7. When we meditate upon the unique grandeur of the Commedia, its cosmic scope, and the joint superiority in it of the inner melody, the action, the theme and the number, our admiration goes out to the genius of Dante, of course, but also to his luck.
A Frenchman has said that genius is a "long patience." He was probably right. But the longue patience and mad obstinacy in labor depend themselves on a deeper source. Complex as the obscure reality meant by this word may be, genius has essentially to do with the fact of poetic intuition taking shape in the inaccessible recesses of the soul at an exceptional degree of depth. When it comes to designating the particular quality which characterizes those creative regions, we are at a loss to find an appropriate name. The least defective term I am able to suggest is creative innocence. This creative innocence, which is one with unimpeded power and freedom of poetic intuition, is, I think, the most profound aspect of Dante's genius.
The word innocence has two connotations. The first is naiveté, that sort of total simpleness and confidence in gazing at things of which intelligence at the highest degree of its vitality or childish ignorance alone are capable, and which, like the charity spoken of by St. Paul, believes as one breathes, "believeth all things."
How could one utter if he did not believe? The native reliance, consubstantial with his own being, "la betise," Baudelaire said{15} (because he hid himself in the disparaging irony of nineteenth-century dandyism), with which any great poet believes all things—not only all things brought to him by poetic experience, but also everything in the world and in himself which is food or support for it, and every nod and wink that events give to him, and his own feeling, and his own urge to speak an unspeakable truth of his own—is carried in Dante to the point of an adamantine certitude. He has no doubt at all. He seems even immune from the doubt which troubles so many great poets about their own work.
And the feeling that every great poet has—be it in distressing obscurity—of a certain wound which has set free in him the creative source, and has separated him from other men (through the dreams and detachment of childhood, or some abiding despair) is carried in Dante to the point of a perfectly clear awareness. He knows his wound and believes in it; and cherishes it. Beatrice has made it. The best that we can do is to accept his testimony, just as it is given. Freudians may explain in their way the sublimation of the experience he underwent in seeing a girl of nine when he was nine. What matters to us is the fact that this trauma, penetrating to the very center of the powers of the spirit, has made of his relation to Beatrice the unshakeable personal truth on which his poetic intuitivity will live, the nest of his creative emotion, the basic belief through which all realities of the visible and invisible world will awaken his creative subjectivity. If by virtue of the magic of imagination and the symbol, Beatrice was to become, while remaining herself, a constellation of supreme spiritual lights, it is because everything revealed to Dante in the night of poetic knowledge was revealed to him in and through his love for her—captured itself by imagination but still keeping its original impact—and in continuity with the primordial intuition which had obscurely disclosed womanhood and desire to him.
Symbolically transmuted as she may be, Beatrice is never a symbol or an allegory for Dante. She is both herself and what she signifies. Dante's blessed naiveté is so profound that—at the preconscious level of creativity, in the deepest nocturnal recess of poetic intuition—he actually believes in this one and multiple identity. Without this central belief all his poetry would have quit him. His naiveté is such that he believes his love for Beatrice to be in itself and in the face of all men as important a thing as heaven and earth. This naiveté, which "believes all things," has such brazen audacity that nothing seems more natural to him than to have a certain girl, by the original fact that his flesh burned for her, exalted in paradise as the incarnation of theological knowledge, in whose eyes the humanity and the divinity of Christ are mirrored, and of faith illumined by the contemplative gifts, and of the inspired guidance in the regions of the beatific vision. Vergil and all the abysses of darkness and light were mobilized, the great voyage from hell to heaven was undertaken, the entire Commedia was written to glorify this woman. This was the first basic incentive. "Therefore," as he puts it in the last chapter of the Vita Nuova, "if it be His pleasure through Whom is the life of all things that my life continue with me a few years, it is my hope that I shall write yet concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman."
8. I would call integrity or incorruption, untouched original purity, the second connotation of creative innocence. If we remember what has been said in another part of this book about poetic experience and poetic intuition, we shall realize that the regions where they are born, when they are to possess the fullness of their nature, are regions of ontologic simplicity which are blissfully shielded from all the busyness of psychological interests. At the center of the Self self-research loses any sense. I have insisted elsewhere on the essential disinterestedness of poetic intuition. There is no merit in this disinterestedness. It is but an effect of the ontologic simplicity I just mentioned, some visible image of which the gravity of a child's gaze sometimes offers to us, who seems simply astonished to be, and condemns all our interests and their futility.
