by C. S. Lewis
But whatever Homer’s motives in making long-tailed similes may have been, he left ready to Virgil’s hand a licence which could be used for the most subtle poetic purposes. It must be allowed that the doctrine of imitation for imitation’s sake weighed upon Virgil; unless my memory deceives me, there are some dull wolves and lions in his battle-pieces, mere ‘property’ animals who turn up there only because they had turned up in Homer. But Virgil at his best uses his similes, as he uses all the rest of the Homeric patrimony, for purposes both new and good. The Homeric Ajax had resembled the Homeric donkey in one respect only: in emotional value they were totally discrepant. But Virgil’s Neptune quelling the waves resembles his grave citizen quelling a riot through and through: the picture in the simile is a kind of echo to the picture in the main story, playing out in diverse material the same theme of turbulence and authority, so that Neptune and the citizen each lend dignity to the other and between them the poetry rises to a quality which is quite un-Homeric (Aeneid, I, 148). But in other places the function of the simile is precisely the opposite. When Vulcan in the eighth book is compared to the poor sempstress the only point of contact between them is that they are both early risers. In that respect the simile is on all fours with Homer’s Ajax and donkey. But the difference is that whereas in Homer the unlikeness of Ajax to the donkey is made no use of—is just an irrelevant fact in spite of which the simile works—in Virgil the very unlikeness between Vulcan and a poor woman gives the simile its whole value. The pathos and homeliness of the sad, domestic scene are, first of all, a relief and refreshment at this point of the story, and then, when we return from it, by contrast it throws up the mythological figures into vaster proportion. But there is no need to make a complete list of the Virgilian uses of simile. Clearly, when it has reached this stage, the original purpose of illustration has become a mere excuse, though an excuse still necessary to lull the logical faculty to sleep, and the real purpose of simile is to turn epic poetry from a solo to an orchestra in which any theme the poet chooses may be brought to bear on the reader at any moment and for any number of purposes.
Now the later exploitation of this orchestral technique is to be found in Milton, but not in Dante. Why Dante did not develop it in the Miltonic direction is a large question. Partly, I think, he was in some ways a literal-minded man who perhaps never quite got over the notion that an illustration ought to illustrate; and partly, as we shall see, he had other things to do which were at least as good.
Dante’s similes may be divided very roughly into four classes, of which the first is purely Virgilian or Homeric and the fourth purely Dantesque. I put the Virgilian type first partly because it is natural to deal with it first, since we are approaching Dante from Virgil, but also because it is most frequent in the earlier parts of the Comedy. Examples of this class will recur easily to everyone’s mind—the comparison of souls to leaves in Inferno, III, 112, of the damned lovers to cranes in V, 40, of the prodigal and avaricious to waves dashing against waves in VII, 22, or of the storks in Paradiso, XIX, 91. These are all good, straight similes built on the ancient principle; some state or action in the main story is compared to a state or action that can be observed in external nature, whether animate or inanimate. It will be noticed that most of them are, by Virgilian standards, pretty short. One of them, indeed, is longer than its Virgilian model—that of the souls and dead leaves, which Virgil disposed of in a line and a half:
Quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo
Lapsa cadunt folia.
(Aeneid, VI, 309)
But it is not longer because Dante is adding logically irrelevant detail in the true ancient manner. He elaborates not to make the picture of the autumn woods more beautiful or interesting in itself, but to make the fall of the leaves, one by one, more accurately illustrative of the souls, dropping down, one after another, into Charon’s boat. The result is that where Virgil gives us a dim, but potent, suggestion of the perennial melancholy inherent in autumn and in death, Dante gives us a sharp picture of a particular scene. That is why this simile, though almost certainly Virgilian in origin, really brings us to the borderline between the first and the second of my two classes.
