is profoundly patriotic; he seeks the spiritual uplifting of the Italian people. But the tools he works with are still not adequate to the vastness of his task; they are the tools of an aristocrat, a Ghibelline, superbly fastidious and exclusive, refusing concession, disdaining compromise. As a reformer he embraces the desperate policy of calling in an alien emperor to impose peace; as a poet he offers for a common speech an 'illustrious vernacular,' jealously confined to the utterance of the most flawlessly beautiful and majestic modes of art; a choice music to be won only by elaborate and strenuous discipline, and demanding ears as choice for its apprehension. With scorn like that of Apollo for the rustic music of Marsyas, he warns off the untaught singer who relies on a native gift of song.

'Let him take warning, and mark these words of ours, and when he proposes to himself to sing flawlessly of these three topics, ... having first drunk of Helicon and strung his lyre, let him fearlessly take up the plectron and duly begin. But to make the song. as beseems, this is a matter of labour and toil; for it can never be accomplished without strenuousness of intellect and assiduous art and acquired knowledge. And these are they whom the poet in the sixth Aeneid calls the beloved of God, lifted up to the aether. And therefore let their folly be confessed who, wanting art and science, and trusting in their wits alone, rush in to sing of the supreme matters in the supreme style; let them leave this presumption, and refrain from emulating the star-aspiring eagle if by reason of native sloth they are geese.'

But this Apolline scorn for the untaught was not the final temper of Dante's poetry. There came a time when Apollo borrowed Marsyas's pipe and played to his audience; when the haughty and fastidious singer subdued his tongue to speak in the language of 'simple womenfolk' and through images which went home to their hearts. The 'Comedy,' consummate flower and fruit of Dante's poetry, involved, in his theory of poetry, a certain shifting of his ground, a certain withdrawal from impracticable or insufficient positions. But the result, for the afterworld, if not for Dante himself, was an enormous advance in theory also; a vast expansion of the recognised scope and possibilities of song. It must suffice here to summarise in the briefest way the conditions and nature of this last and supreme phase of Dante's art.

The death of the Emperor Henry VII in 1313, which finally frustrated the Ghibelline solution of the political problem, also sapped the basis, for an ardent patriot like Dante, of an aristocratic poetry From authority, in the State as in the Church, nothing was visibly to be hoped; and Dante, abandoning the direct path towards national salvation which rapine and lust had barred, chose under the guidance of Virgil the other way,' and set his hand to the great work of which the aim, in his own words, was 'to win all men in this life from the state of misery and to lead them to the state of felicity,' by setting before them the vision of humanity in its choice of good and evil. In other words, he addresses himself no longer primarily to a circle of select hearers, but to the whole body of his countrymen. He goes out from the sanctuary to the public ways. He takes up the common tunes into his symphony, touching them to finer issues. The didactic allegory of his old master Brunetto is resumed in a compendium of universal knowledge. The savage realism of the Ceccos reappears transmuted into the words of flame and steel that burn and rend the shades of Boniface and Brutus.

The inner core of his poetry-its fundamental passion and thought-remained; righteousness and love were the final theme of the 'Comedy' as, in more naïve and personal form, they had been of the Vita Nuova.' But the whole fabric of the imaginative presentment, the whole vesture of speech and figure, are new. For the author of the 'De Vulgari Eloquentia,' love and righteousness could only be worthily sung in majestic lyric canzoni; now song gives way to story, the canzone to the verse in which tales were recited in the public piazzas, the fine woof of philosophic symbolism to the immemorial marvels of the popular creed. They could only be worthily sung in the choice high-wrought tragic style; now he utters them, if we may accept his express assurance, in the lowly and careless manner of comedy, and in the language in which simple women-folk converse, 'in qua et mulierculae communicant.' We smile at this description of the language of the 'Inferno'; but the simple women-folk themselves went far to justify him when they pointed, in the streets of Verona, to the man' who had seen hell.' He had told them of hell in language which spoke home.

Thus did Dante, in merely seeking to temper his art to simple minds, fall upon new and wonderful developments of it. In giving up song to tell a story, he was in effect emancipating himself from the lyric prepossessions in which he had grown up, and creating an epic poem for Italy. An epic, indeed, still vibrating with the lyrical prepossessions out of which it had grown; story as told by a born singer who of choice refrains from song; passionate, personal, individual, wholly unlike the sculpturesque objectivity of the Iliad.' Homer never emerges; Dante stands always in the focus and centre of the tale he tells. Yet, on the other hand, it is true epic and of the grandest kind. The circle which thus thrills and throbs with personality and passion at the centre, holds the universe in its circumference; and, if the soul of Dante attends us everywhere and will not let us go, it is a soul which has become a mirror for all things in heaven and earth, which has possessed the sun and the stars.

