Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  other things to be learnt from the two successive divisions of the

  poem. From the Purgatorio one learns that a straightforward

  philosophical statement can be great poetry ; from the Paradiso,

  that more and more rarefied and remote states of" beatitude can

  be the material for great poetry. And gradually we come to admit

  that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of

  human life than Dante ; but that Dante understands deeper

  degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation. And a

  further wisdom is reached when we see clearly that this indicates

  the equality of the two men.

  On the one hand, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso belong, in the

  way of understanding, together. It is apparently easier to accept

  damnation as poetic material than purgation or beatitude; less is

  involved that is strange to the modern mind. I insist that the full

  meaning of the Inferno can only be extracted after appreciation of

  the two later parts, yet it has sufficient meaning in and by itself

  for the first few readings. Indeed, the Purgatorio is, I think, the

  most difficult of the three parts. It cannot be enjoyed by itself like

  the Inferno, nor can it be enjoyed merely as a sequel to the

  Inferno ; it requires appreciation of the Paradiso as well; which

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  means that its first reading is arduous and apparently unremunerative. Only when we have read straight though to the end of the Paradiso, and re-read the· Inferno, does the Purgatorio

  begin to yield its beauty. Damnation and even blessedness are

  more exciting than purgation.

  By compensation, the Purgatorio has a few episodes which, so

  to speak, 'let us up' (as the counterpart to letting down) more

  easily than the rest, from the Inferno. We must not stop to orient

  ourselves in the new astronomy of the Mount of Purgatory. We

  must linger first with the shades of Casella and Manfred slain,

  and especially Buonconte and La Pia, those whose souls were

  saved from Hell only at the last moment.

  'Io fui di Montefeltro, io son Buonconte;

  Giovanna o altri non ha di me cura;

  per ch'io vo tra costor con bassa fronte'.

  Ed io a lui: 'Qpal forza o qual ventura

  ti travio st'fuor di Campaldino

  che non si seppe mai tua sepoltura ?'

  'Oh', rispos' egli, 'a pie del Casentino

  travers a un' acqua che ha nome I' Archiano,

  che sopra I' Ermo nasce in Apemtino.

  Dove il vocabol suo diventa vano

  arriva' io forato nella go/a,

  .fuggendo a piede e sanguinando il piano.

  Quivi perdei Ia vista, e Ia parola

  nel nome di Maria finii: e quivi

  caddi, e rimase Ia mia carne sola.'

  'I was of Montefeltro, I am Buonconte ; neither Giovanna nor any

  other has care of me, wherefore I go with these, with lowered brow.' I

  said to him : 'What force or chance led you so far away from Campaldino that your place of sepulture has always been unknown ?' 'Oh', said he, 'at the foot of Casentino a stream crosses, which is called

  Archiano, and rises in the Apennines above the Hermitage. There,

  where its name is lost, came I, jabbed in the throat, fleeing on foot,

  dripping blood over the plain. There my sight left me, and I ended

  speech with (crying on) the name of Mary. There I fell, and my flesh

  alone remained.'

  When Buonconte ends his story, the third spirit speaks :

  'Deh, quando tu sarai tornato a/ mondo,

  e riposato della lunga via,'

  seguito il terzo spirito al secondo,

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  'ricorditi di me, che son Ia Pia;

  Siena mi Je', disfecemi Maremma:

  salsi colui che innanellata, pria

  disposando, m' ave a con Ia sui a gemma.'

  '0 pray, when you return to the world, and are rested from your long

  journey,' followed the third spirit after the second, 'remember me,

  who am La Pia. Siena made me, Maremma unmade me : this is known

  to him who after due engagement wedded me with his ring.'

  The next episode that impresses the reader coming fresh from

  the Inferno is the meeting with Sordello the poet (Canto VI), the

  soul who appeared

  altera e disdegnosa

  e ne/ mover degli occhi onesta e tarda!

  proud and disdainful, superb and slow in the movement of his eyes !

  E if dolce duca incominciava:

  'Mantova' . . . e l'ombra, tutta in se romita,

  surse ver lui del loco ove pria stava,

  dicendo: '0 Mantovano, io son Sordello

  della tua terra.' E l'un l'altro abbracciava.

  The gentle guide (Virgil) began : 'Mantua' . . . and the shade, suddenly

  rapt, leapt towards him from the place where first it was, saying : '0

  Mantuan, I am Sordello of thy very soil.' And the one embraced the

  other.

  The meeting with Sordello a guisa di leon quando si posa, like a

  couchant lion, is no more affecting than that with the poet Statius,

  in Canto XXI. Statius, when he recognizes his master Virgil,

  stoops to clasp his feet, but Virgil answers - the lost soul speaking

  to the saved :

  'Frate,

  non far, che tu se' ombra, ed ombra veda.'

  Ed ei surgendo: 'Or puoi Ia quamitate

  comprender dell' am or ch' a te mi scalda,

  quando dismento nostra vanitate,

  trattando l'ombre come cosa saldi.'