The creative emotion of minor poets is born in a flimsy twilight and at a comparatively superficial level in the soul. Great poets descend into the creative night and touch the deep waters over which it reigns. Poets of genius have their dwelling place in this night and never leave the shores of these deep waters. Here are the regions of integrity of which I am speaking.
We have no sign of this deep-seated integrity, except the work itself, or perchance the presence, in the visible regions of the soul, of some pure and lasting feeling, which is like a reflection on moving clouds of the sun fallen below the horizon. "What is God?" Thomas Aquinas asked when he was five. This question born in the creative innocence of a child's astonishment developed into the multiform and single movement of his lifelong research. It is not unwise to assume that in Dante something similar came about: not a prime question of nascent reason, but a prime wound of nascent sensibility and, in proportion as later on poetic experience developed, a more and more profound (as this wound itself) discovery by poetic intuition—an amazement without end before the face of love unveiling its miraculous and terrible ambiguity; and, then, across all the weaknesses and failings of a human life, a pure abiding feeling of spiritual fidelity, an unbroken process of deeper knowing and purifying of love. Shelley states that Dante "understood the secret things of love" more than any other poet. And did he not say himself:
Tutti li miei pensier parlan d'Amore.
He never idealized carnal love, whose tricks he also understood, and he never forgot that any evil can "color as love wills," as did the Siren's smarrito volto. He knew perfectly the difference in nature which distinguishes the various kinds of love, and especially divine love from human love. He is frightened and ashamed when, at the appearance of Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise, even before recognizing her he suddenly feels "the mighty power of ancient love," "d'antico amor la gran potenza," "through hidden virtue which went out from her." But he also knew that the lowest forms of love bear in darkness and distortion the seal of a higher origin, and that purified human love can be redeemed by divine love, and serve it. While his love for God his Savior, for "Him Who is the lord of courtesy," transfigures the woman he once desired, his love for this transfigured woman is the medium through which divine love penetrates, the creative center of his poetry. The entire Commedia was written to bear testimony to the purification of love in the heart of a man. This was the second basic incentive, and it was one with the first.
How would this long movement itself of self-purification have taken hold of the soul of the poet without the basic integrity of his creative experience, in which the "secret things of love" were gradually discovered to him?
9. Creative innocence is in no way moral innocence. It is, as I have indicated above, of an ontologic, not a moral nature. It has essentially to do with the intuition of the poet, not with his loves. And of the two things which alone make life worth living, love is more valuable than intuition when it transforms us into something better than we are, but intuition is not liable to all kinds of illusion and moral defilement, as love is: because intuition deals with knowledge (creative knowledge in the case of the poet) and, qua intuition, never misses the mark.
In every great poet creative innocence exists to some degree. It has its plenitude in the greatest. It exists in a place which is so deep-seated that no impact of the troubles, splits, vices, or failures which may undermine the domain of free will, passion, and instinct can spoil its ontologic integrity. In this place there is no conflict or break between senses and reason, because there is no division. All the powers of the soul are brought to unity in a state of habitual permanence, proper to a poetic experience which is not fleeting and transient, as it is usually, but lasting and steady, at least virtually. This place is the only one that is not wounded, I would say, by the old hereditary sin which wounds human nature. It is a kind of earthly paradise—but physical, not moral—concealed in nocturnal depths, in which nothing, to be sure, of the divine pageant described by Dante can be hoped for, but where the smile and the eyes of a Beatrice of beauty, not of sainthood, are mirrored in deep waters.
The inner world in the midst of which such a place exists may be filled with impurity; the moral experience of a great poet may be rotten; his thought and his passion may be stimulated by energies of illusion or perversity. When the things he has nourished in himself enter his earthly paradise of creative innocence, they keep their moral impurity—if they have any—which will also pass into the work. But they bathe in the ontologic purity of this place. In the waters of poetic knowledge they are dehumanized and made into mineral entities, transmuted into forms of the revelation of being through creative emotion; they receive a new nature, a poetic nature, a new principle of existence, which replaces in them the human one, and causes their moral impact and moral qualities, as well as the marks and stains upon them of a man's tics or vices, to become henceforth accidental and secondary in the particular sphere of this new state of existence, where only poetry and beauty are essential. To the extent to which moral deformity always involves some ontologic defect, some naught, there will be, if the things in question, the poet's intellectual and moral supply, are corroded by such naught, some lack or deficiency in their new nature as forms of the revelation of being through creative emotion. Yet inasmuch as they receive this new nature, and emerge from a poetic intuition proper to the great depths, this lack or deficiency entails only some comparative imperfection in the work into which they enter, and they are invested with the ontologic purity of creative innocence, they are possessed of a purity which is poetic purity.
