of his first love. Why should he not have sought the solace and the support of a generous woman's nature, who, knowing all the truth, was yet content with such affection as he was able to bring to a second love? Nor was that necessarily small. Ardent and affectionate as his nature was, the sympathies of such a woman must have elicited from him a satisfactory response; while, at the same time, without prejudice to the wife's claim on his regard, he might entertain his heavenward dream of the departed Beatrice.' The tradition is, however, that Dante did not 10 live happily with his wife; and some have thought that he means to cast a disparaging reflection on his marriage in a passage of the Purgatory. I need not say that this sort of thing would never do for Mr. Martin's hero-that hero who can do nothing inconsistent with the purest respect to her who had been the wedded wife of another, on the one hand, or with his regard for the mother of his children, on the other.' Accordingly, are we to assume,' Mr. Martin cries, that the woman who gave herself to him in the full knowledge that she was not the bride of 20 his imagination, was not regarded by him with the esteem which her devotion was calculated to inspire?' It is quite impossible. 'Dante was a true-hearted gentleman, and could never have spoken slightingly of her on whose breast he had found comfort amid many a sorrow, and who had borne to him a numerous progeny-the last a Beatrice.' Donna Gemma was a 'generous and devoted woman,' and she and Dante' thoroughly understood each other.'

All this has, as applied to real personages, the grave defect of being entirely of Mr. Martin's own imagining. 30 But it has a still graver defect, I think, as applied to Dante, in being so singularly inappropriate to its object. The grand, impracticable Solitary, with keen senses and ardent passions-for nature had made him an artist, and art must be, as Milton says, sensuous and impassioned but with an irresistible bent to the inward life, the life of imagination, vision, and ecstasy; with an inherent impatience of the outward life, the life of distraction, jostling, mutual concession; this man of a humour which made him hard to get on with,' says Petrarch; 'melancholy and 40 pensive,' says Boccaccio; by nature abstracted and taci

turn, seldom speaking unless he was questioned, and often so absorbed in his own reflections that he did not hear the questions which were put to him;' who could not live with the Florentines, who could not live with Gemma Donati, who could not live with Can Grande della Scala ; this lover of Beatrice, but of Beatrice a vision of his youth, hardly at all in contact with him in actual life, vanished from him soon, with whom his imagination could deal freely, whom he could divinize into a fit object for the 10 spiritual longing which filled him-this Dante is transformed, in Mr. Martin's hands, into the hero of a sentimental, but strictly virtuous, novel! To make out Dante to have been eminent for a wise, complete conduct of his outward life, seems to me as unimportant as it is impossible. I can quite believe the tradition which represents him as not having lived happily with his wife, and attributes her not having joined him in his exile to this cause. I can even believe, without difficulty, an assertion of Boccaccio which excites Mr. Martin's indignation, that Dante's con20 duct, even in mature life, was at times exceedingly irregular. We know how the followers of the spiritual life tend to be antinomian in what belongs to the outward life: they do not attach much importance to such irregularity themselves; it is their fault, as complete men, that they do not; it is the fault of the spiritual life, as a complete life, that it allows this tendency: by dint of despising the outward life, it loses the control of this life, and of itself when in contact with it. My present business, however, is not to praise or blame Dante's practical conduct of his 30 life, but to make clear his peculiar mental and spiritual constitution. This, I say, disposed him to absorb himself in the inner life, wholly to humble and efface before this the outward life. We may see this in the passage of the Purgatory where he makes Beatrice reprove him for his backslidings after she, his visible symbol of spiritual perfection, had vanished from his eyes.

For a while she says of him to the pious substances,' the angels for a while with my countenance I upheld him; showing to him my youthful eyes, with me I led 40 him, turned towards the right way.

Soon as I came on the threshold of my second age,

and changed my life, this man took himself from me and gave himself to others.

6

When that I had mounted from flesh to spirit, and beauty and spirit were increased unto me, I was to him less dear and less acceptable.

