来自：ITALIAN FANTASIES
The after-world was rendered not only in painting, but in other art-media. In his famous pulpit in the Baptistery of Pisa Niccolò Pisano carved it in relief, imaginatively rendering the faces of the damned almost animal with sin. Byzantine art treated it in mosaic and enamel, in stone and bronze, while on the rich-jewelled Pala d’Oro of St. Mark’s, _Christ in Hades_ has called forth the craft of the goldsmith. An exhaustive study of eschatological æsthetics would include also the innumerable apotheoses and receptions in Heaven, would involve a comparison with Teutonic and other pictorial conceptions, and would range from the pious sincerities of the primitives to the decorative compositions of the decadents.
I do not know if any scholar has yet thus treated the genesis and evolution of these pictorial images. They certainly did not derive from Dante, for Dante’s poem itself contains an allusion to a Florentine calamity, which we know to have been the collapse in 1304 of a wooden bridge over the Arno, holding spectators of a popular representation of the horrors of the Inferno.
Moreover—apart from the demons and chimæras dire on the old Etruscan tombs—fumblings at the theme exist in art prior to Dante, as, for instance, those rude bronze reliefs in the Byzantine manner on the doors of S. Zeno in Verona, which mark, as it were, the Bronze Age of the concept. These, I was assured, were ninth-century, but even dating them at the eleventh or twelfth—and the church contains frescoes as early—they were in time for Dante to have seen them when enjoying Can Grande’s hospitality in Verona. His denunciation of Alberto della Scala for appointing his bastard as abbot of the monastery shows his interest in S. Zeno. In these rude bronzes Dante beheld the bare elements of that Hell which he furnished so handsomely. Here is already the giant fee-fi-fo-fum figure holding—O primeval irony!—a quaking monk. Here is the sinner upside down whose legs are disappearing within a caldron. Here also, in another bronze relief, is Christ in Limbo, haling figures out. Christ’s halo is novel, consisting of three tufts, one sticking out on either side of his head, the other on top. It may interest the decadent to learn that there is also a relief of Salome dancing, in which she anticipates all the modern contortionists.
To pass back from the Bronze Age of the _Last Judgment_ to the Stone Age, that fine old Lombardic cathedral of Ferrara, whose lateral façades date from 1135, shows in a lunette over one of them a stone relief of _The Day of Judgment_. Flanked by saints, “God’s in his Heaven,” holding the saved souls in his lap in a sort of sheet, while the devil in his Hell pokes up his busy fire and an acolyte shoves a sinner down a dragon’s mouth. The Baptistery of Parma, a structure less ancient, but still antecedent to Dante, shows on its left portal three dead men coming out of their tombs, to be received by the angels or the executioner, according to the dictum of the Judge on high, who is nursing a saved soul. The guilty lean anxiously out of curious stone buildings, apparently awaiting their turn to be decapitated.
With such compositions existing in Italy, it seems supererogatory of M. Didron to have counted more than fifty French illustrations of the “Divine Comedy,” before Dante, painted on church windows or sculptured on church portals, or for M. Lafitte to seek for Dante’s inspiration in the western portal of Notre-Dame, which he must have seen during his stay in Paris.
Giotto, then, did not altogether originate his conception of the Judgment scene. Indeed, already in the alleged discourse of Josephus to the Greeks concerning Hades, we have a word-picture of the Hebrew Day of Judgment in which the souls of the just are marshalled to the right and the souls of the sinners to the left.
Dante may equally be exonerated from the crime of having originated these grotesque notions of the after-world, if he cannot be exonerated from the crime of corroborating them. These infantile images were made in the brains of fasting monks and terror-stricken sinners—for brains make day-dreams as well as nightmares—on a confused basis of the classic Hades and Tartarus and Elysium and the Egyptian after-world and the Hebrew Gehennah, supplemented by misapplied texts and misunderstood metaphors. They drew their appeal from that conflict ’twixt good and evil which every man felt raging in his own soul, and which made plausible the externalisation of these forces as angels and demons fighting for its possession.
