Only with the aid of metaphor is it possible to find a concrete sign for the forming instinct with which Dante accumulated his terza rima to the point of overflowing.

Thus, one has to imagine how it would be if bees had worked at the creation of this thirteen-thousand-faceted shape, bees endowed with instinctive stereometric genius, who attracted more and still more bees as they were needed. The work of these bees, who always keep an eye on the whole, is not equally difficult at the various stages of the process. Their cooperation broadens and becomes more complex as they proceed with the formation of the combs, by means of which space virtually arises out of itself.

The analogy with bees, by the way, is suggested by Dante himself. Here are the three lines which open Canto XVI of the Inferno:

Già era in loco, onde s’udia il rimbombo

dell’acqua che cadea nell’altro giro,

simile a quel che l’arnie fanno rombo.16

(Inferno, XVI, 1–3)

Dante’s similes are never descriptive, that is, purely representational. They always pursue the concrete goal of giving the inner image of the structure or the force. Let us take the very large group of bird similes—all those long caravans now of cranes, now of crows, and now the classical military phalanxes of swallows, now the anarchically disorderly ravens, unsuited to Latin military formations—this group of extended similes always corresponds to the instinct of pilgrimage, travel, colonization, migration. Or let us take, for example, the equally extensive group of river similes, portraying the rise in the Apennines of the river Arno, which irrigates the Tuscan plain, or the descent into the plain of Lombardy of its alpine wet nurse, the river Po. This group of similes, marked by an extraordinary liberality and a step-by-step descent from tercet to tercet, always leads to a complex of culture, homeland, and unsettled civic life, to a political and national complex, so conditioned by water boundaries and also by the power and direction of rivers.

The force of Dante’s simile, strange as it may seem, is directly proportional to our ability to get along without it. It is never dictated by some beggarly logical necessity. What, pray tell, could have been the logical necessity for comparing the poem as it neared its end to an article of attire—gonna, what we would today call “skirt” but in early Italian meant, rather, a “cloak” or “dress” in general—and himself to a tailor who, forgive the expression, had run out of stuff?

IV.

As Dante began to be more and more beyond the powers of readers in succeeding generations and even of artists themselves, he was more and more shrouded in mystery. The author himself was striving for clear and exact knowledge. For his contemporaries he was difficult, he was exhausting, but in return he bestowed the award of knowledge. Later on, things got much worse. There was the elaborate development of the ignorant cult of Dantean mysticism, devoid, like the very idea of mysticism, of any concrete substance. There appeared the “mysterious” Dante of the French etchings,17 consisting of a monk’s hood, an aquiline nose, and some sort of occupation among mountain crags. In Russia this voluptuous ignorance on the part of the ecstatic adepts of Dante, who did not read him, claimed as its victim none other than Alexander Blok:

The shade of Dante with his aquiline profile

Sings to me of the New Life . . .18

The inner illumination of Dante’s space by light—light derived from nothing more than the structural elements of his work—was of absolutely no interest to anyone.

I shall now show how little concern the early readers of Dante felt for his so-called mysteriousness. I have in front of me a photograph of a miniature from one of the very earliest copies of Dante, made in the mid-fourteenth century (from the collection in the library of Perugia). Beatrice is showing Dante the Holy Trinity. A brilliant background with peacock designs, like a gay calico print, the Holy Trinity in a willow frame—ruddy, rosy-cheeked, round as merchants. Dante Alighieri is depicted as an extremely dashing young man and Beatrice as a lively, round-faced girl. Two absolutely ordinary little figures—a scholar, exuding health, is courting a no less flourishing girl.

Spengler, who devoted some superlative pages to Dante, nevertheless saw him from his loge in a German Staatsoper, and when he says “Dante” one must nearly always understand “Wagner, as staged in Munich.”

The purely historical approach to Dante is just as unsatisfactory as the political or theological. Future commentary on Dante belongs to the natural sciences, when they shall have been brought to a sufficient degree of refinement and their capacity for thinking in images sufficiently developed.

I have an overwhelming desire to refute the disgusting legend that Dante’s coloring is inevitably dim or marked by the notorious Spenglerian brownness. To begin with, I shall refer to the testimony of one of his contemporaries, an illuminator. A miniature by him is from the same collection in the museum at Perugia. It belongs to Canto I: “I saw a beast and turned back.” Here is a description of the coloring of this remarkable miniature, which is of a higher type than the preceding one, and completely adequate to the text.

Dante’s clothing is bright blue (adzura chiara). Vergil’s beard is long and his hair is grey. His toga is also grey. His short cloak is rose. The hills are bare, grey.

Thus we see here bright azure and rose flecks in the smoky grey rock.

In Canto XVII of the Inferno there is a monster of transportation named Geryon, something like a super-tank, and with wings into the bargain. He offers his services to Dante and Vergil, having received from the sovereign hierarchy an appropriate order for the transportation of two passengers to the lower, eighth circle:

due branche avea pilose infin l’ascelle;

lo dosso e’l petto ed ambedue le coste

dipinte avea di nodi e di rotelle:

con più color, sommesse e sopraposte

non fer mai drappi Tartari nè Turchi,

nè fur tai tele per Aragne imposte.19

(Inferno, XVII, 13–18)

The subject here is the color of Geryon’s skin.