poetarum maxume 1 Yet all this wonder-world would never have secured to Virgil his place as guide to Dante in his wonderful journey through the unknown world : nor perhaps would it have been enough for Dante to have recognized both the descent of ./Eneas into the realms of Dis in the sixth book of the ' jEneid,' or the splendour of prophetic inspira- tion in the Sibylline picture of the new heaven and the new earth' in the fourth Eclogue, though the descent to the realm of Dis qualified him as a guide, and the Eclogue was held in the Middle Ages to be the utterance of a true Prophet. What was needed more than this was Dante's faith in the imperial unity of Rome, his Ghibelline belief in the persistence of the world-authority of the Caesars. To him Virgil was the John Baptist of the Latin world : Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna, he cries, an age of Peace and reformed life, with Utopian gleams ; he even seems to hint at the coming of the Blessed Child. Virgil was also herald of the Roman world - empire.... This was Virgil's highest flight.... Thus Virgil is presented as the Evangelist for Christ, and as converting Statius.f. This is why Dante takes him as guide and friend... .This is the meaning of Dante's choice of Virgil: he represents to him the Divine purpose, as he conceived it, in the Ghibelline domination of the Germanic Caesars of the Holy Roman Empire." called. t Referring to the " Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano," of ' Purg.,' xsii. 73. The penultimate sentences of this passage seem to me to be needlessly magisterial and curiously involved. The propositions overweight the conclusion, which is too peremptorily advanced as final. Thus, though. it was not the " wonder - world " which led Dante to select Virgil as his guide, yet the Mantuan was John the Baptist or herald of. Christ to the Florentine, and so was taken, as " guide and friend " ; nor was it " the descent of ./Eneas into the realms of Dis " that secured this post for Virgil, yet that descent " qualified him as a guide " ; the. •real " meaning of Dante's choice " is that. " Virgil was also herald of the Roman world-empire." Here we have not only two propositions mutually contradictory,, but two illations which are equally so.. The one conclusion deducible from such a tangle is that Virgil was herald both of." Christ and of Caesar, which means that he- was neither, for he could not have been both. This is precisely my own inference, though from a postulate which the Dean ad- duced, but only half admitted : " the descent [of .(Eneas] to the realm of Dis qualified him [Virgil] as a guide." To me this is the factor to be reckoned with in attempt- ing to determine the " meaning of Dante's choice of Virgil." " In the vision of Hades- in B. VI. of the ' .<Eneid ' he found, it need hardly be said," observes Dean Plumptre,. " more than in any mediaeval legends, the- archetype of the ' Commedia.' " And with the " arohetype " also a companion meet (because intimately acquainted with it) for his own projected journey through the nether-world. All other alleged motives I regard as subsidiary to this, such as Mr,. Tozer's very plausible assumptions " that Dante's primary reason for assigning to Virgil so prominent a place in the action of the poem was his sense of the debt which he owed him in respect of the formation of his own poetic style "; that " he also admired him as being the poet of the Roman Empire " ; that he regarded him as " the representative of human in- telligence," and " no doubt felt that the fact of his companion and guide being a famous poet would contribute to the- treatment of the subject an element of grace and sympathy which would otherwise be lacking." Quite possibly these qualities, combined uniquely in Virgil beyond other eschato- logical dreamers, weighed the balance in his favour, yet, in our diverse and frequently contradictory suppositions as to Dante's motives, are we not attempting a greater artfulness than the poet's own in his veiling of those motives ? Yet without a
 * " Santo Virgilio," as he has been grotesquely