V DANTE AND MODERN EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES

In face of Benedetto Croce’s new Book,[180] wherein all the meticulous industry exerted by the typical Dantist upon side-issues of the Divine Comedy is held up to scorn, and denounced, like Cromwell’s House of Lords, as “useless and dangerous,” one hardly dares to labour a point—even if it be so exalted a point as the principles and method of education. But it is the criticism of Dante’s Poesy that is Croce’s concern: his jealous anxiety is directed against any admixture in that criticism of any irrelevant considerations—allegorical, theological, philosophical, poetical. As we are not attempting a criticism of Dante’s Poesy (though none can approach the Commedia without falling under the spell of its beauty and passion), we may perhaps hope to evade the fiery darts of the Poet’s latest critic.

Croce himself would be the last to deny Dante’s extraordinary versatility: only he pleads that if the author of the Divine Comedy had not been, “as he is, grandissimo poeta,” the world would not have noted his other accomplishments.[181] We may therefore perhaps be pardoned if we indulge in something of that “sonorous but empty phraseology”[182] which he attributes to those who look for much more than Poetry in the great Poem; and come to the Commedia as to a mine of varied treasures reflecting the versatile spirit of one who was not only a sublime poet, but also a man of many-sided knowledge and experience—theological, philosophical, political, practical—and who poured all the wealth of his knowledge and experience into the supreme effort of his genius:

Before Dante as a boy learnt his lessons of the good friars of Sta. Croce, and in the school of the great lord, Love blossomed out into verse under the sunshine of his “first friend’s” encouragement, pored over crabbed manuscripts under the inspiration of the learned Ser Brunetto, and grew up to be an unique exponent of mediaeval lore; that lore, which formed the material out of which he wrought the scheme of his immortal poem had very slowly and gradually come into being. The course of Christian Education had passed through rhythmic vicissitudes of advance and retrogression, of decadence and revival. Sown broadcast over the fields of the Graeco-Roman world by Apostolic hands[183] the seed fructified and gave forth foliage to delight and refresh mankind. In the golden age of the Greek Fathers, when Clement and Origen wrote and taught, when Basil and Gregory at the University of Athens drank in all that the old world had to teach, and transmuted it into something fresh and new by the fertilising power of the New Life that was in them, the Christian Church became, in Harnack’s phrase, “the great elementary schoolmistress of the Roman Empire.”

Then followed a decline. The barbarian invasions kept men fighting, and left no time to muse or think, or write. Dante’s hero, Boethius, stands out an almost solitary luminous figure in a world of growing intellectual darkness, of which Gregory of Tours despairingly exclaimed: “Periit studium litterarum.” By the middle of the eighth century the lamp was nearly extinguished. To our own Alcuin of York belongs the glory of having preserved the continuum of literary studies which made a Dante possible. His patient and persevering labours at the court of Charles the Great laid the foundations on which was ultimately built—of multifarious material, partly recovered through Arabic sources—the splendid structure of mediaeval scholasticism which forms much of Dante’s mental background.

After Dante’s death the same rhythmic alternation of advance and retrogression, of greater and less vitality, may, on the whole, be discerned in the course of educational history; and as our object is to unearth in the Divine Comedy some educational principles vaunted as “peculiarly modern,” it may be best to dwell for a moment—if still all too superficially—on this second half of the story.

When the impulse of Scholasticism had well-nigh spent itself—and with it the splendid revival at once of practical and of intellectual Christianity which came in with “The Coming of the Friars”—the dawn of the Renaissance was already gleaming in the Eastern sky, and the fall of Constantinople flooded Western Europe with a new interest in, and passion for, Hellenic culture. The birth-throes of the Reformation ushered into the world a “New Learning.” In a couple of centuries the fire of this impulse in turn died down, and (in England, at any rate) Education largely fell back, speaking generally—with smaller actions and reactions—into something like a mere mechanical routine. The Classics became an end, and not a means, and the study of them was divorced from citizenship and from life. The aim and method of the average schoolmaster would almost appear to have degenerated into a grinding of his pupils all alike in the same mill, or a feeding of their diverse digestions all on the same “iron rations”: the pedagogue himself innocent alike of an as yet undiscovered psychological method in teaching, and in many cases also failing to realise the paramount importance of the formation of character as the only result worth striving for.

Then came, with Rousseau, the first streaks of the dawn of the “New Teaching,” and there followed, in a brightening sky, Pestalozzi and Froebel abroad, and here in England Arnold and Thring and the rest. And this New Teaching, using the present-day opportunities of co-operation and tabulation of experimental results on a large scale, has, by dint of Conferences and Congresses, grown into something of a world-wide unity. Modern Science has thus leavened educational method both in general and in particular. In general, its spirit and principles have been employed to make available for all the investigations of each; in particular, the recent developments of psychology and psycho-physics have given a new impulse and a new direction to child-study, and made possible an elaboration of scientific method and of didactic apparatus such as was not available in any previous age. Here the instinctive methods employed unconsciously by the “born teachers” of all generations have been brought up to the level of consciousness, and systematised and made available, to a large extent, for those in whom the instinctive gift is not so great.

