This essay first appeared in a book of essays, In The Key of Blue.
The sexcentenary of Beatrice Portinari, which was celebrated two
years ago at Florence, compelled the student of Dante's life and
writings once more to consider the relation of the poet to his
lady. Are we to accept as truths of history the facts related
by Boccaccio-namely, that Dante's father took him at the age of
nine to a May-day feast in the house of Folco Portinari, and that
there he beheld Beatrice, the daughter of his host, for the first
time: "She was a child of eight then," says Boccaccio,
"more fit to be an angel than a girl." Are we to accept
the incidents of the "Vita Nuova" literally? In that
record of his earliest life experience, Dante says that love on
this occasion took possession of his soul, and that henceforth
he worshipped Beatrice, till the day of her death, with steadfast
silent adoration. To see her pass upon the streets, to receive
her salutation, to sympathise with her at a distance in her joys
and griefs, sufficed to keep the flame of spiritual passion alive
in his heart, until that day in the year 1290, six centuries ago,
when "the Lord of Justice called my most gracious lady to
be glorious beneath the banner of that blessed Queen Mary whose
name was always of greatest reverence in the words of saintly
Beatrice." It does not appear from anything he tells us of
his youthful years that they conversed together; and of love in
the common acceptation of that term it is clear there was no question.
Are we then to believe that the inspiring lady of the Convito,
who typifies philosophy, that the Beatrice of the Paradise, who
is certainly Divine Wisdom, was still this same daughter of Folco
Portinari? During those years of severe studies, of political
activity, of exile, after his marriage and the birth of several
children, did Dante still cherish the memory of Beatrice, whom
he had worshipped at a distance from his tenth to his twenty-fifth
year? How are we to explain the fact, that a love, so immaterial,
so visionary, begotten in the tender days of childhood, and fed
with aliment so unsubstantial, exercised this enduring influence
over a man of Dante's stamp-severe, precise, logical, austerely
loyal to truth as he conceived it?
In short, was Beatrice a woman? Or was she, as a certain school
of commentators (starting with Gian Maria Filelfo, and represented
in this century by the elder Rossetti, by Barlow, by Tomlinson,
and others) would have us imagine-was she an ideal, an allegory?
For my own part I cannot reject the authority of Dante's contemporaries,
Boccaccio and Villani, who believed in the literal meaning of
the "Vita Nuova." I cannot doubt the accent of veracity
in that book of youthful love. I cannot put out of sight the sonnet
to Guido Cavalcanti, in which the poet, assuming for once a tone
of familiarity and daily life, speaks of his lady as one whose
presence in the flesh might give complete and innocent joy to
her lover. The mistrust in the reality of Beatrice seems to me
to have arisen partly from the false note struck by Boccaccio,
and partly from Dante's own mystical habit of mind. Boccaccio
could not comprehend the peculiar nature of chivalrous passion
as it existed in natures more metaphysical than his own. And Dante
from the very beginning, in his language about love, in his idealisation
of the woman whom he loved, introduced an element of allegory.
Even in the "Vita Nuova" she is not merely a beautiful
and gracious girl, but a spiritual being, round whom his highest
and deepest thoughts spontaneously crystallise. She is the living
ensign of a power more potent than herself, of something vital
in the universe for Dante; of Love, in fact, which for her lover
included all his noblest impulses and purest strivings after the
ideal life. Early in his boyhood he formed this habit of regarding
Beatrice; and after her death, in spite of all temporal changes,
the habit was continued: so that at last she became in fact what
critics of the allegorical interpretation wish to believe she
always had been-a symbol. Still, even to the last, even in the
pageant of the Purgatory and the ascent through Paradise, Beatrice
retains a portion of her original womanhood. She never wholly
transmuted into allegory.
It is only by adhering steadily to these conceptions-to the thought
of Beatrice as a real woman, whom Dante really selected to love
after the singular fashion of his age; and to the thought of her
submitted to an allegorising process from the earliest in her
lover's mind-that we can arrive at sound critical conclusions
on this problem. Our main difficulty is to throw ourselves back
by sympathy and intelligence into the mood of emotion which made
the poet's attitude possible. In other words, we have to try to
comprehend that very peculiar form of philosophical enthusiasm
which the chivalrous love of medieval Christendom assumed in Italy.