The second class has been familiar to everyone since Macaulay’s famous digression on Dante in his essay on Milton. Dante’s similes, says Macaulay, ‘are the illustrations of a traveller. Unlike those of other poets, and especially of Milton, they are introduced in a plain, business-like manner; not for the sake of any beauty in the objects from which they are drawn . . . but simply in order to make the meaning of the writer as clear to the reader as it is to himself’.* If this is intended to describe Dante as a whole, it misses a good many important truths, as Macaulay was apt to do: but it hits one nail admirably on the head. And let me digress here for a moment to emphasize his recognition of Dante’s similes as the ‘illustrations of a traveller’. Much of the strength of the Comedy comes from the fact that it is performing a complex function which has since been split up and distributed among several different kinds of book. It is, first, a book of travel into regions which the audience could not reach but in whose existence they had a literal belief, and is thus strictly comparable to Jules Verne’s or H. G. Wells’s voyages to the Moon. It is, secondly, a poetic expression of the current philosophy of the age, and so comparable to The Essay on Man or The Testament of Beauty. It is, thirdly, a religious allegory like Bunyan, and fourthly a history of the poet like The Prelude—not to mention its political and historical aspects which would set it side by side with the memoirs of some retired statesman. In this complexity of function it does not, of course, stand alone. All old works of art show the same contrast to modern works, and the history of all arts tells the same miserable story of progressive specialization and impoverishment. Thus Tasso is, in some sort, the Milton or Wordsworth of his age—the great serious poet: but he is mediating all his serious poetry through pastoral and chivalrous stories of the kind then generally enjoyed and so writing epic poetry and popular fiction at the same time, and we should get a modern parallel only if we had Ezra Pound and Lord Tweedsmuir rolled into one. In the same way, the great Italian painters are not only the Cézannes and Picassos of their day: they are also the popular illustrators whose work would now appear in Christmas magazines, the people who show you what some famous story really looked like: and, thirdly, they are the great decorators who can make a rich man’s dining room look as he wants it to look. So, once more, an opera by Mozart is the ancestor both of the modern serious opera and of the revue. The separation of the low-brow from the high-brow in its present sharpness is a comparatively recent thing: and with the loss of the old unified function all curb on the eccentricity of real artists and the vulgarity of mere entertainers has vanished.
I hope this digression has not seemed too long. It is relevant to our subject because that second kind of Dantesque simile, which Macaulay has characterized, is probably a direct outcome of Dante’s determination to satisfy a simple, popular taste which he himself shared to the full—a taste for vivid realism in the description of places none of us has seen but which are believed in, not only as a modern Christian may believe in Heaven or a modern philosopher in the Absolute, but also, at the same time, as a modern scientist believes in the other side of the moon. The complete subservience of many Dantesque images to this purpose is even startling. When, in the Inferno, IX, 76, the souls scattering before the angel—by the way, surely the best angel ever made by a poet—are compared to frogs, we might suspect, since these souls are damned, some emotional connexion between them and the slimy and ugly creatures to which they are compared. In fact, however, the connexion is purely pictorial, as we shall see if we think of those blessed, or almost blessed, souls in Purgatorio, XXVI, 135 who dart back from the surface to the depth of the flame like fish. The poet is anxious simply to set the thing before our eyes, and is, of course, brilliantly successful. Sometimes, in his determination to make us see, he piles simile on simile. The almost transparent spi
rits whom he saw in the moon (Paradiso, III, 10) are said to be just as visible (no more) as the image of one’s own face seen in a clear stream so shallow that the bottom, as well as the reflexion, is visible: and to make it clearer, he tells us that this image in the stream is as hard to see as a white pearl against a white forehead: and then, as if even that were not enough, he tells us that he mistook the spirits for reflexions and turned round expecting to find the reality behind him. This is an admirable instance of a kind of vividness which we still sometimes meet in popular prose fiction, but not often in modern poetry. It produces the maximum of illusion, and it will grip a mind to which the irrelevant liveliness of the Homeric simile or the dim suggestion of the Virgilian would mean nothing. A simple example occurs when the bleeding and speaking tree in Inferno, XIII, 40 is compared to a green branch in the fire hissing and spluttering. The Virgilian passage on the same subject in the third Aeneid is remote and mythological—an echo of old unhappy far-off things. Virgil has hardly asked himself what it would be like, in its immediate impact on the senses, if it happened here and now at the bottom of a man’s own garden.
