as in his others, Bradley is thoroughly empirical, much more
empirical than the philosophies that he opposed. He wished only
to determine how much of morality could be founded securely
without entering into the religious questions at all. As in Appearance and Reality he assumes that our common everyday knowledge is on the whole true so far as it goes, but that we do not know how far it does go ; so in the Ethical Studies he starts always
with the assumption that our common attitude towards duty,
pleasure, or self-sacrifice is correct so far as it goes - but we
do not know how far it does go. And in this he is all in the
Greek tradition. It is fundamentally a philosophy of common
sense.
Philosophy without wisdom is vain ; and in the greater philosophers we are usually aware of that wisdom which for the sake of emphasis and in the most accurate and profound sense could be
called even worldly wisdom. Common sense does not mean, of
course, either the opinion of the majority or the opinion of the
moment ; it is not a thing to be got at without maturity and study
and thought. The lack of it produces those unbalanced philosophies, such as Behaviourism, of which we hear a great deal . A purely 'scientific' philosophy ends by denying what we know to
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be true ; and, on the other hand, the great weakness of Pragmatism is that it ends by being of no use to anybody. Again, it is easy to underestimate Hegel; out it is easy to overestimate
Bradley's debt to Hegel ; in a philosophy like Bradley's the points
at which he stops are always important points. In an unbalanced
or uncultured philosophy words have a way of changing their
meaning - as sometimes with Hegel ; or else they are made, in a
most ruthless and piratical manner, to walk the plank : such as the
words which Professor J. B. Watson drops overboard, and which
we know to have meaning and value. But Bradley, like Aristotle,
is distinguished by his scrupulous respect for words, that their
meaning should be neither vague nor exaggerated ; and the
tendency of his labours is to bring British philosophy closer to
the Greek tradition.
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T H E INFER NO
In my own experience of the appreciation of poetry I have always
found that the less I knew about the poet and his work, before I
began to read it, the better. A quotation, a critical remark, an
enthusiastic essay, may well be the accident that sets one to
reading a particular author; but an elaborate preparation of
historical and biographical knowledge has always been to me a
barrier. I am not defending poor scholarship ; and I admit that
such experience, solidified into a maxim, would be very difficult
to apply in the study of Latin and Greek. But with authors of
one's own speech, and even with some of those of other modern
languages, the procedure is possible. At least, it is better to be
spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry, than
to suppose that you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired
the scholarship. I was passionately fond of certain French poetry
long before I could have translated two verses of it correctly. With
Dante the discrepancy between enjoyment and understanding
was still wider.
I do not counsel anyone to postpone the study of Italian grammar until he has read Dante, but certainly there is an immense amount of knowledge which, until one has read some of his poetry
with intense pleasure - that is, with as keen pleasure as one is
capable of getting from any poetry - is positively undesirable. In
saying this I am avoiding two possible extremes of criticism. One
might say that understanding of the scheme, the philosophy, the
concealed meanings, of Dante's verse was essmtial to appreciation ;
and on the other hand one might say that these things vere quite
irrelevant, that the poetry in his poems was one thing, which
could be enjoyed by itself without studying a framework which
had served the author in producing the poetry but could not
serve the reader in enjoying it. The latter error is the more
prevalent, and is probably the reason why many people's knowledge of the Comedy is limited to the Inferno, or even to certain 205
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passages i n it. The enjoyme11t o f the Divine Comedy is a continuous process. If you get nothing out of it at first, you probably never will ; but if from your first deciphering of it there comes now
and then some direct shock of poetic intensity, nothing but
laziness can deaden the desire for fuller and fuller knowledge.
What is surprising about the poetry of Dante is that it is, in one
sense, extremely easy to read. It is a test (a positive test, I do not
assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can
communicate before it is understood. The impression can be
verified on fuller knowledge ; I have found with Dante and with
several other poets in languages in which I was unskilled, that
about such impressions there was nothing fanciful. They were not
due, that is, to misunderstanding the passage, or to reading into it
something not there, or to accidental sentimental evocations out
of my own past. The impression was new, and of, I believe, the
objective 'poetic emotion'. There are more detailed reasons for
this experience on the first reading of Dante, and for my saying
that he is easy to read. I do not mean that he writes very simple
Italian, for he does not ; or that his content is simple or always
simply expressed. It is often expressed with such a force of
compression that the elucidation of three lines needs a paragraph,
and their allusions a page of commentary. What I have in mind is
that Dante is, in a sense to be defined (for the word means little
by itself), the most universal of poets in the modern languages.