Thus it is that a great poet can be corrupt, while his creative intuition never is. A purity remains in him, which of itself is of no avail for his soul, but which is a blessing for his work and for us. And if there are in this work poisonous human meanings and morally impure ferments, their impact on human minds will wear off in time, absorbed or superseded by another impact, more essential to the work, the impact of poetic purity and poetic energy. Time, as Shelley put it, will wash away all the sins of the poet in the eyes of those who receive from him the pure gift of a more profound discovery in the experience of beauty and the human soul.
10. Dante was not corrupt, and nothing morally impure went from his heart into his work. This is not, however, the fact with which our present considerations are concerned. They point to this other fact, that all things a poet puts in his work must pass through the creative night of poetic intuition. Nowhere is Dante's great lesson clearer.
No poet has had to do with heavier equipment and ammunition. Not to speak of his perfect craftsmanship, he knew everything his time knew and took to heart all the conflicts, whether social, political, or religious, in which his time was engaged. His work is a summa laden with a world of divine and human truths, yearnings, and violence. For ivory tower he has the earth and heaven. He describes, he narrates, he teaches, he preaches. Why such freedom? All his immense materials, all the constellations of Christianity were carried in the creative night of his poetic intuition to a state of imponderable poetic existence. All passed through this intuitive night, by virtue of his extraordinarily profound creative innocence. For creative innocence is the paradise of poetic intuition, the existential state in which poetic intuition can reach full power and liberty. (And another quality of the entire soul concurred, but this is another point.)
In addition to the basic poetic incentives, all kinds of purposes, human, nonartistic in nature, played their part freely in the productive effort of Dante. None entered his art and his work as an extraneous element, interfering with, or "bending," them. Being integrated in poetic intuition, all were in, from the start, at each creative instant on which each part of the work depended. As to the final end, it was, so he wrote, "to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and lead them to the state of felicity."{16} In fact, while the poet intended such a final purpose, poetry was freer than ever, quickened from within in its very liberty, and it was to make of the work, if not the great instrument of salvation that the poet proposed, at least a self-sufficient creation mirroring the wanderings of humanity in search of blessedness—simply a poem, in a word, in which a host of readers most often deaf to its preaching would look for the delights of beauty—not to speak of the supreme delights afforded to scholars by the puzzles of allegory, trope, and anagogy.
Dante teaches a great deal. Everybody teaches in the Commedia. Why do we never feel the tedium of didacticism? Nothing is more boring in a poem than philosophy or allegory. Why are we never bored with the philosophical lectures of Dante, and all his allegorical apparatus? Not to speak of his geographical contrivances and cosmological devices? The answer is always the same. If all these things are deprived of their natural weight, and become light and transparent, and have been made themselves innocent, it is because, as a natural result of the poet's creative innocence, they have been seized hold of by his emotion, abstract as they may be, and have received from it an ingenuous soul, and an indefinite meaning which matters more than their own. May I suggest that Dante believes in his riddles and his cosmological and geographical sand castles with the ambiguous seriousness of childhood's imagination? As to allegory, he invests it with such visual melody that we already receive some intuitive pleasure from it—even from it!—before understanding anything of it.{17} As T. S. Eliot observes, it is enough for us to know that it has a meaning, without knowing yet what this meaning can be.
And perhaps it is not necessary to understand Dante's philosophical discourses either, to be allured by a pleasure of reason: so pure are their perfect economy and the intellectual sweep they delineate, like a dance movement, by virtue of some underlying music of emotion. Yet we enjoy them to the full, to be sure, when the marvelous precision of the intelligible meaning appears also to us, adding clarity to clarity. Thus, in the Purgatorio, we are instructed in the existence of free will by Marco Lombardo:
Voi che vivete ogni cagion recate
pur suso al cielo, pur come se tutto
movesse seco di necessitate.
Se cosi fosse, in voi fora distrutto
libero arbitrio, e non fora giustizia
per ben, letizia, e per male, aver lutto.
Lo cielo i vostri movimenti inizia;
non dico tutti, ma, posto ch'io it dica,
lume v'e dato a bene ed a malizia
e libero voler, che, se fatica
nelle prime battaglie col del dura,
poi wince tutto, se ben si notrica.