  'Brother ! refrain, for you are but a shadow, and a shadow is but what

  you see.' Then the other, rising : 'Now can you understand the quantity

  of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and

  treat the shadows like the solid thing.'

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  The last 'episode' at all comparable to those of the Inferno is the

  meeting with Dante's predecessors, Guido Guinicelli and Arnaut

  Daniel {Canto XXVI). In this -cahto the Lustful are purged in

  flame, yet we see clearly how the flame of purgatory differs from

  that of hell. In hell, the torment issues from the very nature of the

  damned themselves, expresses their essence ; they writhe in the

  torment of their own perpetually perverted nature. In purgatory

  the torment of flame is deliberately and consciously accepted by

  the penitent. When Dante approaches with Virgil these souls in

  purgatory flame, they crowd towards him :

  Poi verso me, quanto potevan farsi,

  certi si feron, sempre con riguardo

  di non uscir dove non fossero arsi.

  Then certain of them made towards me, so far as they could, but ever

  watchful not to come so far that they should not be in the fire.

  The souls in purgatory suffer because they wish to suffer, for

  purgation. And observe that they suffer more actively and keenly,

  being souls preparing for blessedness, than Virgil suffers in

  eternal limbo. In their suffering is hope, in the anaesthesia of

  Virgil is hopelessness ; that is the difference. The canto ends with

  the superb verses of Arnaut Daniel in his Provens;al tongue :

  'leu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan;

  consiros vei
Ia passada Jolor,

  e vei jausen lo jorn, qu' esper, denan.

  Ara vos prec, per aquella valor

  que vos guida a! som de I' escalina,

  sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.'

  POI s' ASCOSE NEL FOCO CHE GLI AFFINA.

  'I am Arnold, who weeps and goes singing. I see in thought all the past

  folly. And I see with joy the day for which I hope, before me. And so I

  pray you, by that Virtue which leads you to the topmost of the stair -

  be mindful in due time of my pain.' Then dived he back into that fire

  which refines them.

  These are the high episodes, to which the reader initiated by

  the Inferno must first cling, until he reaches the shore of Lethe,

  and Matilda, and the first sight of Beatrice. In the last cantos

  (XXIX-XXXIII) of the Purgatorio we are already in the world of

  the Paradiso.

  But in between these episodes is the narrative of the ascent of

  the Mount, with meetings, visions, and philosophical expositions,

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  all important, and all difficult for the uninstructed reader who

  finds it less exciting than the continuous phantasmagoria of the

  Inferno. The allegory in the Inferno was easy to swallow or ignore,

  because we could, so to speak, grasp the concrete end of it, its

  solidification into imagery ; but as we ascend from Hell to Heaven

  we are more and more required to grasp the whole from idea to

  image.

  Here I must make a diversion, before tackling a specifically

  philosophical passage of the Purgatorio, concerning the nature of

  Belief. I wish merely to indicate certain tentative conclusions of

  my own, which might affect one's reading of the Purgatorio.

  Dante's debt to St. Thomas Aquinas, like his debt (a much

  smaller one) to Virgil, can be easily exaggerated ; for it must not

  be forgotten that Dante read and made use of other great mediaeval philosophers as well. Nevertheless, the question of how much Dante took from Aquinas and how much from elsewhere is one

  which has been settled by others and is not relevant to my present

  essay. But the question of what Dante 'believed' is always relevant.

  It would not matter, if the world were divided between those

  persons who are capable of taking poetry simply for what it is and

  those who cannot take it at all ; if so, there would be no need to

  talk about this question to the former and no use in talking about

  it to the latter. But most of us are somewhat impure and apt to

  confuse issues : hence the justification of writing books about

  books, in the hope of straightening things out.

  My point is that you cannot afford to ignore Dante's philosophical and theological beliefs, or to skip the passages which express them most clearly ; but that on the other hand you are not

  called upon to believe them yourself. It is wrong to think that

  there are parts of the Divine Comedy which are of interest only to

  Catholics or to mediaevalists. For there is a difference (which here

  I hardly do more than assert) between philosophical belief and

  poetic assent. I am not sure that there is not as great a difference

  between philosophical belief and scientific belief; but that is a

  difference only now beginning to appear, and certainly inapposite

  to the thirteenth century. In reading Dante you must enter the

  world of thirteenth-century Catholicism : which is not the world

  of modern Catholicism, as his world of physics is not the world of

  modern physics. You are not called upon to believe what Dante

  believed, for your belief will not give you a groat's worth more of

  understanding and appreciation ; but you are called upon more

  and more to understand it. If you can read poetry as poetry, you

  will 'believe' in Dante's theology exactly as you believe in the

  physical reality of his journey ; that is, you suspend both belief

  and disbelief. I will not deny that it may be in practice easier for

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  a Catholic to grasp the meani'hg, i n many places, than for the

  ordinary agnostic ; but that is not because the Catholic believes,

  but because he has been instructed. It is a matter of knowledge

  and ignorance, not of belief or scepticism. The vital matter is that

  Dante's poem is a whole ; that you must in the end come to understand every part in order to understand any part.