In the case of Dante, this presents itself to our imagination
under conditions of almost insuperable unintelligibility, owing
to the specific qualities of his unique genius. The other poets
of his period, Cino, Guido Guinicelli, Guido Cavalcanti, afterwards
Petrarch, approached love from the same points of view-of mysticism,
allegory, metaphysical interpretation-each, according to his character
and temperament, blending the memory of the woman who had stirred
passion is his soul with those aspiring thoughts and exalted emotions
which were then considered to be the natural offspring of respectful
love, until the woman disappeared in an incense-cloud of adoration,
vanished in a labyrinth of philosophical abstractions. This, so
to speak, was the method of that school of poetry which, transmitted
from Provence through Sicily, took upon itself a new character
of intellectual subtlety at Florence and Bologna. But Dante, while
he followed the method, displayed the inevitable qualities of
his marked personality. We have to deal with no mere Iyrist and
schoolman, such as Guido Cavalcanti was. Dante is over and above
all the singer of the Divine Comedy, the poet of stirring dramatic
passages, of concrete images, of firm grasp on all external and
internal facts. The realistic veracity of his genius applied to
the delineation of an actual emotion so spiritual as that of his
for Beatrice, has misled people into thinking that he cannot be
telling the truth. There are strains of feeling so ethereal and
impalpable (as there are qualities of pitch in sound so fine)
that the ordinary sense does not perceive them. Dante, in the
"Vita Nuova" and the "Rime," expresses such
a feeling; and he further complicates our difficulty by doing
so to a great extent indirectly, employing the method of his school,
allegorising, transmuting love-thoughts into metaphysical conceptions,
confounding the simple propositions of a natural emotion with
the corollaries from those propositions in the lover's mind. Beatrice
is not only Beatrice, Portinari's daughter and Simone's wife.
She is also all that the poet-philosopher learned and saw and
loved of beautiful or good or true; the whole of which, as springing
from her influence, he carries to her credit, and worships under
her sign and symbol.
This, I repeat, is a difficult attitude of mind for us modern
men, with our positive conceptions, to assimilate. In order to
approach the task more easily, it may be well to consider another
type of amorous enthusiasm which once flourished in the world
for a short season, and which also assumed the philosophical mantle.
I allude to that specific type of Greek love which Plato expounds
in the "Phaedrus" and "Symposium." Greek love
and chivalrous love form two extraordinary and exceptional phases
of psychological experience. By comparing them in their points
of similarity and points of difference, we may come to understand
more of that peculiar enthusiasm which they possessed in common,
which made love in either case a ladder for scaling the higher
fortresses of intellectual truth, and which it is now well-nigh
impossible for us to realise as actual
II
In order to understand the Platonic and the Florentine enthusiasm,
the love of the "Symposium" and the love of the 'Vita
Nuova," we must begin by studying the conditions under which
they were severally elaborated.
Platonic love, in the true sense of that phrase, was the affection
of a man for a man; and it grew out of antecedent customs which
had obtained from very distant times in Hellas. Homer excludes
this emotion from his picture of society in the heroic age. The
tale of Patroclus and Achilles in the "Iliad" does not
suggest the interpretation put on it by later generations; and
the legend of Ganymede is related without a hint of personal desire.
It has therefore been assumed that what is called Greek love was
unknown at the time when the Homeric poems were composed. This
argument, however, is not conclusive; for Homer, in his theology,
suppressed the darker and cruder elements of Greek religion, which
certainly survived from ancient savagery, and which prevailed
long after the supposed age of those poems. An eclectic spirit
of refinement presided over the redaction of the "Iliad"
and the "Odyssey"; and the other omission I have mentioned
may possibly be due to the same cause. The orator Aeschines, in
his critique of the Achilleian story, adopts this explanation.
Unhappily for the science of comparative literature, we have lost
the Cyclic poems. But there is reason to believe that these contained
direct allusions to the passion in question. Otherwise, Aeschylus,
the conservative, and Sophocles, the temperate, would hardly have
written tragedies (the "Myrmidons" and the "Lovers
of Achilles") which brought Greek love upon the Attic stage.
If the "Iliad" had been his sole authority, Aeschylus
could not have made Achilles burst forth into that cry of "unhusbanded
grief" over the corpse of his dead comrade, which Lucian
and Athenaeus have preserved for us.