But though the first sketch of the Christian Hell appears in literature as early as the apocryphal “Acts of St. Thomas,” Dante may be said to have systematised these chaotic conceptions, drawn the chart of the Hereafter, and determined the scientific frontiers between Hell and Limbo, Purgatory and Paradise. His are the nine concentric circles of the Inferno, though Acheron and Minos, Charon and Cerberus, are borrowed from his guide and master; he is the sole discoverer and surveyor of the island-mountain of Purgatory, so precisely antipodal to Jerusalem, with its seven parishes corresponding to the seven deadly sins; his are the nine Heavens, ascending to the Beatific Vision, that is circumscribed by the thrice three orders of the angelic hierarchies. Nevertheless, marvellous as is the sustained imaginativeness of the achievement, his contribution to the stock of eschatological ideas is comparatively small. The vulgar imagination is quite capable of bodying forth these grimacing, horned demons, these imps with prongs and lashes, those swooping fiends, that heavy head-gear,—not unlike the English high hat in August—those fiery floods, those gibbering, wailing ghosts, those wretches immersed in ordure, those ghastly sinners munching each other, those disgustful stenches and itchings. Dante would not be remembered for such nursery horrors. Happily, he enriched the theme with finer imaginings. They meet us at the very threshold of the dolorous city in those neutral souls good enough neither for Heaven nor Hell; like the abdicating Pope Celestine V, neither rebels against God nor true to Him. Yet Dante almost spoilt his own conception by adding the material pains inflicted by wasps and hornets to their eternal nullity. Kipling, in his probably unconscious approximation to the idea in “Tomlinson,” had a sounder instinct, though perhaps Ibsen’s idea of returning Peer Gynt to the Button-Moulder hits the truer penology. Dante’s touch is more satisfying when he pictures the doom of those who were sad in sunny air, and must now continue sad in the more appropriate surroundings of slime. Yet there is here a touch of the Gilbertian grotesque; a foreshadowing of the Mikado, whose “object all sublime” was “to make the punishment fit the crime.” This suggestion is even stronger in the twenty-seventh canto, where Mohammed and the arch-heretics who provoked schisms are ripped and cleft from chin to forelock. Savagery, too, is met by savage punishment, as in the Ugolino episode.
There are a few inventions, indeed, beyond the vulgar imagination: the six-footed serpent that transmutes the sinner to its own form, a passage palpitating with Æschylean genius; the monstrous-paunched coiner, consumed with a terrible hate; the shore “turreted with giants”; the tears that cannot be shed. Nor could the vulgar—pre-occupied with fire—have conceived a Hell of ice, though Dante’s Arctic circle is bettered in the Gospel of Barnabas preserved in an Italian MS., which compounds a Hell of fire and ice united by the Justice of God, “so that neither tempers the other, but each gives its separate torment to the infidel,” and in Vondel’s “Lucifer” the archfiend is condemned to
“The eternal fire Unquenchable, with chilling frosts commingled.”
But neither the Dutch poet nor his contemporary, Milton, condescended to the fee-fi-fo-fum infantility of Dante’s three-headed King of Hell, that fantastic fiend who holds in each of his mouths one of the three archetypal traitors, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. And that Dante’s “Judgment” was not considered “The Last” is shown by the popularity of Brutus—as a tyrannicide—in the Florence of the Medici. The beauty of the verse and the imaginative intensity alone render Dante’s “Inferno” bearable. Translated into the images of Signorelli or Michelangelo—and these more truly than Botticelli were Dante’s illustrators—the grossness of his “Inferno” leaps to the eye, while his finer imaginings are not capable of interpretation by brush or pencil.
The paradox of the “Divina Commedia,” indeed, is that it lives less by its supernatural visionings, sombre and splendid as these occasionally are, than by its passages of the earth, earthy, when the world the poet has left behind breaks in upon the starless gloom of Hell or upon the too ardent radiancy of Paradise. Nor need I prove my case by the familiar episodes of Paolo and Francesca, and of Ugolino, though Dante’s fame rests so largely upon them. Never was poem more terrestrial, more surcharged with the beauty and grossness of earth-life. The delicious touches of natural beauty, the splendid descriptions of sunrise and moonlight, the keen observation of animal and insect life, of starlings and doves, of storks and frogs, of falcons and goshawks, the pictures of the jousts at Arezzo, or of the busy arsenal of Venice, the homely similes painting indirectly the labours of ploughmen and shepherds, warriors and sailors, even the demeanour of dicers—this last Dante’s sole approach to humour—it is by these that Dante will live when his Heaven and Hell are rolled up like a scroll. The sound of the vesper bell that touches the earthly pilgrim moves us more than all the celestial music of the Purgatory; the vision of beatific goodness, beside the lovely picture of the ancient virtue of Florence in the homely ages, is an airy nothing—one is more interested even to hear the ladies of the day rebuked for their low-necked dresses. The dazzling circles of Paradise leave us lethargic compared with the irrelevant intrusion therein of the lark’s rapture of song or the earthly pain of exile.