  Furthermore, we can make a distinction between what Dante

  believes as a poet and what he believed as a man. Practically, it is

  hardly likely that even so great a poet as Dante could have composed the Comedy merely with understanding and without belief; but his private belief becomes a differing thing in becoming

  poetry. It is interesting to hazard the suggestion that this is truer

  of Dante than of any other philosophical poet. With Goethe, for

  instance, I often feel too acutely 'this is what Goethe the man

  believed', instead of merely entering into a world which Goethe

  has created ; with Lucretius also ; less with the Bhagavad-Gita,

  which is the next greatest philosophical poem to the Divine

  Comedy within my experience. That is the advantage of a coherent

  traditional system of dogma and morals like the Catholic : it stands

  apart, for understanding and assent even without belief, from the

  single individual who propounds it. Goethe always arouses in me

  a strong sentiment of disbelief in what he believes : Dante does

  not. I believe that this is because Dante is the purer poet, not

  because I have more sympathy with Dante the man than Goethe

  the man.

  We are not to take Dante for Aquinas or Aquinas for Dante. It

  would be a grievous error in psychology. The belief attitude of a

  man reading the Summa must be different from that of a man

  reading Dante, even when it is the same man, and that man a

  Catholic.

  It is not necessary to have read the Summa (which usually

  means, in practice, reading some handbook) in order to understand Dante. But it is necessary to read the philosophical passages of Dante with the humility of a person visiting a new world, who

  admits that every part is essential to the whole. What is necessary

  to appreciate the poetry of the Purgatorio is not belief, but suspension of belief. Just as much effort is required of any modern person to accept Dante's allegorical method, as is required of the

  agnostic to accept his theology.

  When I speak of understanding, I do not mean merely knowledge of books or words, any more than I mean belief: I mean a state of mind in which one sees certain beliefs, as the order of the

  deadly sins, in which treachery and pride are greater than lust,

  and despair the greatest, as possible, so that we suspend our judgment altogether.

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  In the XVlth Canto of the Purgatorio we meet Marco Lombardo, who discourses at some length on the Freedom of the Will, and on the Soul :

  Esce di matzo a lui, che Ia vagheggia

  prima che sia, a guisa di Janciulla

  clze piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia,

  /'anima semplicetta, che sa nulla,

  salvo che, mossa da lieto Jattore,

  volentier toma a cio che Ia trastulla.

  Di picciol bme in pria sente sapore;
/>   quivi s'ingamta, e retro ad esso corre,

  se guida o fren 11011 force suo amore.

  Onde cottvenne Iegge per .fren porre;

  cottvenne rege aver, che discernesse

  della vera cittade almm Ia torre.

  From the hands of Him who loves her before she is, there issues like a

  little child that plays, with weeping and laughter, the simple soul, that

  knows nothing except that, come from the hands of a glad creator, she

  turns willingly to everything that delights her. First she tastes the

  flavour of a trifling good ; then is beguiled, and pursues it, if neither

  guide nor check withhold her. Therefore laws were needed as a curb ; a

  ruler was needed, who should at least see afar the tower of the true City.

  Later (Canto XVII) it is Virgil himself who instructs Dante in the

  nature of Love :

  'Ne creator ne creatura mai,'

  comincio ei, 'figiuol, Ju smza amore,

  o naturale o d' a11imo; e tu if sai.

  Lo natural e sempre senza errore,

  ma l'altro puote errar per malo obbietto,

  o per poco o per troppo di vigore.

  Mentre ch' egli e ne' primi bm diretto,

  e ne' secondi se stesso misura,

  esser non puo cagion di mal diletto;

  ma, quando al mal si force, o co11 piii cura

  o con mm eire non dee corre nel bene,

  contra il Jattore adopra sua fattura.

  Qui11ci comprender puoi ch' esser conviene

  am or sementa in voi d' ogni virtute,

  e d'ogni operazion che merta pene.'

  He began : 'Neither Creator, nor creature, my son, was ever without

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  love, either natural o r rational : and you know it. The natural is always

  without error ; but the other may err. through mistaking the object, or

  through excess or deficiency of force. While it is directed towards the

  primal goods, and in the secondary moderates itself, it cannot be the

  cause of delight of sin ; but when it turns to evil, or hurries towards the

  good with more or less solicitude than is right, then the creature works

  against the Creator. Accordingly you may understand how Love must

  be the seed in you both of every virtue and of every act that merits

  punishment.'

  I have quoted these two passages at some length, because they are

  of the sort that a reader might be inclined to skip, thinking that

  they are only for scholars, not for readers of poetry, or thinking