One of the prominent tendencies of the New Teaching is to revert to, and elaborate, that Direct Method in the teaching of Languages which was characteristic of the “New Learning” in the days of Erasmus and his fellow pioneers. This we shall see foreshadowed in Dante. It is a part of a tendency to make education “paido-centric”; to lay its emphasis on, and find its focus in, the child rather than in the instructor; to make it less of an imposition of the dominant teacher upon a submissive and receptive pupil. The New Teaching requires that “the relative activities of teacher and pupil” should be “reversed.” It recognises that pupils need to be “trained in initiative,” and “made increasingly responsible for their own education”; that the inertia of many pupils has to be met not by force or browbeating, but “by taking steps to reach indirectly the goal of stimulating their individual activity.”[184]

The watchword therefore of the modern teaching is Liberty. And this principle of Liberty—the recognition that all education is, at bottom, self-education; and that the teacher’s business is to liberate (or make possible the liberation of) the inherent evolutionary forces latent in the pupil—finds its climax in the doctrine of Dante’s compatriot and sincere admirer, Madame Montessori. She is also, in a sense, the most modern of the Modernists; for in her method is carried, probably to its highest point, the application of psycho-physical science to education. She represents in some ways—and especially on the individualistic side—the extreme advance of the modern movement; and it is with her system that we shall institute later on a somewhat detailed comparison of the educational principles underlying Dante’s Purgatorio.

Dante’s name is not popularly associated with those of the World’s Greatest Educators—with Aristotle and Quintilian, with Alcuin and Alfred, with Colet and Erasmus, with Pestalozzi and Froebel and Montessori. He is not claimed as the conscious originator of new didactic method. He has not left us any systematic treatise on Education. Yet many have found in him a mighty Teacher, “who being dead yet speaketh”; and to such it will bring no surprise to find great educational principles embodied in his work.

We may compare and contrast his opportunities with those of his great contemporary, Robert Grosseteste, who as “First Chancellor,” if we may call him so, of the University of Oxford, may rank in a sense as a professional Teacher. Such a comparison would surely demonstrate that the permanent influence of the illustrious Bishop of Lincoln upon subsequent generations bears no comparison with that of the Florentine Poet.

Grosseteste may claim a place among the world’s Educators not only in virtue of his general influence upon English education at a period when the Oxford Franciscans were about to take the lead in European culture, but also—and more especially—because, in an age when study had become largely a second-hand matter of commenting on someone else’s commentary, Robert called men back to a diligent first-hand study of originals; a principle of the utmost importance alike for Education and for Learning.[185]

Dante, too, was a keen, first-hand student; but his place in the history of Education is different from that of Grosseteste. He attained to no such commanding position in ecclesiastical or political life, with the power that official status gives of forcing one’s ideas on public notice. His brief tenure of the high office of Prior in his native city of Florence was followed immediately by those years of exile and ignominy in which his best work was done. His sole means of influencing his own and succeeding generations was by his writings. But these writings not only proclaimed him (as all the world admits) the very flower and crown of Mediaeval Education—its justifying product—but also earn him, we would contend, a place among the World’s Great Educators, and perhaps we may add, its Educationalists. But first of all we may remind ourselves of Dante’s position, as the finest and most typical product of Mediaeval Education. Benedetto Croce[186] is doubtless right in denying him the right to be called a pioneer in metaphysics or ethics, in political theory or philological science: in such lines it is vain to attribute to him the same originality which is rightly his in the realm of Poetry. Yet his learning remains encyclopaedic.[187] His amazing erudition is displayed in his Minor Works; in the Divine Comedy it is concealed with the most consummate art. In the Convivio, where he is, perhaps, most consciously and deliberately (if least successfully) the Teacher, he revels in erudition, and so too in the Monarchia. Perhaps the clearest and swiftest demonstration of the vast range of his learning is afforded by a glance through the pages—or even the index—of Dr. Moore’s Studies in Dante (First Series).

Dante was not a Greek scholar, like Grosseteste, but he had a thorough acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures in the Vulgate, and with a large part of the theological and mystical writings of the Middle Age. He was familiar with all the extant works of Aristotle in two Latin translations. He quotes also, and in some cases very frequently, from Classical and post-classical authors of repute. He has thoroughly mastered the Graeco-Arabian Astronomy of his day: so thoroughly, that, to the despair of some of his humbler votaries, he can toy with its ponderous intricacies as with a plaything! Nor must we forget that his studies were conducted in an age when printing had yet to be invented; so that all his reading must needs be done with rare, costly, cumbrous and eye-wearying manuscripts. Well may he, in the Paradiso, describe his labours as “emaciating,” and in the Convivio allude to a temporary blindness caused by overstrain.[188]

It has been plausibly conjectured that he studied as a boy under the Franciscan Fathers of Sta Croce.[189] The idea that Brunetto Latini (or “Latino”), the author of the “Tesoro” (Livre dou Tresor), was the regular preceptor of his youth, however just an inference it may seem from the famous passage in the Inferno,[190] is disproved by the exigencies of chronology. And, in the end, he must have been largely self-taught, since his visit to the University of Paris, alleged by Boccaccio, is placed towards the end of his life, when most of his extant work was already done.