However this may be, masculine love, as the Greeks called it,
appeared at an early age in Hellas. We find it localised in several
places, and consecrated by diverse legends of the gods. Yet none
of the later Greeks could give a distinct account of its origin
or importation. There. are critical grounds for supposing that
the Dorians developed this custom in their native mountains (the
home of Achilles and the region where ix still survives), and
that they carried it upon their migration to Peloponnesus. At
any rate, in Crete and Sparta, it speedily became a social institution,
regulated by definite laws and sanctioned by the State. In each
country a youth who had no suitor lost in public estimation. The
elder in these unions of friends, received the name of "inspirer'
or "lover," the younger that of "hearer" or
"admired." When the youth grew up and went to battle
with his comrade, he assumed the title of bystander in the ranks.
I have not space to dwell upon the minute laws and customs by
which Dorian love was governed. Suffice it to say that in all
of them w~ discern the intention of promoting a martial spirit
in the population securing a manly education for the young, and
binding the male members of the nation together by bonds of mutual
affection. In earlier times at least care was taken to secure
the virtues of loyalty, self-respect and permanence in these relations.
In short, masculine love constitutes the chivalry of primitive
Hellas, the stimulating and exalting enthusiasm of her sons. It
did not exclude marriage, nor had it the effect of lowering the
position of women in society, since it is notorious that in those
Dorian States where the love of comrades became an institution,
women received more public honour and enjoyed fuller liberty and
power over property than elsewhere.
The military and chivalrous nature of Greek love is proved by
the myths and more or less historical legends which idealised
its virtues Herakles, the Dorian demigod, typified by his affection
for young me and by his unselfish devotion to humanity what the
Spartan and Cretan warriors demanded from this emotion. The friendships
of Theseus and Peirithous, of Orestes and Pylades, of Damon and
Pythias, comrades in arms and faithful to each other to the death,
embalmed the memory o lives ennobled by masculine affection. Nearly
every city had some tale t~ tell of emancipation from tyranny,
of prudent legislation, or of heroic achievements in war, inspired
by the erotic enthusiasm. When Athens laboured under a grievous
curse and pestilence, two lovers, Cratinus and Aristodemus, devoted
their lives to the salvation of the city. Two lovers Harmodius
and Aristogeiton, shook off the bondage of the Peisistratidae
Philolaus and Diocles gave laws to Thebes. Another Diocles won
everlasting glory in a fight at Megara. Chariton and Melanippus
resisted the tryanny of Phalaris at Agrigentum. Cleomachus, inspired
by passion, restored freedom to the town of Chalkis. All these
men were lovers of the Greek type. Tyrants, says an interlocutor
in one of Plato's dialogues, tremble before lovers. Glorying in
their emotion, the Greeks pronounced it to be the crowning virtue
of free men, the source of gentle and heroic actions, the heirloom
of Hellenic civilisation, in which barbarians and slaves had and
could have not part or lot. The chivalry of which I am speaking
powerfully influenced Greek history. All the Spartan kings and
generals grew up under the institution of Dorian comradeship.
Epameinondas and Alexander were notable lovers, and the names
of their comrades are recorded. When Greek liberty expired upon
the Plain of Chaeronea, the Sacred Band of Thebans, all of whom
were lovers, fell dead to a man; and Philip wept as he beheld
their corpses crying aloud: "Perish the man who thinks that
these men either did or suffered what is shameful." It powerfully
influenced Greek art. Pindar and Sophocles were lovers; Pindar
died in the arms of Theoxenos, whose praise he sang in the Skolion
of which we have a characteristic fragment Pheidias carved the
name of his beloved Pantarkes on the chryselephan tine statue
of Olympian Zeus. Aeschylus, as we have seen, wrote one of his
most popular tragedies upon the affection of Achilles for Patroclus.
Solon, Demosthenes, Aeschines, among statesmen and orators, made
no secret of a feeling which they regarded as the highest joy
in life and the source of exalted enthusiasm.
Greek love, as I have shown, was in its origin and essence masculine
military, chivalrous. However repugnant to modern taste may be
the bare fact that this passion existed and flourished in the
highest-gifted of all races, yet it was clearly neither an effiminate
depravity nor a sensual vice. Still such an emotion, being abnormal,
could not prevail and dominate the customs of a whole nation without
grave drawbacks. Very close to the chivalry of Hellas lurked a
formidable social evil, just as adultery was intertwined with
the chivalry of mediaeval Europe. Adultery was not occasionally,
but so to speak continually, mixed up with the feudal love de
par amour. One ingenious writer, Vernon Lee even maintains
that adultery was the very ground on which that love flourished.