A maggior forza e tniglior natura
liberi soggiacete, e quella cria
la mente in voi, che it ciel non ha in sua cura.{18}
Finally a point made by T. S. Eliot may be discussed, I think, in the light of our present considerations. Eliot observes that although the Divine Comedy could not have been written without Dante's religious faith, it is not necessary to share in this faith to understand the poem and assent to its beauty. You must be instructed, of course, about the things in which Dante believed, but you are not required to believe in them yourself. In reading the poem, Eliot says, "you suspend both belief and disbelief." Moreover, while being perhaps as remote as possible from Dante's own belief, you do not feel hurt by that imposition of the personal belief of a man forcing its way into another which other poets, Goethe for instance, do not spare us.{19} I assume, as Eliot does, that the typical characteristics of the religious doctrine to which Dante adhered are not alien to the fact. "A coherent traditional system of dogma and morals like the Catholic . . . stands apart, for understanding and assent even without belief, from the single individual who propounds it."{20} More precisely, with the objective system of reference of a public revelation conveyed to all through the testimony of a visible Church, there is no need for the poet to push himself forward in speaking of what he believes more than in speaking of what everyone sees.
I hasten to say, nevertheless, that not with all Catholic poets does a non-Catholic reader feel himself protected from any intrusive assertion of an individual's belief. The reason for the fact mentioned by Eliot lies in the very purity of Dante's poetic approach. It relates to the sovereign and native primacy of the poetic sense over the intelligible sense—even in a poetry which is splendidly clear. The ego of the man has disappeared in the creative Self of the poet. Theological faith itself, the most sacred belief, has entered the work through the instrumentality of creative emotion and poetic knowledge, and passed through the lake of disinterestedness of creative innocence.
And Luck
11. It is not enough to speak of Dante's genius. We must also take his luck into consideration. The extraordinary luck of Dante the poet was a result of the coincidence of an extraordinary variety of good fortunes. It had to do with the grace of God and the virtues of Dante the man, with centuries of culture and with a unique moment in time.
There was, first, the innocence of his heart. The subtle naivete of the medieval man was all the greater in him as it was brightened but not yet corrupted by the dawning ardors of modern consciousness. Full of violence as he was, his passions, angers, and prepossessions, as well as the ventures of his life, all emerged from candor and ingenuousness. The purity of his eye made his "whole body lightsome." No fault leaves mud in a soul which knows itself in clarity and is steeped in the feeling of the mercy of its Redeemer. I do not believe that the creative innocence of Dante, and the transparency of his poetic experience, could have been so deep, had not the innocence of his heart established his entire soul in genuine connaturality with them.
Another luck for his poetry was the freedom of mind he received from the firmness of his religious faith. Because he was so perfectly sure of his faith, his poetry was able freely to play even with its tenets, and to fancy, without deceiving anybody, that condition of the "neither rebellious nor faithful," rejected both by heaven and by hell, which theology does not know. Because he was perfectly sure of his faith, he was eager for knowledge, whose consonance with his faith was for him divinely unquestionable, and he had such liberty in his appreciation of any effort of human reason, that he welcomed in his praise and paradise both Thomas Aquinas and Siger de Brabant. He was not afraid, as the Jansenists were later on, to do justice to the natural virtues of the pagans. He had none of the fears and complexes which paralyze our modem literary martyrs of freedom from truth. His undivided intellect was established in a state of general security by the all-pervading security of his faith. It is hard for our modern mind to imagine the simplicity in belief and firmness in adherence which characterized the whole thought of Dante, however refined, subtle, and learned, and his vision of the world and of himself. Here again a certain kind of innocence in man, an innocence of the intellect, which was in no way credulity, but integrity of the natural elan or eros, assisted creative innocence.
And so we are led to a different category of luck, which has to do not with a strengthening of the creative source itself, but rather with the prerequired conditions—depending on the general equipment of the mind and the harvest garnered in its granaries—of which I spoke with respect especially to the action and the theme, and which relate to creative intuition from the outside. I am thinking, here, of the heritage of culture received by Dante, and of the articulate universe of beliefs and values in which his thought dwelt. Dante wrestled with his time, which forced into exile the poet threatened with death. But as concerns the spiritual quality of the cultural heritage he was blessed by his time. Then the human mind was imbued with the sense of being, and nature appeared all the more real and consistent as it was perfected by grace. Being still turned toward wisdom, still permeated with rationality and mystery both of which descended from the Uncreate Word, still softened by the blood of the Incarnate Word, the universe of the late thirteenth century, with its ontological hierarchies mirrored in the hierarchies of intellectual disciplines, ensured to the intelligence and emotion of a poet, despite all the evil fevers, discords, crimes, and vices of the time, a state of integration and vitality that the modern man has lost. Dante participated with all his fibers in an organic order which already felt the first breaths of a newly-born spring, and did not know it was already decaying.