In his attitude Dante is a traditionalist, but not a blind one; his originality everywhere tends to modify his conservatism. A true son of the thirteenth century, he accepts loyally the traditional authority of Scripture and of Aristotle. He accepts the tradition of the old Roman culture: the “Seven Liberal Arts” of the Trivium and Quadrivium find a place in the scheme of his world and a symbolic significance therein. According to a well-known passage in the Convivio[191] these seven sciences correspond to the seven lowest Heavens.

The mythology of Greece and Rome, on which the minds of our Public School boys are still fed, are caught up into the scheme of the Divine Comedy as “didactic material” side by side with scenes from history and from Holy Writ. The Ptolemaic system of the universe is accepted; but Dante uses his own genius freely in the handling of details, adorning the vast framework with a symbolism of his own, and spreading over it a network of intense human interest.[192]

So also in the sphere of Theology, he takes up traditional beliefs and makes them living and concrete, vitalising them by the force of his own originality. In his volume on Dante and Aquinas, Mr. Wicksteed has drawn out very strikingly the contrast between the two: between the “layman, poet, and prophet, and the ecclesiastic, theologian, and philosopher.” “Aquinas,” he says, “regards the whole range of human experiences and activities as the collecting ground for illustrations of Christian truth; Dante regards Christian truth as the interpreting and inspiring force that makes all human life live.”[193] This contrast comes out, as we shall see, with special emphasis in the conception of Purgatory, where Aquinas is thinking all along of the formal completion of the sacrament of Penance, while Dante, who, with most daring originality, makes his Mountain of Purgation the pedestal of the Earthly Paradise, is intent on the redressing of man’s inner psychological and spiritual balance. Eden itself is to be the immediate goal of penitence. Before this earthly life is superseded by the heavenly, man shall win his way to the primal Garden of Delight, and “experience the frank and full fruition of his nature, as God first made it.”[194] He shall have achieved inner balance and self-mastery. Says Virgil, on the threshold of Eden—

Free, sound and upright is thy will.... Wherefore over thyself I invest thee with supreme control.[195]

We may note then, in passing, that Dante, like all the best educators, has his eye on the “formation of character.”

Such erudition, originality, insight, give promise that we shall find in Dante a real teacher; and the promise is abundantly fulfilled to those who tread the spacious halls of his School, which is his Poem.

The very language in which the Divina Commedia is written is a testimony to the Poet’s grasp of the fundamental condition of all teaching—that it should be intelligible! There is a saying of Alcuin’s great disciple, Rabanus Maurus, which expresses simply and well this obvious, but oft-forgotten principle. “Teach,” he says, “in words that teach; not in words that do not teach.” With this principle, surely, in mind—for his purpose in creating the great Poem was a practical one—the strangely haughty and aloof spirit of Dante girds itself to a humble use of the “Vulgar Tongue.” When we remember that this magnificent structure of his is the first big effort in the Italian vernacular, and that one of his reasons for calling it a “Comedy” is that “its method of speech is lax and humble, for it is the vernacular speech in which mere women communicate,”[196] we cannot but see in this pioneer work of Italian literature evidence of that discerning sympathy with the needs and capacities of the learner which marks the born teacher. Another mark of the true educator is his practical aim. Dante is not content to “teach the classics in vacuo,” as our English Public Schools once were: he does not divorce learning from life. In the famous Tenth Epistle he defines the “Moral Sense” of the Poem as “The conversion of the Soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace”; and, again, he describes “the end of the whole” thus: “To remove those living in this life from the state of misery and to lead them to the state of felicity.”[197] He has his eye upon life in the highest sense: “Come l’ uom s’eterna.” To this end he displays to us the unique means provided by Heaven for his own salvation, and allows us in his company to visit the three kingdoms of the Eternal World. He performs for us the office fulfilled by Virgil towards himself—

We must see with his eyes to what state of ineffable woe, not Divine Justice merely, but the sinner’s own choice will bring him. We must watch with him the Divine process of purgation, the eagerly-accepted suffering of those whose penitent love longs above all things to undo the ruin that sin has wrought—[199]

and finally he will take us up with him into the Blessed Place itself, to behold “the things which God has prepared for them that unfeignedly love Him.”

Here again is the true teacher, adopting the story-telling method of the Teacher of Nazareth:[200] the method of which the usefulness—nay, the indispensableness—was never more appreciated than to-day.