In like manner, another immorality was, not occasionally, but
continually mixed up with Greek love, was the soil on which it
flourished. Therefore in those States especially, like Athens,
where the love in question had not been moralised by prescribed
laws, did it tend to degenerate. And it was just here, at Athens,
that it received the metaphysical idealisation which justifies
us in comparing it to the Italian form of mediaeval chivalry.
Socrates, says Maximus Tyrius, pitying the state of young men,
and wishing to raise their affections from the mire into which
they were declining, opened a way for the salvation of their souls
through the very love they then abused. Whether Socrates was really
actuated by these motives, cannot be affirmed with certainty.
At any rate, he handled masculine love with robust originality,
and prepared the path for Plato's philosophical conception of
passion as an inspiration leading men to the divine idea.
I have observed that in Dorian chivalry the lover was called "inspirer,"
and the beloved "hearer." It was the man's duty to instruct
the lad in manners, feats of arms, trials of strength and music.
This relation of the elder to the younger is still assumed to
exist by Plato. But he modifies it in a way peculiar to himself,
upon the consideration of which I must now enter, since we have
reached the very point of contact between Plato's and Dante's
enthusiasm.
Socrates, as interpreted in the Platonic dialogues entitled "Phaedrus"
and "Symposium," sought to direct and elevate a moral
force, an enthusiasm, an exaltation of the emotions, which already
existed as the highest form of feeling in the Greek race. In the
earlier of those dialogues he describes the love of man for youth
as a madness, or divine frenzy, not different in quality from
that which inspires prophets and poets. The soul he compares to
a charioteer guiding a pair of winged horses, the one of noble,
the other of ignoble breed. Under this metaphor is veiled the
psychological distinctions of reason, generous impulse, and carnal
appetite. Composed of these triple elements, the soul has shared
in former lives the company of gods, and has gazed on beauty,
wisdom, and goodness, the three most eminent manifestations of
the divine, in their pure essence. But, sooner or later, during
the course of her celestial wanderings, the soul is dragged to
earth by the baseness of the carnal steed. She enters a form of
flesh, and loses the pinions which enabled her to soar. Yet even
in her mundane life (that obscure and confused state of existence
which Plato elsewhere compares to a dark cave visited only by
shadows of reality) she may be reminded of the heavenly place
from which she fell, and of the glorious visions of divinity she
there enjoyed. No mortal senses, indeed, could bear the sight
of truth or goodness or beauty in their undimmed splendour. Yet
earthly things in which truth, goodness, and beauty are incarnate,
touch the soul to adoration, stimulate the growth of her wings,
and set her on the upward path whereby she will revert to God.
The lover has this opportunity when he beholds the person who
awakes his passion; for the human body is of all earthly things
that in which real beauty shines most clearly. When Plato proceeds
to say that "philosophy in combination with affection for
young men" is the surest method for attaining to the higher
spiritual life, he takes for granted that reason, recognising
the divine essence of beauty, encouraging the generous impulses
of the heart, curbing the carnal appetite, converts the mania
of love into an instrument of edification. Passionate friends,
bound together in the chains of close yet temperate comradeship,
seeking always to advance in wisdom self-restraint, and intellectual
illumination, prepare themselves for the celestial journey. "When
the end comes, they are light and ready to fly away, having conquered
in one of the three heavenly or truly Olympian victories. Nor
can human discipline or divine inspiration confer any greater
blessing on man than this." Moreover, even should they decline
toward sensuality and taste those pleasures on which the vulgar
set great store, they, too, will pass from life, "unwinged
indeed, but eager to soar, and thus obtain no mean reward of love
and madness."
The doctrine of the "Symposium" is not different, except
that here Socrates, professing to report the teaching of a wise
woman Diotima, assumes a loftier tone, and attempts a sublimer
flight. Love, he says, is the child of Poverty and Contrivance,
deriving something from both his father and his mother. He lacks
all things, and has the wit to gain all things. Love too, when
touched by beauty, desires to procreate; and if the mortal lover
be one whose body alone is creative, he betakes himself to woman
and begets children; but if the soul be the chief creative principle
in the lover's nature, then he turns to young men of "fair
and noble and well-nurtured spirit," and in them begets the
immortal progeny of high thoughts and generous emotions. The same
divine frenzy of love, which forms the subject of the "Phaedrus,"
is here again treated as the motive force which starts the soul
upon her journey towards the region of essential truth. Attracted
by what is beautiful, the lover first dedicates himself to one
youth in whom beauty is apparent; next he is led to perceive that
beauty in all fair forms is a single quality; he then passes to
the conviction that intellectual is superior to physical beauty;
and so by degrees he attains the vision of a single science, which
is the science of beauty everywhere, or the worship of the divine
under one of its three main attributes.