I do not believe that the greater or less perfection in intrinsic truth of the universe of thought of a poet matters to his poetry save in quite a remote manner. The medieval universe, true as its highest metaphysical principles may be, was, on the other hand, lacking in a great many truths that the modern man has discovered at the price of his internal unity. Moreover, great poetry was to live in universes of thought quite different from that of Dante—already the universe of Cervantes, and still more that of Shakespeare, and still more that of Goethe, and still more that of Dostoevski, not to speak of what had been the universe of Homer or that of Sophocles, or that of the Upanishads. What matters to poetry in a close and direct manner are, I think, certain extremely simple but basic presences or existential certainties, assured by the universe of thought which constitutes the vital environment of poetic intuition: for instance a certitude both of the mysterious irrefragable existence and the exigency of intelligibility involved in things; a certitude of the interiority of the human being, and of its importance; a certitude that between man and the world there is an invisible relationship deeper than any material interconnection; a certitude that the impact of his freedom on his destiny gives his life a movement which is oriented, and not lost in the void, and which has to do, in one way or another, with the whole fabric of being. Such existential certitudes, and many others no doubt, existed in the mind of Baudelaire (at what cost—columns in what desert) as in that of Dante. The absence of some of them is responsible for the narcissism of Mallarmé. I submit that without them the prerequired conditions are lacking for any great poetry to reach full stature. Natural as they may be, these certitudes exist with greater force and stability if they are integrated in an articulate universe of thought. They cannot exist in us when the universe of thought that we have received—and accepted (in anguish or complacency, revolt or self-abandonment)—from our age of culture is a disintegrated universe which rejects or denies them, and has lost, together with the intellectual sense of being and truth, what Waldo Frank called, in the page quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the sense of the person (or of the interiority of the human being) and the sense of Time (or of the oriented movement of human existence). Dante's luck was to have all the presences, the existential certitudes which are the natural soil of poetry, integrated with absolute firmness in a consistent universe of thought rooted in reason and faith—and radiant to his emotion in the blissful innocence of the intellect. Never has creative innocence enjoyed so favorable a climate and such exceptional assistance. A whole cosmos could pass through the creative night of his poetic intuition.
Finally we have also to consider the fleeting uniqueness of the moment of human history which was the moment of Dante. As Allen Tate has pointed out, the luckiest periods for art and poetry are those where a great civilization is on the verge of decline. Then the vital force of this civilization meets with historical conditions which cease being appropriate to it, but it is still intact, for one moment, in the sphere of spiritual creativity, and it gives its last fruit there, while the freedom of poetry avails itself of the decay of social disciplines and ethos. Nothing less than age-old Christendom was singing its last song in Dante.
Yet the point with which I am concerned is much more particular. It has to do with the proper time of poetry itself. Considering the process of self-realization, through a work of words, of poetry as free creativity of the spirit, I would say that during the Middle Ages poetry (I mean in the vernacular) had remained in a preadult state. The diversity of generic forms (mystery play, romance, lyric, etc.) in which it expressed itself had only to do with a condition imposed by art or technè. Medieval poetry had not reached the stage where the inner growth of poetry demands a division of poetry itself into certain basic forms by virtue of an essential difference in its approach to the work. In other words art was differentiated; poetry, in its own ways of using the activity of art, was not. The virtualities of its energy of self-realization through the work of words were still united in indistinctness. Dante arrived just at the instant when medieval poetry touched its ultimate point of growth—on the verge of differentiation, but still undifferentiated.
Thus it is that the Divine Comedy breaks open, the classical framework of the epic (it is in no way a simple Christian Aeneid)and cannot be classed in any literary genre. He we are confronted with the central fact on which I wish to lay stress. The Commedia embraces in its substantial unity forms of poetic creation which demand of themselves to be separate, and which will separate after Dante—I say as specific types of poetry, apart from the more external division of the work (even if it happens to lack any poetry) into artistic or literary genres. The Divine Comedy is at the same time and with the same intensive reality poetry of the song, poetry of the theater, and poetry of the tale; the three epiphanies of poetic intuition compose together its single soul or entelechy.
