HKB
England! let nothing persuade you that it is better to preach frightful and foolish ideas of God from your pulpits, than loving-kindness to all men, and peace above all things.
If Dante had erred only on the side of indulgence, humanity could easily have forgiven him--for the excesses of charity are the extensions of hope; but, unfortunately, where he is sweet-natured once, he is bitter a hundred times. This is the impression he makes on universalists of all creeds and parties; that is to say, on men who having run the whole round of sympathy with their fellow-creatures, become the only final judges of sovereign pretension. It is very well for individuals to make a god of Dante for some encouragement of their own position or pretension; but a god for the world at large he never was, or can be; and I doubt if an impression to this effect was not always, from the very dawn of our literature, the one entertained of him by the genius of our native country, which could never long endure any kind of unwarrantable dictation. Chaucer evidently thought him a man who would spare no unnecessary probe to the feelings (see the close of his version of Ugolino). Spenser says not a word of him, though he copied Tasso, and eulogised Ariosto. Shakspeare would assuredly have put him into the list of those presumptuous lookers into eternity who "take upon themselves to know" (Cymbeline, act v. sc. 4). Milton, in his sonnet to Henry Lawes, calls him "that sad Florentine"--a lamenting epithet, by which we do not designate a man whom we desire to resemble. The historian of English poetry, admirably applying to him a passage out of Milton, says that "Hell grows darker at his frown." [26]
Walter Scott could not read him, at least not with pleasure. He tells Miss Seward that the "plan" of the poem appeared to him "unhappy; the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting." [27] Uninteresting, I think, it is impossible to consider it. The known world is there, and the unknown pretends to be there; and both are surely interesting to most people.
Landor, in his delightful book the Pentameron--a book full of the profoundest as well as sweetest humanity--makes Petrarch follow up Boccaccio's eulogies of the episode of Paulo and Francesca with ebullitions of surprise and horror:
"Petrarca. Perfection of poetry! The greater is my wonder at discovering nothing else of the same order or cast in this whole section of the poem. He who fainted at the recital of Francesca,
'And he who fell as a dead body falls'
would exterminate all the inhabitants of every town in Italy! What execrations against Florence, Pistoia, Pisa, Siena, Genoa! what hatred against the whole human race! what exultation and merriment at eternal and immitigable sufferings! Seeing this, I cannot but consider the Inferno as the most immoral and impious book that ever was written. Yet, hopeless that our country shall ever see again such poetry, and certain that without it our future poets would be more feebly urged forward to excellence, I would have dissuaded Dante from cancelling it, if this had been his intention." [28]
Most happily is the distinction here intimated between the undesirableness of Dante's book in a moral and religious point of view, and the greater desirableness of it, nevertheless, as a pattern of poetry; for absurdity, however potent, wears itself out in the end, and leaves what is good and beautiful to vindicate even so foul an origin.
Again, Petrarch says, "What an object of sadness and of consternation, he who rises up from hell like a giant refreshed!
"Boccaccio. Strange perversion! A pillar of smoke by day and of fire by night, to guide no one. Paradise had fewer wants for him to satisfy than hell had, all which he fed to repletion; but let us rather look to his poetry than his temper."