The lesson which both of these Socratic dialogues seem intended
to inculcate, may be summed up thus. Love, like poetry and prophecy,
is a divine gift, which diverts men from the common current of
their earthly lives; and in the right use of this gift lies the
secret of all human excellence. The passion which grovels in the
filth of sensual grossness may be transformed into a glorious
enthusiasm, a winged splendour, capable of rising to the contemplation
of eternal verities and reuniting the soul of man to God. How
strange will it be, when once those heights of intellectual intuition
have been scaled, to look down again on earth and view the human
being in whom the spirit first recognised the essence of beauty.
There is a deeply rooted mysticism, an impenetrable Soofyism,
in the Socratic doctrine of Eros. And it must be borne in mind
that the love of women is rigidly and expressly excluded from
the scheme. The soul which has attained to the highest possible
form of perfection in this life, is defined by Plato ("Phaedr."
249, A.), to be "the soul of one who has followed philosophy
with flawless self-devotion, or who has combined his passion for
young men with the pursuit of truth." These are the essential
conditions of Platonic love; and they are so strange that Lucian,
Epicurus, Cicero, and Gibbon may be pardoned for sneering at "the
thin device of virtue and friendship which amused the philosophers
of Athens," just as in modern times the purity of chivalrous
love has been almost universally suspected.
III
It is not needful to describe the conditions of mediaeval chivalry
with great particularity of detail. They are better known than
the conditions of Greek chivalry; and the enthusiastic love which
sprang from them, though little understood, is regarded by common
consent as legitimate and beneficial to society.
Chivalry must not be confounded with the feudalism out of which
it emerged. It was an ideal, binding men together by common spiritual
enthusiasms. We find the ground material of the chivalrous virtues
in the Teutonic character. As described by Tacitus, the German
races were distinguished for chastity, obedience to self-imposed
laws, truth, loyalty, regard for honour more than gain, and a
reverence for women amounting to idolatry. These qualities furnished
a proper soil for the chivalrous emotions; and the chivalrous
investiture, whereby the young knight was consecrated to a noble
life, can also be derived from Teutonic customs. "They decorate
their youthful warriors with the shield and spear," says
Tacitus, insisting on the sacred obligation which this ceremony
imposed. Chivalry would, however, scarcely have assumed the form
it did in the twelfth century but for the slowly refining influences
of Christianity. In the epics of the Niblung Cycle, and in the
song of Roland, there are but faint traces of its subtler spirit.
The unselfishness of the true knight, his humility and obedience,
his devotion to the service of the weak and helpless, his inspiration
by ideals, his readiness to forgive and to show mercy - in fact,
what we may call his charity in armour - sprang from Christianity.
It is only in the later romances of King Arthur that these essential
elements of the chivalrous spirit make themselves manifest.
"As for death," says a knight of the Round Table, "be
he welcome when he cometh; but my oath and my honour, the adventure
that hath fallen to me, and the love of my lady, I will lose them
not."
This sentence, in a few words, expresses the attitude of a chivalrous
gentleman. When King Arthur established his knight in a solemn
chapter at the Court of Camelot, he "charged them never to
do outrage nor murder, and always to flee treason; also by no
means to be cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asked mercy,
upon pain of forfeiture of their worship and lordship of King
Arthur for evermore; and always to do ladies, damsels, and gentlewomen
succour upon pain of death. Also that no man take no battles in
a wrong quarrel for no law, nor for worldly goods." The knights,
both old and young, swore to these articles; and every year they
took the oath again at the high feast of Pentecost.
