Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 8.djvu/564

 462 NOTES AND QUERIES. [i2avm.j,n,i M i. intelligence is better than can be had at either of those places. The Islands of Magdaline lie only 12 leagues to the North East of this Island, and I beg leave humbly to submit, whether it would not be an advantage to them, if they were dependant on it in matter of Government. I have the honor to be, &c., WALTER PATTERSON. E. H. FAIRBROTHER. DANTEIANA. 1. ' Inf.' xxv. 94-99. Taccia Lucano omai, la dove tpcca Del misero Sabello e di Nassidio ; E attenda a udir quel ch' or si scocca. Taccia di Cadmo e d'Aretusa Ovidio ; Che, se quello in serpente e quella in fonte Converte poetando, io non 1'invidio. What is the drift of this passage, of which Dean Plumptre says " there are few passages in the commentators on which we dwell with less delight, or from which we reap less profit " ? The drift is clear ; the " less profit " obscure, for, as a rule, " in the multitude of counsellors there is safety," or at least there is variety which is " profit," and the Dean's own penetrative comment reduces his strange verdict to zero : With a feeling which reminds us of Turner's wish that the picture which he looked on as his masterpiece should be hung in the National Gallery, side by side with one of Claude's, Dante boldly challenges comparison with two out of the five great poets of antiquity whom he most reverenced. He had been content to be sixth in that goodly company (c. iv. 102) ; now he claims his place among the first three, No one will dispute his claim to that high position, but most of us will probably rest that claim on powers, aims, characteristics, which were as unlike as possible to those of Ovid or Lucan, rather than on his successful rivalry with them in the line " which each had made his own." What he probably prided himself on was the condensation which compressed into eighty or ninety lines what they would have spread over two or three hundred, the marvellous complica- tion of the double reciprocal metamorphosis, the vividness of the similes in 11. 64 and 79, drawn as they were from objects that seemed to lie out- side the range of conventional poetic imagery ; and in all these he might fairly claim the palm, if such a prize were worth contending for. But we feel also that the poet stoops from his higher level in the very act of competition ; that, after all, what we have is a tour de force and nothing more. This is an excellent piece of intuitive and suggestive reasoning, but, as it seems to me, the passage is something more than a mere tour de force. It is a distinct moral lapse from the virtue of humility to the vice of pride, engendered by a growing con- sciousness, between the two cantos (iv. and xxv. )> of his own powers of imagery, and composition, and culminating in this out- burst of self-acknowledged superiority. So far back as canto iv., in 1. 102, Si ch' io fui sesto tra cotanto senno, Dante calmly places himself, with little modesty and much boldness, next after Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Virgil ; here, with undisguised effrontery, he sweeps the third and fourth aside and places himself between the second and fifth. This is surely unworthy of the poet, who, in the next canto (v. 142), swoons and falls, " come corpomorto cade," at Francesca's recital of her tragic love. Even Plumptre, who accepts Dante's boastful claims, is forced to admit that " Literature hardly records an instance of such supreme self-confidence," and adds : " Approxi- mate parallels are, however, found in Bacon's committing his fame to the care of future ages, and in Milton's belief that he could write what ' the world would not willingly let die,' " to which he might have added Keats' s hope that he would be found after his death amongst the poets of his native land. With these modest expressions Dante's bombast contrasts painfully. Even were his fanciful descriptions more imagina- tive than those of Ovid and Lucan, it was the acme of bad taste to bid those poets be silent while he, the Sir Oracle of his time, showed them a smarter flight of fancy. One wonders what position he would arrogate to himself were he a contemporary of Shakespeare and Milton.* I am inclined to place him second to the former in characterization and insight into human nature, and on a par with the latter in grandeur of descriptive power of divine things. I can overlook his astrology and his anti-Scriptural conceptions of the material torments of Hell, in fact the entire eschatology of his ' Inferno ' and ' Purgatorio ' as reflecting his age ; I admire his masterly handling of his great theme and his un- impeachable impartiality in meting out my attention was called to the following in Lord Morley's ' Life of W. E. Gladstone,' vol. iii., p. 488 : " At tea-time, a good little discussion raised by a protest against Dante being praised for a complete survey of human nature and the many phases of human lot. Intensity he has, but insight over the whole field of character and life ? Mr. Gladstone did not make any stand against this, and made the curious admission that Dante was too optimist to be placed on a level with Shakespeare, or even with Homer."
 * Curiously enough, alter penning this sentence