This intense realism naturally leads Dante into what is, perhaps, his favourite type of simile, of which I make my third class. It is rather remarkable that Homer and Virgil hardly ever compare an emotion with an emotion. They compare one material thing or action with another material thing or action—warrior with wolf or words with snowflakes. Or again, they compare an emotion with some external object, the invisible with the visible: a man’s mind may bubble like a cauldron. But hardly ever do they say ‘Achilles or Aeneas felt at this juncture as you or I, reader, might feel in this or that situation in ordinary life’. If I remember rightly there is only one place in Homer where the content of a simile is psychological, and there, oddly enough, the thing which is compared to the psychological action is not itself psychological but is a movement in space; I am referring to the passage in Iliad, XV where Hera, darting from Ida to Olympus, is likened to the thought of a much travelled man darting hither and thither, among the places he remembers (Iliad, XV, 78)—and I confess that to my ear this beautiful passage always sounds strangely unlike Homer. Now it might be predicted that a man who was trying to do what Dante is trying to do, would find frequent occasion for the psychological simile: and in fact, one of the chief memories we bear away from a first reading of Dante is the wealth of passages beginning come colui in which he tries to make us realize something indirectly by telling us that the feeling it excited was like some feeling we know. Two such similes occur in the first sixty lines of the poem. The poet looks back on his night in the terrible wood as a shipwrecked man looks back on the sea; and a few moments later he is driven back by the beast, feeling like a man who sees his hopes of a great gain suddenly disappointed. These are elementary examples. More notable is the preoccupied expression of the angel in Inferno, IX, 101–3, where we get the psychological and the pictorial simile combined, for he looked as a man looks when he is intent on something more important than the people before his eyes. Perhaps the best of all, in its combination of intense realism, deep appropriateness and satiric edge, is that in Paradiso, XXXI, 31–40, where Dante, in sight of the celestial rose, a newcomer from Florence to truth and justice, compares his almost stupid wonder to that of the Goths in Rome. But with this we are already on the verge of the fourth class. It will be seen that this simile is on the surface just a very good psychological simile; a man, at such a moment, would, we suppose, feel like that. But there is a deeper significance because the Goths, like the Florentines, are wicked, or, more generally, because the world of time and sin is to Heaven what the barbaric world was to Rome: not simply that to Dante, at that moment, a possible analogy flashes on the mind as it might flash on the mind of a modern poet, but for two reasons rooted in his whole system of thought; first, because Heaven is essentially the City, as he had learned from the Apocalypse and from St Augustine, and secondly because, for him, the earthly city Rome, which in St Augustine had been almost exclusively the antitype, was predominantly the ectype, the earthly μίμησις, of the heavenly city.
I have been willing thus to glide into the fourth, and most Dantesque, of my classes without an attempt at definition because this fourth type is so difficult to define. The principle is that the things compared are not yoked together by a momentary poetic analogy, like Vulcan and the old woman—an analogy which disappears the moment you step out of that particular poetic context—but by a profound philosophical analogy or even identity. Like, in these similes, is always tending to turn into same.
In Purgatorio, XV, 64–75 Dante re-states Aristotle’s distinction between goods that are, and goods that are not, objects of competition. He uses the image of light which gives more of itself in proportion as the body it falls on is more highly polished, with the consequence that the greater the number of such bodies the more light there is for all. There are two things to notice about this simile. In the first place, though it is excellent poetry, it is the sort of simile that could equally well occur in philosophical prose. In the second place, the use of light as a symbol for what is here symbolized is almost a part of nature, not of art, for nothing else will do and it is almost dictated, as Dr Edwyn Bevan has shown,* by the shape of the human mind. God is, or is like, light, not for the purposes of this bit of poetry but for every devotional, philosophical, and theological purpose imaginable within a Christian, or indeed a monotheistic, frame of reference.
In Purgatorio, XXV, 22 the relation between the disembodied spirit and the phantasmal or aerial body (which is all the body it has till the resurrection) is expounded by the successive similes of Meleager wasting away as the brand wasted and a mirror image moving in accord with the reality. We should be quite deceived if we thought Meleager was introduced here for the same emotional purposes as Milton’s Proserpine and Orpheus. He is there for the sake of precision. The disembodied soul is not an animal and therefore does not animate its aerial vehicle as we now animate our terrestrial bodies. The relation between them is one of response or correspondence, like that of a mirror image to a real object, or (as Dante says later) of shadow to body: and of such relation the occult sympathies pre-supposed in such witchcrafts as that suffered by Meleager are a very good example. Perhaps this is not, strictly speaking, a simile. Meleager and the brand are not simply like the souls and their aerial bodies: they are another instance of the same law.
It will be easily seen in what sense Dante’s similes are ‘metaphysical’. The connexion between the two members is real, ontological, intelligible, and the material need not be in itself beautiful or may be even grotesque—as when Time is represented as a tree growing downwards with its roots in a vase which is the Primum Mobile (Paradiso, XXVII, 118). And this certainly connects them, in one way, with what literary critics call ‘Metaphysical’ conceits, meaning the conceits used by Donne and his followers. But there are only two points of contact—first, the difficult and (at first sight) unpoetical nature of the material, and, secondly, the intellectual rather than emotional connexion between this material and the thing compared with it. The spirit in which they are used is not the same in Donne and in Dante. In Donne, the connexion, though intellectual as in Dante, is as momentary, as incapable of life beyond the immediate context, as the connexions in Homer or Virgil. It may be true that Donne cannot court a mistress without bringing in scholastic philosophy, law, chemistry, and cosmography. But he has no interest in these things except as toys and does not care in the least what place they have, if any, in the real universe—if, indeed, there is a real universe outside the present emotion. The longer you look at Donne’s comparison of the lovers to the compasses, the less alike they will seem, and the more certain you will become that the innumerable differences between them are a more interesting and fruitful field for thought than the single analogy. But in the greatest Dantesque similes, the longer you look the greater the likeness becomes and the more fruitful in thoughts that are interesting as long as you l
ive. This, of course, is no disparagement to Donne: a witty love song, whether salacious or saturnine, is not meant to be chewed over like the great Comedy which made its author lean. If I seem to be breaking a butterfly upon a wheel, it is only because I want to avoid a misunderstanding which would hinder our reading both of the great and of the little poet.