As the Christian religion in general exercised a decisive influence
in the formation of chivalry, so we may perhaps connect the peculiar
mode of amorous enthusiasm which characterised this ideal with
the worship of the maiden mother of Christ. Woman had been exalted
to the throne of heaven; and it was not unnatural that woman should
become an object of almost religious adoration upon earth. The
names of God and of his lady were united on the lips of a true
knight; for the motto of chivalry in its best period was "Dieu
et ma Dame." Love came to be regarded as the source of all
nobility, virtue, heroism, and self-sacrifice. "A knight
may never be of prowess," says Sir Tristram, "but if
he be a lover." This language precisely corresponds with
the language of the Greeks regarding that other love of theirs,
which nerved them for deeds of prowess, for the overthrow of tyrants,
and the liberation of their fatherland.
Chivalrous love was wholly extra-nuptial and antimatrimonial.
The lady whom the knight adored and served, who received his service
and rewarded his devotion, could never be his wife. She might
be a maiden or a married woman; in practice she was almost invariably
the latter. But the love which united the two in bonds more firm
than any other, was incompatible with marriage. The federal courts
of love in fact proclaimed that "between two married persons,
Love cannot exert his powers." This is a peculiarity well
worthy of notice. Not only does it at once and for ever set an
end to those foolish questions which have sometimes been asked
about the reasons why Dante did not marry Beatrice; it also constitutes
one of the strongest points of similarity between the chivalrous
love of the ancient Greeks and that of the mediaeval races. Plato,
in the "Symposium," it will be remembered, asserts that
the exalted love on which he is discoursing has nothing whatever
to do with the "vulgar and trivial" way of matrimony.
It must be excited by a person with whom connubial relations are
absolutely impossible. It is a state of the soul, not an appetite;
and though the weakness of mortality may lead lovers into sensuality,
such shortcomings form a distinct deviation from the ideal. Least
of all can it have anything to do with those connections profitable
to the State and useful to society, which involve the procreation
and rearing of children, domestic cares, and the commonplace of
daily duties. In theory, at any rate, both Greek and mediaeval
types of chivalrous emotion were pure and spiritual enthusiasms,
purging the lover's soul of all base thoughts, lifting him above
the bondage of the flesh, and filling him with a continual rapture.
Plato called love a "mania," an inspired frenzy. Among
the chivalrous lovers of Provence, this high rapture received
the name of "Joy." It will here be remembered by students
of the 'Morte D'Arthur" that the castle to which both Lancelot
and Tristram carried off their ladies was Joyous Gard. The fruits
of joy were bravery, courtesy, high spirit, sustained powers of
endurance, delight in perilous adventure. The soul of the knight,
penetrated with the fine elixir of enthusiatic love, is ready
to confront all dangers, to undertake the most difficult tasks,
to bear obloquy and want, the scorn of men, misunderstanding,
even coldness and disdain on the part of his lady, with serene
sweetness and an exalted patience. Plato's description of the
lover in the "Phaedrus" exactly squares with this romantic
ideal of the knight's enthusiasm. The permanent emotion, whether
termed "mania" or "joy," is precisely the
same in quality; and whether the object which stirred it was a
young man as in Greece, or a married woman as in mediaeval Europe,
signified nothing.
Chivalrous love, under both its forms, did not exclude marriage,
except between the lovers themselves. Lancelot and Tristram took
wives, while remaining loyal to Guinevere and Iseult, their ladies.
Dante had children by Gemma, and Petrarch by a concubine. Still
it was the sainted Beatrice, the unattainable Laura, who received
the homage of these poets and inspired their art.
In theory, then, chivalrous love of both types, the Greek and
the mediaeval, existed independently of the marriage tie and free
from sensual affections. It was, in each case, the source of exhilarating
passion; a durable ecstasy which removed the lover to a higher
region, rendering him capable of haughty thoughts and valiant
deeds. Both loves were originally martial, and connected with
the military customs of the peoples among whom they flourished.
Both, in practice and in course of time, fell below their own
ideal standards, without, however, losing the high spirit, loyalty,
and sense of honour, which went far to compensate for what was
defective in their psychological basis. At the same time, social
evils of the gravest kind were inseparable from both forms of
enthusiastic feeling, because each had striven to transcend the
sphere of natural duties and of normal instincts.