6

It is perhaps not hypercritical to notice that the structural divisions of the poem, the three cantiche and the hundred cantos, appear to simulate a collection of songs, such as the Wolfian school were later to discover in the 'Iliad' and the Nibelungenlied,' rather than a continuous narrative; and the single canto resembles a canzone in length rather than a Homeric or Virgilian 'book.' And the seamless vesture of interwoven rhymes which enfolds each canto seems designed to secure, together with the continuity of narrative, the interrelatedness of the parts which he admired in the sestinas of Arnaut Daniel. The sequence of terzine is not so closeknit as that of the stanzas in the sestina, but they have the same character of advancing by definite and symmetrical steps. And just as the old lyric temper still works in Dantesque epic, so the old subtle symbolism has not really been expelled by the new plain and homely speech, but persists along with it, a more profound and pervading form than ever-a Proteus saved by transforming itself. The story, however simple, direct, and lifelike the telling, is not really simple; it means more than is told; behind the human drama we witness and listen to, there is a larger sense that we gather and infer. The modern student reads with some alarm, perhaps, Dante's exposition to Can Grande of the four meanings

running through his poem. But though it be allegory, and allegory fourfold, it is wholly exempt from the besetting frigidity and unreality of allegory. He hardly ever deals in dreamy personifications like Spenser.* The modern allegorist has to establish or invent a correspondence between the order of real life and the order of ideas, and he rarely does it without violence to the one or the other. But for the medieval poet a correspondence was already there. To signify something in the higher order was of the essence of whatever really existed in the lower. The universe, God's act, was at the same time His speech; everything that happened, every life that rose and strove and passed away, was a word of the divine mind, pregnant with a significance more than it knew. The human world which gives the literal sense of this allegory, and the spiritual interpretation, are for Dante equally real; and the old poetic ideal of the Vita Nuova' days, fidelity through figure, found a deeper solution in this union of realism and suggestion in the great poem of his maturity.

The conception of the universe as the visible language of God, moreover, while liable to abuse by superstitious fancy, opened the way to the subtle imaginative apprehension of life and of nature which is one of the notes of the greatest modern poetry. Dante stands, a great mediator, between the allegorists who shadowed forth their meaning in purely symbolic shapes, and the naturalists, who painted what they saw, but saw nothing more than they painted. The imaginative and pregnant realism of Dante, uniting the larger significance of the one with the lifelike veracity of the other, foreshadowed, despite the vast changes wrought by Protestantism, and the scientific discovery of the world by Humanism, whatever is, in the profounder sense of the term, Romantic in modern poetry; whether it be Wordsworth's wondrous earth, this mighty sum of things for ever speaking,' or Goethe's living and moving humanity, the living robe of the Godhead woven by the Earth-spirit at the roaring loom of Time.

C. H. HERFORD.

Art. 6.-THE PROBLEM OF PASCAL.

1. Pascal. By Viscount St Cyres.

Elder and Co., 1909.

London: Smith,

2. Euvres de Blaise Pascal. Edited by L. Brunschvicq and Pierre Boutroux (in course of publication). Paris: Hachette, 1904-8.

3. Pascal. By Emile Boutroux. Paris: Hachette, 1900. 4. Blaise Pascal. A Study in Religious Psychology. By Humphrey R. Jordan, B.A. London: Williams and Norgate, 1909.

And other works.

Of certain well-known figures in history, as on the stage, we may say that they exert the fascination of a problem never quite resolved and therefore continually new. In literature the striking example is Hamlet; in history, among the Romans, Tiberius, among Italians, Machiavelli; but the French, from whom we should scarcely look for it, have given us in Pascal the most enigmatic of religious teachers and the most questionable of orthodox champions. Pascal stands by himself, claiming no ancestors, leaving no successors. Although the spokesman of a 'refined and special sect of Christian believers,' he derived from Port Royal neither his eloquence nor his method of reasoning. By conviction a fierce dogmatist, he has been reckoned a sceptic. Sensitive to all the springs of emotion, he was yet hard upon others and harder to himself. A pioneer of physical science, he renounced and despised it in the name of religion; yet he it was who most sharply defended Galileo in a famous sarcasm about the earth's moving on despite ecclesiastical censure. Violently opposed to the Reformers, he is equally hostile to the Jesuits. A devout Roman Catholic, he appeals from the judgment of the Papal See to the tribunal of Christ. He is a fanatic, but he questions all first principles; a keen logician who scorns the syllogism; a master of irony and satire who resolves the Gospel into a commandment of love; a humorist who provokes inextinguishable laughter yet who is more melancholy than tears, more saddening in his effect on such as turn to him for comfort than any modern except Swift. That some formidable note of interrogation was embodied in Pascal we cannot deny. Vol. 213.-No. 425.

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