“Tu proverai sì come sa di sale Lo pane altrui, e com’è duro calle Lo scendere e’l salir per l’altrui scale.”
To prove how salt is others’ bread, how hard the passage up and down others’ stairs! How impotent all the laboured strivings to shadow forth the vision celestial compared with this touch of the terrestrial concrete! In truth Dante did not go “out of his senses,” even in his most transcendental moments of inspiration. His five senses were all he had wherewith to obtain the raw material of his imaginings, and out of his sensations of touch and sight, of smell and taste and hearing, he wove both his Hell and his Heaven. The stored repugnances of mankind, the shudders and horrors at beasts and serpents, at bites and wounds and loathsome diseases, the dread of fire—he himself was condemned to be burnt alive—the chill of ice, the nausea of stinks and dizzying motions—these are the factors of his Hell, as the odour of flowers and incense, the shimmer of jewels, the sound of music, and the pains and pleasures of anticipation are the factors of his Purgatory. As for his Paradise, it is merely the sublimation of the philosophic Elysium Aristotle and Cicero had conceived before Christianity; his very ecstasy of Light is anticipated by Seneca.
Restlessness is a recurring image of doom with Dante—and perhaps his own wander-years of exile lent vividness to the onward drifting of the neutral spirits, the unrepose of the learned sinners, the eternal whirl of Paolo and Francesca. Yet there are moments in which Dante rises beyond his gross scale of punishments to a more spiritual plane.
“Thou art more punished in that this thy pride Lives yet unquenched; no torrent, save thy rage, Were to thy fiery pain proportioned full.”
In addressing this observation to Capaneus, Virgil, says Dante, spoke in a higher-raised accent than ever before. In a less literal sense, it is indeed a higher accent: it is even the note of modern thinking, from Spinoza onwards. The wages of sin is—sin! It is probably even the note of an earlier and still more misunderstood Master. But this note is only heard once and faintly. The wages of sin is physical torture. But surely such a Hell is unjustly balanced by such a Heaven—all Platonic intellection, Plotinian ecstasy, and ethereal Light. If the wages of sin is physical torture, then the wages of virtue should be physical rapture. Dante’s Hell requires Mohammed’s Heaven, just as Christ’s Heaven requires an immaterial Hell. For if the Kingdom of God is within you, the Kingdom of the Devil cannot be without. This thought broke dimly on Milton when, despite his material Hell, he wrote of Satan:
“But the hot Hell that always in him burns, Though in mid-heaven. . . .”
Dante’s Purgatory possesses, indeed, some of the material attractions a logical Heaven needs: it has all the makings of an Earthly Paradise not inferior to Addison’s in his “Vision of Mirza.” There are even great set pieces of painting, and much that might well tempt the soul to linger on its upward way.
The soul of the present critic is also tempted to seek superiority by preferring the Paradise to the Inferno. Alas! a law of psychology has ordained that pleasures shall be less exciting than tortures, and hence the Purgatory is far duller than the Inferno, while the Paradise is hopelessly swamped in sweetness and light. The splendid vision of the snow-white Rose—wonderful as poetry—retains little spiritual value under analysis, though the majestic passion of the close of the great poem almost carries up the spirit with closed eyes to this dazzling infinitude of Light and Love.