That does not mean that he is 'the greatest', or that he is the most
comprehensive - there is greater variety and detail in Shakespeare. Dante's universality is not solely a personal matter. The Italian language, and especially the Italian language in Dante's
age, gains much by being the product of universal Latin. There is
something much more local about the languages in which Shakespeare and Racine had to express themselves. This is not to say, either, that English and French are inferior, as vehicles of poetry,
to Italian. But the Italian vernacular of the late Middle Ages was
still very close to Latin, as literary expression, for the reason that
the men, like Dante, who used it, were trained, in philosophy and
all abstract subjects, in mediaeval Latin. Now mediaeval Latin is
a very fine language ; fine prose and fine verse were written in it ;
and it had the quality of a highly developed and literary Esperanto. When you read modern philosophy, in English, French, German, and Italian, you must be struck by national or racial
differences of thought : modern languages tend to separate abstract
thought (mathematics is now the only universal language) ; but
mediaeval Latin tended to concentrate on what men of various
races and lands c
ould think together. Some of the character of
this universal language seems to me to inhere in Dante's Floren-
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tine speech ; and the localization ('Florentine' speech) seems if
anything to emphasize the universality, because it cuts across the
modern division of nationality. To enjoy any French or German
poetry, I think one needs to have some sympathy with the French
or German mind ; Dante, none the less an Italian and a patriot, is
first a European.
This difference, which is one of the reasons why Dante is 'easy
to read', may be discussed in more particular manifestations. The
style of Dante has a peculiar lucidity - a poetic as distinguished
from an intellectual lucidity. The thought may be obscure, but the
word is lucid, or rather translucent. In English poetry words have
a kind of opacity which is part of their beauty. I do not mean that
the beauty of English poetry is what is called mere 'verbal
beauty'. It is rather that words have associations, and the groups
of words in association have associations, which is a kind of local
self-consciousness, because they are the growth of a particular
civilization ; and the same thing is true of other modern languages.
The Italian of Dante, though essentially the Italian of today, is
not in this way a modern language. The culture of Dante was not
of one European country but of Europe. I am aware, of course, of
a directness of speech which Dante shares with other great poets
of pre-Reformation and pre-Renaissance times, notably Chaucer
and Villon. Undoubtedly there is something in common between
the three, so much that I should expect an admirer of any one of
them to be an admirer of the others ; and undoubtedly there is an
opacity, or inspissation of poetic style throughout Europe after
the Renaissance. But the lucidity and universality of Dante are far
beyond those qualities in Villon and Chaucer, though they are
akin.
Dante is 'easier to read', for a foreigner who does not know
I tali an very well, for other reasons : but all related to this central
reason, that in Dante's time Europe, with all its dissensions and
dirtiness, was mentally more united than we can now conceive. It
is not particularly the Treaty of Versailles that has separated
nation from nation ; nationalism was born long before ; and the
process of disintegration which for our generation culminates in
that treaty began soon after Dante's time. One of the reasons for
Dante's 'easiness' is the following - but first I must make a
digression.
I must explain why I have said that Dante is 'easy to read',
instead of talking about his 'universality'. The latter word would
have been much easier to use. But I do not wish to be thought to
claim a universality for Dante which I deny to Shakespeare or
Moliere or Sophocles. Dante is no more 'universal' than Shakespeare : though I feel that we can come nearer to understanding 207
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Dante than a foreigner can c;me t o understanding those others.
Shakespeare, or even Sophocles, or even Racine and Moliere, are
dealing with what is as universally human as the material of
Dante ; but they had no choice but to deal with it in a more local
way. As I have said, the Italian of Dante is very near in feeling to
mediaeval Latin : and of the mediaeval philosophers whom Dante
read, and who were read by learned men of his time, there were,
for instance, St. Thomas who was an Italian, St. Thomas's predecessor Albertus, who was a German, Abelard who was French, and Hugh and Richard of St. Victor who were Scots. For the
medium that Dante had to use compare the opening of the
Inferno :
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
clze Ia diritta via era smarrita.