Nor is it merely that the Poet narrates instead of preaching. What he does, he does with the most consummate art.[201] The story that he tells—the pilgrimage on which he goes—is one which both he and we really share; we become his fellow-pilgrims, his intimates, before whom, without the least touch of self-consciousness, he manifests his joy and his despondency, his courage and his cowardice, his native dignity and his occasional lapses therefrom.... The narrative reads like a truthful and vivid diary of his actual experiences from the night of Maundy Thursday till Easter Wednesday in the Year of Grace One Thousand and Three Hundred.

It may be claimed for Dante’s method of teaching in the Divina Commedia that it is in a very real sense a “direct method,” and one in which teacher and pupil co-operate as fellow-learners.

The educational quality of the poem is at its highest in the Purgatorio, because it is in this realm that the conditions approach most nearly to those of our present life. Like the normal life of a faithful Christian here below, that of the souls in this “Second Realm” is a struggle, but a struggle upwards, inspired and sweetened by the “sure and certain hope.” It is a process of growing transformation into the Divine ideal, of gradual achievement of a perfect union of will with the Will of God, wrought out by means of a providentially ordered discipline eagerly embraced by the penitent.

All this may seem a little vague and elusive. Probably the quality claimed for Dante will be brought into higher relief if we concentrate our attention upon one or two definite points.

In the attempt to emphasise the “modern” character of Dante’s educational principles we shall be bold enough to confront him with the very latest of educational methods—that of Dr. Montessori, which originated but a few years ago in Dante’s native Italy.

The fundamental principle of Madame Montessori’s Method is that of Liberty. Education, she would say, must be a free organic process of development from within. This vital growth may be guarded, nourished, and (within limits) guided. The right kind of atmosphere and of external stimulus is of immense importance; but mechanical pressure, or domineering force, or inappropriate stimulus will only stunt and distort the growth, deaden the life that is calling out for free self-development. All this is not, of course, a new discovery. It was enunciated in other forms by Pestalozzi and by Froebel; it is implied in the words and works of all the greatest educators—of Vittorino da Feltre in the Renaissance, of Quintilian in the early Empire, and of Aristotle himself. But in Montessori the principle of individual freedom acquires a new prominence, and is given a larger scope than ever before; and the principle is coming to its own in many phases and many grades of our present-day education. It is interesting, therefore, to note what a fundamental position it holds in Dante’s Purgatorio, the central Cantica of what Professor Edmund Gardner rightly calls “The mystical Epos of the Freedom of Man’s Will.”

Liberty—that true liberty of soul which is found in perfect conformity to the Will of God—is the end and purpose of the Poet’s grim journey. Libertà va cercando—“he goes seeking freedom”—says Virgil to Cato at the foot of the Mountain:[202] the freedom which Dante himself, a little later, identifies with inward peace—“That peace which ... draws me on in pursuit from world to world.”[203]

It is to the entrance upon this peace and this freedom that Virgil refers in his words quoted above, where on the threshold of the Earthly Paradise he declares the pilgrim to be, at last, “King and Bishop of his own soul”—

And, finally, in the heaven of heavens itself Dante pours out his thanks to Beatrice for liberty regained—“Thou has led me forth from bondage into liberty.”

We have already spoken of the spontaneity of Dante’s Penitents; the eager gladness and alacrity with which they embrace the discipline appointed for them, “glad in the Fire”: a temper which finds its typical expression in the attitude of the souls who are purging the sin of Lust in literally burning flames. “Certain of them,” says the Poet, “made towards me, so far as they could, ever on their guard not to come forth beyond the range of the burning”—

Or, again, on the Terrace of the Gluttonous, where Forese explains to Dante that the voluntary pain of the penitents (which is also their solace) is mystically identified with that of Christ upon the Cross—“For the same desire doth conduct us to the tree, which moved Christ to say with joy: ‘Eli,’ when by His blood He won our freedom.”

And this spontaneity on their part is matched and helped by the atmosphere and environment provided for them. Their movements and occupations are indeed, in one sense, unnatural; but this is because their purpose is the counteraction of that most unnatural of all things, Sin. Here, however, are no frequent warders and task-masters, like the grotesque fiends of the Inferno. The Angel guardians of each of the seven terraces where sins are purged are no more in evidence than is the Teacher in a Montessori School; an unobtrusive, ever-present, never-interfering inspiration to the pupil’s own spontaneous development. There is no external voice to bid a spirit move on when its purgation is done. So Statius explains to Dante when describing the impulse of his own upward movement. “Of the cleansing, the will alone gives proof, which fills the soul, all free to change her cloister, and avails her to will. She wills indeed before; but that desire permits it not which Divine justice sets, counter to will, toward the penalty, even as it was toward the sin”—

When the soul is ready for another task, it moves on, naturally and spontaneously,—like a Montessori child!