Read as a poem of earth, the “Divine” Comedy has for us a value quite other than Dante—in his political and prophetic passion—designed. What we see in it is the complete _Mappamondo_ of the mediæval, a complete vision of the world, with its ethics, its philosophy and its science, as it reflected itself in the shining if storm-tossed soul of the poet, whose epic was alike the climax and the conclusion of the Middle Ages. No wonder the Italian quotes it with the finality of a Gospel text. For this epic is less of a people than of humanity. Though the Florentine background is of the pettiest—including even Dante’s apologia for breaking a font in the church of St. John—it is really world-history with which the poem is concerned; not world-history as the modern conceives it, for Dante’s _Mappamondo_ held neither America nor China, neither Russia nor Japan, but that selected conceptual world—that autocosm—in which the cultured of his day lived and had their being: a world in which classic and chivalric legend had their equal part—as they have in the poetry of Milton—so that the very “Paradiso” could open with an invocation to Apollo! And this world-history is unified by being strung together on a moral plan, precisely as in the Hebrew Bible, Judas and Brutus finding themselves equally in Lucifer’s avenging fangs. The flames of righteous indignation redeem the crude brimstone, and if we bleed for the sinners, the sins under chastisement are mainly those we would wish purged from the universe in the white flame of righteousness. Indeed, this great sensuous, sinful Tuscan, who went unscathed through the dolorous city, is a soul on fire. He is taken up to Heaven, like Elijah, but in the fiery chariot of his own ardour. His passion is the stars, visible symbol of beauty and infinity. Each of his three great sections ends with the very words. “The stars” shine again in that noble letter refusing the Republic’s terms of pardon. “What!” cries the exile, “shall I not everywhere enjoy the sight of the sun and the stars?” “The love that moves the sun and the other stars” is, indeed, the great doctrine of the poem—its literal last word. How this love, “this goodness celestial, whose signature is writ large on the universe,” is to be reconciled with the spirit that moves the flame and the other dooms, he does not explain. Though ever and anon his own tears of pity flow, the doctrine of eternal hopeless torture does not appal him; not even though, at the Day of Judgment, worse is in store, for the sufferers shall by then have subtilised their practised nerves for the final damnation. It does not disconcert him—any more than it disconcerts his great admirer, Michelangelo—that unbaptised infants and heathens whose only crime was chronological should sigh in Limbo, and that Adam and Noah, Abraham and Moses themselves, should need for their salvation the special descent of Christ. For all his sublimity, his passionate metaphysic insight into the Godhead, he falls below the homely Rabbis of the Talmud, who taught eight or ten centuries earlier, “The righteous of all nations have a share in the World-to-Come.” Yet there are broken lights of this truth here and there.
“But lo! of those Who call, ‘Christ, Christ,’ there shall be many found In judgment, further off from Him by far Than such to whom His name was never known.”
And the fine temper of the man is shown in his struggle against the pitiful obsessions of a provincial theology; in his gratitude towards the great Teachers of Antiquity, his reverence for whom anticipated the Renaissance, albeit the Greeks among them were probably known to him only in Latin translations. A Dante of the Renaissance—if such were possible—might have placed Aristotle and Plato in Paradise by interposition of a Christ loving his Gospel tongue. Bernardo Pulci did, indeed, place Cicero and sundry Roman heroes in Heaven. But even during the Renaissance Savonarola proclaimed that Plato and Aristotle were in Hell, and the best that Dante in his rigider century could do for them was to put them in a painless Limbo, which they perambulate “with slow majestic port,” acquiring from their continuous earthly reputation grace which holds them thus far advanced, and which it seems not beyond all hoping may ultimately exalt them to bliss. And with Aristotle, the “maestro di color che sanno,” walk not only Homer and Euclid, but his Mohammedan commentator, Averroes, and even mythical figures like Orpheus and Hector. A Christendom that had never altogether lost touch with the classical world—were it only by way of Virgil, mediæval saint and sorcerer—a Christendom whose philosophers found ingenious inspiration in Aristotle, could not easily relegate to the flames either the classical writers or their works. Classic literature and mythology made a second Bible, as the lore of chivalry and general history a third; indeed, these were the three great circles in which swam the world of the mediæval _Mappamondo_, the Biblical circle outermost and nearest to Heaven. Yet it was a bold stroke of tolerance on Dante’s part to make Virgil his guide, chronology giving him no chance, as it gave with Statius, of a legendary conversion to Christianity. And this penchant for the great Pagans accentuates his intolerance to the great Christian