At this point, when feudal chivalry was tending toward the travesty
which is depicted for us in "Little Jehan de Saintre,"
the same thing happened at Florence to its imaginative essence
as had previously happened to the imaginative essence of Greek
chivalry at Athens. We have seen that Greek love was originally
a Dorian and soldierly passion; it had grown up in the camp: and
when it lost its primal quality in the Attic circles, Socrates
attempted to utilise the force he recognised in this still romantic
feeling for the stimulation of a nobler intellectual life. The
moral energy was there. It throbs though previous ages of Greek
legend, literature, and history. But a philosophical application
of this motive, which is the peculiar discovery of the Platonic
Socrates, had not been attempted. That was reserved for the Athenians,
and, in particular, for the school of the Academy. Precisely in
like manner, chivalry, the fine but scarcely wholesome flower
of feudalism, the super-subtle hybrid between savage Teutonic
virtues and hyper-sensitive Christian emotions, which grew up
in the mediaeval castle, had been now transplanted to the classic
soil of Italy. Italy was neither feudal nor Teutonic; and her
Christianity, for the highest of her sons, was deeply penetrated
with political and intellectual ideas. The generous Tuscan spirits
who adopted chivalry, partly as a motive for their art, and partly
as a visionary guide in conduct - Guido Guinicelli, Guido Cavalcanti,
Cino da Pistoja, Lapo, Dante - enamoured of its beauty, but unable
to prolong its life upon the former line of feudal institutions,
lent it the new touch of mystical philosophy. The simple substance
of the chivalrous enthusiasm, which had taken gracious form in
the legends of Lancelot and Tristram, of Sir Beaumains and Sir
Galahad was refined upon and spun into a web of allegory. The
subtleties and psychological distinctions of the troubadours received
metaphysical interpretations. A nation of scholars and of doctors,
who were also artists-Dante calls the poets of his school dottori-men
who were not knights or squires or mighty of their hands, reformed,
rehandled, and recast the tradition of the love they had received
from militant subconscious predecessors. We come thus to the remarkable
fact that the last manifestation of mediaeval love at Florence
represents an almost exact parallel to the last manifestation
of Greek love at Athens. In both instances, an enthusiasm which
had its root in human passion, after passing through a martial
phase of evolution and becoming a social factor of importance
in the raising of the race to higher spiritual power, assumes
the aspect of philosophy, and connects itself with the effort
of the intellect to reach the Beatific Vision. Dante, conducted
by Beatrice into the circle of the Celestial Rose, proclaims the
same creed as Plato when he asserts that the love of a single
person, leading the soul upon the way to truth, becomes the means
whereby man may ascend to the contemplation of the divine under
one of its eternal aspects.
What is really remarkable in the parallel I have attempted to
establish is, that the metaphysical transformation of Greek "mania"
and mediaeval "joy," which was effected severally at
Athens and in Tuscany, took place in each case by a natural and
independent process of development. We have no reason to suppose
that feudal chivalry owed anything to Platonic influences, even
in this its latest manifestation. It is certain, for instance,
that Dante never read the "Phaedrus" and the "Symposium"
in the originals; and nothing shows that he was even remotely
acquainted with their true substance in scholastic compendiums.
The same exalted psychological condition followed similar lines
of development, and reached the same result - a result which in
each case is almost unintelligible to us who study it. We find
the greatest difficulty in believing that Socrates was sincere,
and that Dante was sincere. We turn, like Gibbon, in our perplexity
about Greek love to the hypothesis of "a thin device of friendship
and virtue," masking gross immorality. We turn, like the
elder Rossetti and his school, in our perplexity about Dante's
idealisation of Beatrice, to the hypothesis of a political or
a theological allegory. But sound criticism rejects both of these
hypotheses. Frankly admitting that Greek love was tainted with
a vice obnoxious to modern notions, and that mediaeval love was
involved with adultery, the true critic will declare that, strange
and incomprehensible as this must always seem, there were two
brief moments, once at Athens and once at Florence, when amorous
enthusiasms of an abnormal type presented themselves to natures
of the noblest stamp as indispensable conditions of the progress
of the soul upon the pathway toward perfection.
IV
I have dwelt in this essay more upon the similarity between Greek
and mediaeval love than on their difference. The identity of the
psychological phenomenon is what I had to demonstrate. Yet each
was distinguished by characteristics which make it seem at first
sight the exact contrary of the other. The antique Platonist,
as appears from numerous passages in the Platonic writings, would
have despised the Petrarchist as a vulgar woman-lover. The Petrarchist
would have loathed the Platonist as a moral pariah. But, though
the emotion differed in external aspect, the spiritual quintessance
of it was the same. Romantic passion, distilled through the alembic
of philosophy, produced both at Athens and in Italy a rare and
singular exaltation, which only superficial observers will deny
to have been one and the same psychical condition.