This consideration accounts for a feature of the purgatorial discipline which at first sight would appear quite contrary to the Montessori spirit. On the lower slopes of the Mountain, below the gate of Purgatory proper, the souls whom Dante meets are grouped informally, or encountered individually; but within the gate, on each of the seven terraces where the seven capital sins are successively purged, the souls are engaged in groups on the same task, or similar ones. How is this consistent with free, spontaneous, individual development? Is not this simultaneous occupation at the same lesson more like a Froebel class, or even an old-fashioned Public School form than a Montessori group? The answer, surely, is in the negative. Collective work has indeed its permanent value, and simultaneous movements at intervals, their ample justification. In the Purgatorio, as in the Montessori School, the class-system in its extreme and rigid form has been superseded; though scope is given, in certain ways (as in the revised Montessori scheme), for the expression of the social instinct.[209] When the pupil is inwardly fit for a move, he “feels it in his bones”; and then—and not till then—he moves. The task in which he is engaged in company with his fellows holds him just so long as it is needful and appropriate to his own case: the moment of its beginning and that of its ending are entirely independent of the doings of his fellow-learners.

Once more, the Terrace of Purgatory resembles a Montessori group rather than a Kindergarten class in its freedom from obvious direction. There is no attractive, central, dominating figure, like the Froebelian teacher, on whom all eyes are fixed in the spirit of Psalm cxxiii, Ad te levavi oculos meos. The grouping of the learners is apparently spontaneous, and different groups are sometimes engaged simultaneously on different tasks.

Again, the School of Purgatory is essentially modern in its emphasis on “expression work,” and its abundant supply of “didactic material.”

By expression work we mean the endeavour to enforce a lesson, to hasten its assimilation and ensure its retention, by means of some appropriate activity on the part of the learner. This is of course much older than Montessorism, as even our best Sunday school teachers can testify; it can be traced back also beyond Froebel. Its origin is, surely, lost in the prehistoric ages of pedagogy. But it was Froebel in the nineteenth century who first claimed for this factor the importance which it holds in modern education. Yet if we study Dante’s Purgatorio we shall find expression work on every terrace of the Mountain, from the humble, stooping march of the cornice of Pride to the significant exclamations wherewith the once Lustful, on the uppermost terrace, punctuate the chanting of their hymn, Summae Deus clementiae. Purgatory is not for Dante, as for Aquinas, merely penal suffering—“something to be borne.” It must be (as Mr. Wicksteed observes)[210] something active—“something to be and to do”—somewhat more definite, more specific, more varied than mere suffering is needed for the building up of the new life which is to be at home once more in Eden.

As in the Montessori school, so in these mystic “cloisters” the learners are led to concentrate and focus on a single task a number of faculties and senses: eye, ear, voice, memory, attitude, gesture and movement all conspire to enforce the lesson. And this variety of expression work is rendered effective by an abundant supply of didactic material, an apparatus as carefully and scientifically thought out as that of Italy’s latest educational leader. One need only instance the famous wall-sculptures[211] and the inlaid pavement[212] of the Terrace of Pride, the description of which forms one of the loveliest passages in this most beautiful poem.

We have spoken of the Angels who preside over these terraces, engaged in the apparently superfluous task of controlling those whose will is bent manfully upon the task before them, lifted as they are for ever above the zone where temptation has any power.[213] What a task, we are inclined to say, for angelic faculties! What a sinecure! Yet the resemblance to the human “Guardian Angel” of the Montessori school is surely too striking to be without significance: and modern educational principles of which the Dottoressa is by no means the exclusive exponent, may help us to realise how—in this as in so many other things—we shall do well to range ourselves “on the side of the Angels.” The Montessori teacher—may we not say the truly modern teacher of whatever type?—submits to an arduous and exacting course of training—far more arduous and exacting than that which “qualified” previous generations of teachers ... and all for—what? To know what not to do, what not to say; to be able to practise at the right moment a fully qualified self-restraint, and so allow free scope to the inner forces of expansion in the pupil’s personality: an expansion which too heavy a hand, however lovingly laid upon the growing life, might crush or stunt or warp! A constant presence, inspiring but unobtrusive; realised but not dominant or over-insistent; not obviating or unduly curtailing those movements and processes which in education are infinitely more valuable than immediate results ... yet ever at hand when really needed.... Is not this a rôle worthy of angelic power and dignity? Is it not precisely the traditional rôle of the Guardian Angel in whose beneficent existence some of us are still childlike enough to believe?

Surely they were not mere figureheads, those “Birds of God,” whose stately grace and beauty Dante delights to portray? Even so is it with the “Guardian Angels” of the Montessori school—with the restrained efficiency and enthusiasm and the carefully calculated use of personal influence of the best teachers of all types and grades: their dignity and essentially angelic quality is apt to be in proportion to their unobtrusiveness. Education is, after all, not “forcible feeding” or “cramming”; its office is to educe—to draw forth. In Socrates’ homely phrase it is a midwife. “Sairey Gamp” was certainly not an angel; but there are those of her craft who are. More and more this maieutic office of the Teacher is realised, and with its realisation Teachers grow less and less like the castigating demons of Inferno—more and more angelic.