'He turned his steps to go in a way not true, pursuing after false images of good, which fulfil nothing of the promises which they give.

6

Neither availed it me that I obtained inspirations to be granted me, whereby, both in dream and otherwise, 10 I called him back; so little heed paid he to them.

'So deep he fell, that, for his salvation all means came short, except to show him the people of perdition.

'The high decree of God would be broken, could Lethe be passed, and that so fair aliment tasted, without some scot paid of repentance, which pours forth tears.'

Here, indeed, and in a somewhat similar passage of the next canto, Mr. Martin thinks that the 'obvious allusion is to certain moral shortcomings, occasional slips, of which (though he treats Boccaccio's imputation as monstrous and 20 incredible) Dante, with his strong and ardent passions, having, like meaner men, to fight the perennial conflict between flesh and spirit,' had sometimes, he supposes, been guilty. An Italian commentator gives at least as true an interpretation of these passages when he says that 'in them Dante makes Beatrice, as the representative of theology, lament that he should have left the study of divinity-in which, by the grace of Heaven, he might have attained admirable proficiency—to immerse himself in civil affairs with the parties of Florence.' But the real truth is, that all the life of the world, its pleasures, its business, its parties, its politics, all is alike hollow and miserable to Dante in comparison with the inward life, the ecstasy of the divine vision; every way which does not lead straight towards this is for him a via non vera; every good thing but this is for him a false image of good, fulfilling none of the promises which it gives; for the excellency of the knowledge of this he counts all things but loss. Beatrice leads him to this; herself symbolizes for him the ineffable beauty and purity for which he longs. Even to Dante at 40 twenty-one, when he yet sees the living Beatrice with his

30

eyes, she already symbolizes this for him, she is already not the 'creature not too bright and good' of Wordsworth, but a spirit far more than a woman; to Dante at twentyfive composing the Vita Nuova she is still more a spirit; to Dante at fifty, when his character has taken its bent, when his genius is come to his perfection, when he is composing his immortal poem, she is a spirit altogether.

ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN

LITERATURE

[Macmillan's Magazine, February 1869]

[What follows was delivered as an inaugural lecture in the Poetry Chair at Oxford. It was never printed, but there appeared at the time several comments on it, from critics who had either heard it, or heard reports about it. It was meant to be followed and completed by a course of lectures developing the subject entirely, and some of these were given. But the course was broken off because I found my knowledge insufficient for treating in a solid way many portions of the subject chosen. The inaugural lecture, however, treating a portion of the subject where my knowledge was perhaps less insufficient, and where besides my hearers were better able to help themselves out from their own knowledge, is here printed. No one feels the imperfection of this sketchy and generalizing mode of treatment more than I do; and not only is this mode of treatment less to my taste now than it was eleven years ago, but the style too, which is that of the doctor rather than the explorer, is a style which I have long since learnt to abandon. Nevertheless, having written much of late about Hellenism and Hebraism, and Hellenism being to many people almost an empty name compared with Hebraism, I print this lecture with the hope that it may serve, in the absence of other and fuller illustrations, to give some notion of the Hellenic spirit and its works, and of their significance in the history of the evolution of the human spirit in general.

M. A.]

It is related in one of those legends which illustrate the history of Buddhism, that a certain disciple once presented himself before his master, Buddha, with the desire to be permitted to undertake a mission of peculiar difficulty. The compassionate teacher represented to him the obstacles to be surmounted and the risks to be run. Pourna-so the disciple was called-insisted, and replied, with equal humility and adroitness, to the successive objections of his adviser. Satisfied at last by his answers of the fitness of his disciple, Buddha accorded to him the desired per- 10 mission; and dismissed him to his task with these remarkable words, nearly identical with those in which he himself is said to have been admonished by a divinity at the outset of his own career:- Go then, O Pourna,' are his words; 'having been delivered, deliver; having been