For I think it is true that the merit of Dante’s metaphysical similes at their greatest is best disengaged in criticism by this contrast between them and the similes of Donne. We speak of a man stirring up a hornet’s nest. If there were any corresponding and opposite proverb to describe the stirring of beneficent creatures into delightful and profitable energy by a single act, I should use it here. If bees were associated only with honey and not with stings, I should say that Dante every now and then wakes up a whole beehive, by giving us some image which seems to focus all the rays of his universe at a single point or touching some wire which sets the whole system vibrating in unison. A specimen of this we have already seen in the simile of the Goths of Rome. Another is the complex simile in the first canto of the Paradiso, 46–54. Beatrice gazes on the sun. Dante, who was gazing at Beatrice, imitates her and also gazes at the sun. The process whereby Beatrice’s gaze produces Dante’s is compared to the process of reflexion by which one beam begets a second. And this second beam is in its turn compared to a pilgrim desirous of return. Now here we have, in the first place, the ordinary point of contact, as it might be in Virgil or Homer—namely that the causal relation between Beatrice’s action and Dante’s was the same as that between a ray of light and a reflexion. But secondly the very thing which Beatrice was doing and Dante was doing after her is itself an instance of response to light, so that the relation between Dante and Beatrice, taken together, and the sun, resembles the same thing which the relation between Dante and Beatrice resembles. And thirdly, inside the simile, the reflected beam is a pilgrim desiring to return home and doing so, which is just what Dante and Beatrice are desiring and doing at the moment. So that Dante and Beatrice are literaliter to the sun (and allegorice to God) what all reflected beams are to the original source of light and what Dante is literaliter to Beatrice and the human understanding allegorice to Wisdom and the whole universe (including beams of light and sources of light) is to the Unmoved Mover. The whole of Christian-Aristotelian theology is thus brought together. Every idea presented to the mind, as in a figure, repeats the subject in a slightly different way, and suggests further and further applications of it. It reverberates from that one imagined moment over all space and time, and further. This is a fairly easy example to treat because it is detachable. Elsewhere the force of the image depends on a context not much less than the whole Comedy. Thus, the passage already quoted about Time as a downward growing tree whose roots are in the Primum Mobile is effective by itself, especially to readers who remember Plato’s conceit of man’s root being in his head. It is much more effective, however, to those who remember the trees in Purgatorio, XXII, 133–5 and XXXII, 40–3, both of which had the peculiarity that they were fan-shaped, the branches becoming longer the higher you went. Of course the Time-tree would have looked like that if you didn’t know which way it was growing. And all these images are, again, to be taken in connexion with the great vision of Paradiso, XXVIII, 55–7 where the universe is turned inside out and the circumference is found to be the centre. But the greatest of all is, fortunately, detachable. I mean the simile which operates the salita in Paradiso, XVIII, 58. Dante sees Beatrice’s beauty increase: he knows from this phenomenon that they have risen to yet another of the spheres—just as (for he is thinking of Aristotle) a man knows that he has increased in virtue when he finds increased pleasure in virtuous acts. But Dante is not content simply to say that he knows they have risen higher: he says they have risen to a larger sphere. Notice first the admirable realism of this merely on the Wellsian level, leaving us to imagine the increased vertical distance (the radius) from the increased horizontal spaciousness (the circumference). And notice how this silence about the direct ascent, which gains our credence for the literal adventure, is implicitly excused or explained by the reminder that it is also like that in moral progress. And then notice that this is more than simile, that these material and spatial spheres are really, in Dante’s view, and not only poetically, correspondent to progressive degrees of grace and virtue and how exactly the ascent accomplished while looking at Beatrice and recognized only by what is seen in her corresponds to the moral advance accomplished while intent on something outside a man’s self; and then think of the increased size of the sphere and how well that symbolizes the new spaciousness of life when a good habitus has been acquired. The poetry of such a passage is almost inexhaustible.