Another point which brings the Purgatorio, in its educational scheme, down to our own days, is the orderly progression of its lessons. The tasks set for the penitents are carefully classified and, so to speak, “graded.” The very form of the Mountain, with its system of gigantic steps or terraces, signifies as much. It symbolises even more: for education even in the infant stage involves the conquest of external difficulties, and, still more, the arduous conquest of self. The prominence of this “joy of overcoming” is one of the happiest psychological phenomena of a Montessori school. And as relations with our fellows become more complex and responsibilities multiply, this “battle of life” is ever more consciously felt. The New Teaching aims at “breaking the back” of a soul’s troubles in the early stage, by inducing a habit of mind to which the appearance of difficulties, instead of depressing, at once suggests victorious effort. In this way the battle of the free will becomes, in a sense, most strenuous at the start, as Marco Lombardo says, “And freewill, which, tho’ it hath a hard struggle in its first encounter with the heavenly influences, in the end wins the day completely, if it be well supported.”

And the same thought of a gradation, a succession of efforts, each of which, bravely faced, makes those that follow lighter, is symbolised in the shape of the mountain of Purgatory, which in reality would have rather the form of a rounded dome than that of the tall pyramid of the customary illustration. Says Virgil, in his comforting way, to Dante, breathless after his first steep climb: “The nature of this eminence is such, that ever at starting from below it is fatiguing, but in proportion as a man mounts, he feels it less; wherefore, when it shall appear to thee so gentle that the ascent is as easy as sailing downward with the stream, then shalt thou be at the end of this path; there mayest thou hope to rest thy weariness.”

There is a moral progression by which man enters gradually and by accumulation into the fulness of self-conquest, and so, of his inheritance of Freedom.

But “grading” also, in the more specific sense, seems to be symbolised in the Purgatorio. This principle was not born with Froebel, though its emphatic recognition to-day may be an outcome of his message that each stage of the child-life has its own absolute value and rights.

We are apt to wonder now how people were ever so psychologically impious as to attempt to teach in a single group, by means of the same cut-and-dried phrases, minds at every different stage of growth and of receptiveness; hurling ready-made truths at the devoted heads of pupils like so many tons of explosive bombs shot down from aircraft upon massed enemy battalions! Grading, and the individual point of contact—which, after all, is just Aristotle’s time-honoured principle of “beginning from that which we know”—these we recognise to be of the first importance, and that whether we be University professors or Sunday school teachers. And so we are prepared to appreciate a fourteenth century scheme which is dominated by the principle of graded progress.

We note that the souls which are not yet psychologically fit to begin the regular course of purgation are kept outside, in Antepurgatory, for a longer or shorter term of years, as each has need. The “Infants,” so to speak, are graded among themselves, and are not grouped with “Standard I.” Within the Gate, the seven terraces are arranged in an order corresponding (not, of course, to a psychological series that would be accepted as it stands to-day, but) to a very carefully-thought-out classification of the seven capital sins; and until the lesson of a given Terrace is completely mastered, there is no chance of moving up. When, on the other hand, the teaching in that particular grade has been thoroughly grasped and the pupil has nothing more to learn there, no power in heaven or earth—or anywhere else—can keep him back. In Dante’s School there are no mistakes in grading, and no wrong removes.

We have spoken of the “atmosphere” of the Purgatorio as one of “naturalness,” meaning by that, that it is an environment not calculated to hamper or restrict normal and spontaneous development. It is “natural” also in a more literal sense, in that the Poet has seen fit to depart from the almost invariable tradition of his predecessors (who place Purgatory underground, side by side with Hell, and make it scarcely distinguishable therefrom save in the matter of duration) and to furnish his penitents with an “open-air cure.”

It is this background of noble scenery, of landscape and skyscape, of slope and scarp, of Flowery Valley and Divine Forest, of star-light and dawn, of sunrise and high noon and sunset—it is this that gives its peculiar beauty to the second Cantica of the Divine Comedy. But this open-air Purgatory is more than a clever artifice, by which a fine dramatic contrast is produced after the murk and gloom of the Inferno. It is, as we have seen, essential to Dante’s conception of the perfect work of penitence in man, that it should draw his footsteps up to the Earthly Paradise, the primal home of Innocence. And so the background of the Purgatorio, as it were inevitably, completes the illusion of “naturalness” in the world beyond, and enforces the parallel between the upward struggle of those elect spirits and our own daily pilgrimage in this life. It suggests further, all that the magic phrase “Open Air” means to our modern ears: that healthy out-door life, nurse of the mens sana in corpore sano, that life of robust activities in close contact with external Nature of which the prime importance is recognised by all schools of thought in the world of modern education.