The person of a beautiful youth led Plato's Socrates to follow
beauty through all its epiphanies until he arrived at the notion
of the universal beauty which is God. Dante, under the influence
of the love he felt for Beatrice, advanced in knowledge till he
grasped the divine wisdom which he then symbolically identified
with the woman who had inspired him.
In addition to the radical divergence I have here indicated-a
divergence of moral sentiment and social custom, which presents
a curious problem to the ethical inquirer-we have to take into
account the dominant conceptions of the peoples who evolved this
enthusiasm. Greek religion was plastic, objective, anthropomorphic.
The Greeks thought of their deities as persons, whose portraits
could be carved in statues. Mediaeval religion was spiritual,
separating the divinity man worshipped from corporeal form, so
far as this was compatible with the dogma of the incarnation.
Greek philosophy, in spite of its occasional excursions into mysticism,
remained positive. Mediaeval philosophy eagerly embraced allegory
and "anagogical interpretations."
Who shall say whether the Platonic ideal evolved from the old
Greek chivalry of masculine love was ever realised in actual existence?
The healthy temper of the Attic mind made it difficult for men
to persuade themselves that such a state of the soul was possible.
But in Italy the corresponding ideal evolved from the feudal chivalry
of woman-service found a more congenial soil to root in. The long
travail of the past ten centuries, the many maladies of scholastic
speculation, created a favourable intellectual atmosphere. Saying
one thing when you meant another, clothing simple thoughts and
natural instincts with the veil of symbolism, drawing an iridescent
mirage of fancy over the surface of fact by half-voluntary self-sophistications:
all this was alien to the frank Greek nature, familiar to the
subtelising minds of schoolmen. Accordingly the Platonic conception
of Greek love soon revealed its unsubstantiality, whereas the
Dantesque conception of feudal love allied itself to the symbolising
tendencies of the age in art and letters, and to the hazy webweavings
of contemporary science. In Greece the Platonic ideal was rudely
disavowed by average men who knew what lurked at the bottom of
it. In Europe the Dantesque ideal, though no one doubted how perilously
near it lay to adultery, imposed for a certain time upon society.
Dante, as I have remarked before, in this, as in all things, stood
apart, sharing the tendencies of his age in a general way only.
His successors, while they affected to carry on the tradition
of the Florentine amourist, practically reverted to the unsophisticated
emotions of common humanity. Laura, in Petrarch's poems, is a
very real though not a very welldefined woman, and is loved by
him in a very natural manner. The climax of Boccaccio's "Amorosa
Visione," after all its mysticism and allegorising, is the
union of two lovers in a voluptuous embrace.
What subsists of really vital and precious in both ideals is the
emotional root from which they severally sprang: in Greece the
love of comrades, binding friends together, spurring them on to
heroic action, and to intellectual pursuits in common; in mediaeval
Europe the devotion to the female sex, through manly courtesy,
which raised the crudest of male appetities to a higher value.
It would also be unjust, in treating of these two ideas, to forget
that the first awakening of love in true and gentle natures is
a psychological moment of the utmost importance. The spiritual
life of a man has not unfrequently started from this point, and
his addiction to nobler aims has been occasioned by the incidence
of emotion. The stimulating and quickening influence of genuine
love is a very real thing; and if this were all contained in the
ideals we have been comparing, no exception could be taken to
them. But in both cases the psychological fact has been strained
beyond its power of tension; and a simple matter of experience
has been made the basis of a misleading mystical philosophy.
So then the attitude of Dante toward Beatrice must, for all practical
purposes, be judged as sterile and ineffectual as the attitude
assumed by Plato toward young men, loved, according to Greek custom,
in the playing field or in the groves of the Academy.
It is a delusion to imagine that the human spirit is led to discover
divine truths by amorous enthusiasm for a fellow-creature, however
refined that impulse may be. The quagmires into which those who
follow such a will-o-the wisp will probably founder are only too
plainly illustrated by the cynical remarks of Shelley upon Emma
Viviani, written a few days after her had composed the Platonic
ravings of "Epipsychidion". Nevertheless, there are
delusions, wanderings of the imaginative reason, which for a brief
period of time, under special conditions, and in peculiarly constituted
natures, have become fruitful of real and excellent results. this
was the case, I take it, with both Plato and Dante.
Source.
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