heretics. But if Virgil himself was excluded from Heaven “for no sin save lack of faith”—Virgil who could not possibly have believed—if even the merits of those who lived before the Gospel, could not profit them because they had missed baptism, it is not surprising to find the Christian heretics collected in the ninth canto in burning sepulchres of carefully graduated temperatures. One wishes that they, rather than Farinata degli Uberti, had held their heads high, with a fine disdain foreshadowing Milton’s Satan. How Socrates would have smiled over the perverted morality of the Christian poet, as we smile over the constricted foot of a Chinese lady! Despite the attempt of a recent writer to moralise his scheme of salvation, the best that can be said for Dante is that he probably followed Aquinas in holding that there is no positive pain in that absence of the divine vision which St. Chrysostom made the severest part of the punishment of the damned. But in tolerance as well as humour he falls far below the _Ha-Tofet weha-Eden_ (“Hell and Paradise”) of his Jewish friend and imitator, Immanuel. It is in vain that Émile Gebhart (in “L’Italie Mystique”) points to his revolutionary liberalism in placing Ripheus the Pagan and Trajan, the Roman Emperor, in Paradise. These apparent exceptions only bring out his lack of tolerance and humour more vividly. For, though the Æneid describes the fallen hero, Ripheus, as “justissimus unus” among the Trojans and “the most observant of right,” yet it is not by the simple force of his own goodness but by some complex operation of grace under which he believes in the Christ that has not yet been born, and even turns missionary, that he penetrates among the “luci sante.” As for the Emperor Trajan, complexity is still worse confounded, for he—despite the title he had won of _Optimus_—must serve his time in hell, and is only popped into Paradise after being resuscitated, converted and baptized by St. Gregory four hundred years after his first decease. Thus both Ripheus and Trajan died Christians, Dante assures us gravely, not Gentiles as the world imagines; one believing in the Crucifixion that was to be, and the other in the Crucifixion that had been.
“Cristiani, in ferma fede Quel de’ passuri, e quel de’ passi piedi.”
With all Dante’s stippling and geometric chart-drawing, his conception of the after-world is not really clear. The sinners are able to deliver long monologues, amid all their agony; they foreknow things terrestrial, exactly like the Manes of Paganism; they quarrel with one another; there are even high jinks in Hell, which according to Burckhardt show an Aristophanic humour. (But then Burckhardt is a German.) Moreover, a certain free will reigns. The undefined powers of the demons import into Dante’s excursion through their dominions a deal of breathlessness and terror from which one should be exempt who travels with a “safe-conduct” acquired by the interposition of powerful personages in Paradise.
Such are the nebulous rings hovering round Dante’s _Mappamondo Infernale_. But the circles of his _Mappamondo Terrestre_ are clear and resplendent. ’Twas within the illumination of these circles—unnecessarily narrowing though they were—that the Middle Ages, and even Ages later, built their sublime cathedrals, painted their lovely Madonnas, and wrote their great poems. For though doubtless much sacred art is merely splendid sensuous decoration, and some even of that which is indubitably spiritual may have been the work of free-thinking and free-living artists, it remains true that the Dark Ages had a light which electricity cannot replace.
But is our modern _Mappamondo_ as scientific as we think it? Can we girdle it with no circles amid which to sail securely again through the infinities?
ST. GIULIA AND FEMALE SUFFRAGE
Vastly strange are the wanderings of saints and pictures. When a Magnificent One ordered for his gilded _sala_ a Madonna—even with himself and his consort superadded—he was, for aught he knew, helping to decorate Hampton Court in Inghilterra, or the mansion of a master-butcher in undiscovered and unchristened Pennsylvania. And when a saint was born, an equal veil hid the place of his death or of his ultimate patronage. The fate of St. Francis, to live and die and be canonised in his birthplace, was of the rarest. His pendant, St. Dominic, came from Old Castile, and was buried in Bologna.
It is no surprise, therefore, to find St. Giulia, of Carthage, in possession of Brescia, though I must confess that until I stumbled upon the frescoes consecrated to her in the church of S. Maria del Solario her name and fame were unknown to me. Luini painted these frescoes, the sacristan said, though the connoisseurs omit to chronicle them and will doubtless repudiate the attribution. The date of 1520 appended to the somewhat free and easy Latin epigraph beneath does indeed bring them well within Luini’s working period, but their authenticity interests me less than the story they tell.
St. Giulia, it would appear, was born in the seventh century of a noble Carthaginian family, and was endowed with holy learning and every spiritual grace.
“Stemate præsignis Carthagine nata libellos Docta sacros, anima, corpus gestuque pudica, Curatu patiens, humilis, jejuniaque pollens.”