Finally (and here we touch upon one of the most beautiful features of Dante’s conception), the spiritual atmosphere, in spite of purgatorial framework of the Seven Sins, is not that of the Decalogue, but of the Beatitudes. The Sins themselves are interpreted as disordered Love, and the manifold love which goes up to make a Saint is expressed in sweetest harmony when each successive barrier is passed.[217] Love is the atmosphere, and Love the supreme lesson, the learning whereof continues beyond the grave.

The conception of Love as the universal motive power, expressed at length in Purg. xvii. 91 sqq.—

suggests a comparison of Dante’s psychology with that of the most modern school. In an age when (as a glance at Fra Salimbene’s pages will demonstrate)—pages written, it must be remembered, for the eye of a Sister of the Order of Sta Clara!—something more than Elizabethan broadness of speech was not uncommon, Dante pours out volumes of prose and verse, every line of which may be said to be suitable pour les jeunes filles. He would scarcely have subscribed to that domination of the Sex-instinct which is an axiom of the Freudian psychology. In the lines referred to above he more or less adumbrates the doctrine of “Libido”; but it does not occur to him to label that psychic force with so doubtfully reputable a name as “Libido.” The noble title “Amor” is for him, as for earlier philosophers, the more appropriate one.

It would, of course, be absurd to credit Dante with the place of a pioneer of the twentieth century psychology of the Unconscious, which had its roots in the Psychical Research of F. W. Myers and his friends, and sprouted up to visible life and growth so recently under the hands of the Viennese Freud and the Switzer Jung. But it would probably not be too much to say, in view of his remarkably intelligent interest in mental processes, and especially in the phenomena of dreams and of the border-land between sleeping and waking, that, given the assets and the advantages of our modern thinkers, he would have taken no mean place among psychologists of the modern type.

From Inf. i. 10—Tant ’era pien di sonno—to Par. xxxiii. 58, we find this interest displayed; and before we pass on to consider his teaching on the more human aspect of Education, the personal relation between Teacher and Pupil, it may be worth while to direct attention to one or two passages which emphasise this point.

In the 30th Canto of Inferno[218] he uses as a simile that significant situation in which the dreamer hopes he is dreaming—

In another passage[219] he sketches a case where the wakened dreamer forgets the “dream-cognition,” but is still dominated by the “affect”—

Ere he quits the Terrace of Accidie, Dante falls asleep, and here he describes[220] in vivid and picturesque language the process of going to sleep, when thought follows thought in more or less inconsequent fashion—

At the opening of the next Canto[221] comes the dream—dream of the two symbolic Ladies—and the awakening. The dreamer is apparently roused by the intensity of a dream-stench; but his awakening is due as a matter of fact to the arresting voice of Virgil, whose person is projected into the “manifest content” of the dream a few lines earlier,[222] in the cry of the “Donna Santa”—

“Three times,” says Dante’s Guide, “have I called you. Get up, and come along!”

In the last Canto of Purgatory proper[223] we have another picture of a going to sleep and an awaking. The sleepiness has been induced by a sort of natural self-hypnotism, the poet’s gaze steadily fixed on a few bright stars seen through the confined opening between the cliffs as he lies on the rocky stair.

This time the awakening is not sudden or violent.[224] After the altogether lovely dream of Lia—the sublimation of Dante’s desire, suggested, or coloured, by the natural anticipations of one on the threshold of the earthly Paradise—he wakes up quite naturally, his sleep “breaking from him” with the breaking dawn.[225]

Dante’s analysis of Dreams was naturally relative to the knowledge and tendency of his day. The presaging quality of Dreams—

like the proverbial belief that the truest dreams are those that come before dawn—

is not for him the fruit of scientific psycho-analysis; but rather the unscientific or quasi-scientific deduction of untold generations of men on whom the dreams that “came true” left a far deeper impress than the large majority that proved fallacious.

Dante was, however, a real psychologist of his own time and date, as many qualities of his thought and interest testify; and his discerning interest in the dream-consciousness supplies a definite link between the thinkers of the Trecento and our modern Masters.

III

It must not, however, be supposed that the somewhat specialised comparison of Dante’s purgatorial scheme with the Montessori Method sketched above[227] by any means exhausts the educational principles of the Purgatorio; still less that it covers the whole area of such principles enshrined in the Divine Comedy. The old-fashioned relation between Master and Pupil has still something to be said for it. The personal element cannot be eliminated, however great may be the need—especially in certain stages of self-restraint and self-effacement. This personal relation, in its permanently important aspects, is beautifully figured in the relation between Dante as learner and Virgil, Beatrice, and Statius as teachers.