The Divine Comedy is indeed a Song—a song to a woman who was loved (all poets think so) as no other woman ever was or will be, and a song to the purification of love in the heart of the poet. With its "lax and humble method of speech," as Dante put it,{21} it is a sustained avowal, veiled under infinitely variegated external forms, of the subjectivity of the poet wounded by this woman, and through this wound awakened to its own depths and all things, in the transparent night of poetic knowledge. A long inner melody of feelings and meanings, running through the entire work, gives it its secret unity, and that pure freedom, satisfied only with being, which witnesses to the freedom in it of the poetic sense. The indefinitely vibrating echoes and overtones in intelligibility due to the multiplicity of allusive senses and to the "imaginative fusion of images and ideas" enigmatically convey in the tercets and sequences a singular impact of subjectivity in the act of intuitive emotion. The music of intuitive pulsions, prevented as it may be from direct expression by the requirements of intelligibility, passes despite all into the very intelligibility of the lines—translated into the infallible cadence of the intelligible and imaginative élan, which loads with pure emotion each particular unit or episode. Speaking of the third canto of the Inferno, "in this canto," Coleridge said, "all the images are distinct, and even vividly distinct, but there is a total impression of infinity; the wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in an inner feeling of totality, and absolute being";{22} and he noted the fundamental importance of "inwardness or subjectivity"{23} in Dante's poetry. Everywhere, but especially perhaps in the Paradiso, the freedom of the song is a sign of the kind of "aseity" peculiar to the first epiphany of creative intuition.
Pero che tutte quelle wive luci,
vie piu lucendo, cominciaron canti
da mia memoria labili e caduci.
O dolce amor, che di riso t'ammanti,
quanto parevi ardente in quei flailli
ch'avieno spirto sol di pensier santi!{24}
But the Divine Comedy is also, indeed, a Drama. Scott Buchanan, in Poetry and Mathematics, and Francis Fergusson, in The Idea of a Theater, have remarked that "the deepest and most elaborate development of the trade rhythm is to be found in the Divine Comedy.”{25} The whole work
and its three parts, and the whole and detail of each part, are animated by the intellectual élan, articulate and definite, proper to the action; and the unitary power of the theme is the meaning of a particularly powerful action. In the last analysis, it is by virtue of that objectivization of creative intuition which is the action that "the most wakeful reason" enjoys full freedom in the poem without threatening (because action and poetic sense are in perfect consonance) the spells of the night, and gently interweaves its threads with those of the myth and the dream. Thus could a theorist of the theater like Fergusson—I have already noted the fact—find in the Divine Comedy, especially in the Purgatorio, an ideal exemplar of dramatic action. The Commedia is for him—with the drama of Sophocles and Shakespeare—one of the "cultural landmarks in which the idea of a theater has been briefly realized"; it shows us "not the contemporary possibility, but the perennial idea of a theater of human life and action."{26}
And the Divine Comedy is also, indeed, a Tale, or better, a Novel of the beyond and the here below. It is a continuous and complex narrative, in which the particular adventures of the two protagonists serve to put into existence and motion a world of adventures and destinies, so as to make of each human being involved a center of interest, looked at by the poet in its own singular ineffable reality. Though their fates are now sealed, and their lives have become only an object of memory, all these characters have life and existential interiority, because their author knows them, as every novelist does, from the inside, that is, through himself, or through connaturality. As the Commedia clearly shows, it is through his own inclinations, but especially through his love, that Dante knew his characters; love was the great medium, either pity or piety or furor (the reverse face of love). And although he nowhere indulged in any kind of connivance or complicity, he even loved, and even admired, certain of his sinners without being in any way hindered by their state of damnation—as in particular that master of his youth, his dear Brunetto Latini, who even in hell "seemed like him who wins, and not like him who loses":
Poi si rivolse, e parve di coloro
che corrono a Verona it drappo verde
per la campagna; e parve di costoro
quelli che wince, non colui che perde.{27}
At this point—just as the essence of the Song appears everywhere, but especially perhaps in the Paradiso, and that of Drama everywhere but especially perhaps in the Purgatorio—must we note that the essence of the Novel appears everywhere, but especially perhaps in the Inferno?{28} It has been said of Dante: "His eye is always directly upon the life of the psyche in its shifting modes of being, its thought, its sufferings, and its contemplation."{29} In other words he has the eye of a genuine novelist.
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