Such a maiden could only become an apostle to the heathen. Accordingly, we see her arrive at Corsica in a boat with neither oar nor sail, and start praying to the true God. A good-natured citizen warns her of the risks of such heresy, and the kindly ruler of Corsica himself adjures her to discretion, his monitions being emphasised by a man with an axe who stands behind him. But holding her prayer-book, and already crowned with her halo, she prays on. The next fresco shows the inevitable sequel. She is hanging by her hair to the bough of a pretty tree, while an executioner prods at her bleeding breasts with a three-pronged fork, though his head is turned away, as if he were not over-proud of his job. The kindly ruler, however, continues his remonstrances. In the distance a small, dim angel wings his way to her. Finally, she is stretched on a cross, and two ruffians batter her with massive clubs, but angels hold the palm and wreath over her head, and the Dove flies towards her. These celestial visions are a true interpretation and externalisation of the psychology of the martyr: these alone could support her. In our own day the visions of our martyrs are less concrete; they die for some far-seen ideal of Justice or Freedom, and this suffices to sustain them in Spanish prisons or under the Russian knout.
But what is peculiarly noteworthy in the story of Giulia is the status of woman in the Dark Ages and under the Catholic Church. St. Giulia appears to enjoy as great a roving licence as St. Augustine, her fellow-citizen in Carthage and “The City of God.” She is not considered unsexed, nor does her teaching rank below man’s, and she is canonised equally with the male. In fact, in leaving the home-nest to preach to the heathen, she is only following the model of Thekla in the Apocryphal “Acts of St. Paul,” whose story, though it was forged by a pious elder, is none the less proof of woman’s position in that highest of all ancient spheres, Religion. “I recommend unto you Phœbe, our sister,” says the misogynous St. Paul himself (Romans xvi), “for she hath been a succourer of many and of myself also. Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my helpers in Christ Jesus; who have for my life laid down their own necks.”
It is, indeed, doubtful whether Christianity would ever have been established but for the courage and companionship of women. I feel sure they tidied up the catacombs and gave a feeling of home to the crypts and caves. “It was the women who spread Christianity in the family,” says Harnack. St. Augustine’s father was a heathen; it was his mother, Monica, who taught him to pray. The Virgin Martyr, like Santa Reparata of Florence, or St. Catherine of Alexandria, is a stock figure of the Roman calendar. As in all great movements, differences of station were forgotten, and Blandine, the servant-girl of Lyons, played as majestic a part as the royal-blooded St. Catherine, whose wheel of martyrdom finds such quaint perpetuation as a firework.
Popular imagination added the Madonna to the Trinity as a sort of female representative. In Tintoretto’s _Paradise_, as I have already noted, she figures as authoritatively as the Christ, and in a picture at Vicenza, attributed to Tiepolo, she stands on the world, crushing the snake with her foot.
Her companions were usually divided in sex and united in glory. Luca della Robbia, in his charming relief in the cathedral of Arezzo, scrupulously places one male and one female saint on her either hand, and even one male and female angel: doubtless had cherubs possessed sex possibilities, his cherubs too would have been impartially distributed. In the Accademia of Florence, Cimabue’s Madonna is entirely surrounded by female saints, though a few males loom below her throne; Giotto’s shows a female surplus; Bernardo Daddi’s redresses the balance. Fra Angelico gives us _Jesus carried to the Tomb_ by nine women to four men.
Italian art is full of symmetrical paradises of sex-equality, and if a church was decorated with male saints down one aisle, they would be scrupulously balanced by female saints along the other. An old Byzantine Basilica of Ravenna, which displays twenty-two virgins arrayed against thirty saints of the dominant sex, first set me wondering whether, since the Dark Ages, woman has not gone back in Christendom instead of forward. Here at least was the atmosphere for the legend, if not for the reality, of a Pope Joan, whereas at the period in which I first opened my eyes upon the world and woman, she appears to have become reduced to an absolute industrial dependence upon her lord like the fifteenth-century chicken in Giambattista della Porta’s “Book of Natural Magic.” For according to the delightful recipe (cited by Corvo) for inducing affection towards you in a chicken, you must—before it has its feathers—“break off its lower beak even to the jaw. Then, having not the wherewithal to peck up food, it must come to its master to be fed.”