I n the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood,
having lost the straight path.
with the lines with which Duncan is introduced to Macbeth's
castle :
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
This guest of summer
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve
By his loved masonry that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed
The air is delicate.
I do not at all pretend that we appreciate everything, even in
one single line of Dante, that a cultivated Italian can appreciate.
But I do maintain that more is lost in translating Shakespeare into
Italian than in translating Dante into English. How can a foreigner
find words to convey in his own language just that combination of
intelligibility and remoteness that we get in many phrases of
Shakespeare ?
I am not considering whether the language of Dante or Shakespeare is superior, for I cannot admit the question : I merely affirm that the differences are such as make Dante easier for a
foreigner. Dante's advantages are not due to greater genius, but
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to the fact that he wrote when Europe was still more or less one.
And even had Chaucer or Villon been exact contemporaries of
Dante, they would still have been farther, linguistically as well as
geographically, from the centre of Europe than Dante.
But the simplicity of Dante has another detailed reason. He not
only thought in a way in which every man of his culture in the
whole of Europe then thought, but he employed a method which
was common and commonly understood throughout Europe. I do
not intend, in this essay, to go into questions of disputed interpretations of Dante's allegory. What is important for my purpose is the fact that the allegorical method was a definite method not
confined to Italy ; and the fact, apparently paradoxical, that the
allegorical method makes for simplicity and intelligibility. We
incline to think of allegory as a tiresome cross-word puzzle. We
incline to associate it with dull poems (at best, The Romance of the
Rose), and in a great poem to ignore it as irrelevant. What we
ignore is, in a case like Dante's, its particular effect towards
lucidity of style.
I do not recommend, in first reading the first canto of the
Inferno, worrying about the identity of the Leopard, the Lion, or
the She-Wolf. It is really better, at the start, not to know or care
what they do mean. What we should consider is not so much the
meaning of the images, but the reverse process, that which led a
man having an idea to express it in images. We have to consider
the type of mind which by nature and practice tended to express
itself in allegory : and, for a competent poet, allegory means clear
visual images. And clear visual images are given much more
intensity by having a meaning - we do not need to know what that
meaning is, but in our awarenes
s of the image we must be aware
that the meaning is there too. Allegory is only one poetic method,
but it is a method which has very great advantages.
Dante's is a visual imagination. It is a visual imagination in a
different sense from that of a modern painter of still life : it is
visual in the sense that he lived in an age in which men still saw
visions. It was a psychological habit, the trick of which we have
forgotten, but as good as any of our own. We have nothing but
dreams, and we have forgotten that seeing visions - a practice now
relegated to the aberrant and uneducated - was once a more
significant, interesting, and disciplined kind of dreaming. We
take it for granted that our dreams spring from below : possibly
the quality of our dreams suffers in consequence.
All that I ask of the reader, at this point, is to clear his mind, if
he can, of every prejudice against allegory, and to admit at least
that it was not a device to enable the uninspired to write verses,
but really a mental habit, which when raised to the point of genius
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can make a great poet as well a; a great mystic or saint. And it is
the allegory which makes it possible for the reader who is not even
a good Italian scholar to enjoy Dante. Speech varies, but our eyes
are all the same. And allegory was not a local Italian custom, but a
universal European method.
Dante's attempt is to make us see what he saw. He therefore
employs very simple language, and very few metaphors, for
allegory and metaphor do not get on well together. And there is a
pec�liarity about his comparisons which is worth noticing in
passmg.
There is a well-known comparison or simile in the great XVth
canto of the Inferno, which Matthew Arnold singled out, rightly,
for high praise ; which is characteristic of the way in which Dante
employs these figures. He is speaking of the crowd in Hell who
peered at him and his guide under a dim light :
e si ver noi aguzzevan le ciglia,
come vecchio sartor fa nella cruna.
and sharpened their vision (knitted their brows) at us, like an old tailor
peering at the eye of his needle.
The purpose of this type of simile is solely to make us see more
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