Benedetto Croce[228] draws attention to the frequent Intramesse didascaliche which mark the XXIst and following Cantos of the Purgatorio—notably the discourse of Statius on “generation” in Purg. xxv. “This poetry,” he says, “breathes throughout the spirit of the Master who knows, and desires to make clear the idea he is expounding; who stoops down towards the pupil to embrace him and lift him up towards the Truth.”[229] Beatrice, again, as Croce points out,[230] taking Virgil’s place in the journey through the skies, is like an elder sister patiently schooling her younger brother. She helps him to overcome his prejudices, to solve his problems, to conquer his doubts; now turning upon him the eye of a fond mother nursing a delirious child,[231] now laughing him out of his “childish notions,” the charm of her resplendent beauty and the illumination of her smile giving just that touch of romance to their relations that suggests the final stage of the transfiguration of the half-earthly love of the Vita Nuova into something wholly celestial. But the type of this relation between Master and Pupil is most surely and most prominently drawn in that which subsists all through the first two cantiche between Virgil and Dante.[232] “Mia scuola,” Virgil calls this relation in the beautiful scene with Statius;[233] and a striking feature of this “School,” recurring in the same Canto[234] and elsewhere, is the close, intimate, easy and even playful mutual understanding between Teacher and Pupil. To this point we shall return; but first a word may be said on the sterner aspect of Education, from the pupils’ point of view.

Granted that the “Primrose Path” is the only appropriate one for infant steps to toddle on; that path itself has its ups and downs—slight gradients from the adult point of view, but for the infant involving a demand for real effort and adventure. And the end of man—our human Good—lies above the zone where primroses bloom, on the heights: as Tasso sings—

Let us glance, then, at what Dante has to say about the sterner side of Education—the necessary sacrifices that must be made for Liberty—and about the responsibilities of the teacher in his relation to the pupil whom he would guide up to freedom of mind and soul.

To the former we have already referred above (p. 102) in connection with the Montessori principle of the joyous facing of difficulties. The hard initial battle[236] is symbolically represented by the place which the Inferno holds in Dante’s quest of Liberty. For him indeed the “prime battaglie” are the hardest. No essential routine or inevitable drudgery which beset the path of learning can match in sheer distastefulness the weary horror of that first part of the Poet’s journey, of which his self-pitying anticipations are recorded in the lovely and pathetic opening lines of the second canto: “The day was departing, and the darkened air was relieving from their labours the animals on earth, and I was preparing all alone to sustain the struggle alike of the journey and of my piteous thoughts.”

The youthful scholar, in his quest for knowledge and truth and the freedom that is truth’s guerdon, has not, as a rule, to face this literal isolation in drudgery and painfulness. For him the social instinct and the companionship of fellow-victims, not to say the healthy stimulus of friendly rivalry and competition, are present to lighten his burden and sweeten his lot. Yet each, after all, has to tackle the drudgery and the difficulties for himself. There is no Royal Road. The Master may spur him on with the vision of the “gladsome mountain which is the origin and source of all joy.”

may encourage him to face the flames by the thought of the welcoming smile of Beatrice on the other side: “as you tempt a child with an apple!” “Mark you, my son, this barrier separates thee from Beatrice.”

but, none the less, the grim journey has to be undertaken, the distasteful plunge to be made. It is largely the Teacher’s attitude and example that make this effort possible; that evoke the manly spirit in the pupil, and encourage him to persevere in face of difficulties.

All this is recognised by the best modern theory and practice. “The New Teaching,” says Professor Adams,[239] “does not seek to free the pupils from effort”—we have seen that this is really the case, even in its extremest form of Montessorianism, with its individualistic charter of Child-liberty—“not ... to free the pupils from effort, but to encourage them to strenuous work”; it “does not seek to get rid of drudgery, but to make it tolerable by giving it a meaning, and shewing its relation to the whole learning process in school, and to the whole process of living in the world.” This is exactly Virgil’s attitude towards Dante. He is, first of all, alert to cheer and encourage him in moments of special difficulty. He encourages Dante both by example and by precept to mount the grisly back of the monster Geryon, their sole means of descent into the Abyss[240]; and later, when the flame has to be faced before entering the Earthly Paradise,[241] he reminds him of the success of that past experiment of faith, much in the manner of the noble self-encouragement of that Homeric hero, who, known to Dante only at second-hand, yet captured his imagination. “Be of good cheer, my heart, we have suffered worse things ere this.”

Or again, when at the foot of the mountain Dante is dismayed at its steepness, the Master explains: “It is ever easier as you ascend.”[243] When Dante is frightened as the Mountain trembles (Purg. xx. 135) Virgil interposes with a call to confidence—

But Virgil not only encourages; he explains. From time to time he pauses with the double object of giving his companion a breathing-space and of enheartening him by an exposition of the end and purpose of the drudgery—of the whole scheme, of which the experience they are now undergoing is an integral and necessary part. Thus he expounds to his disciple the topography of Hell when they have passed within the rampart of the City of Dis, and before they begin the steep and terrible descent, and encounter the Minotaur.[244] Again, after the uncomfortable ordeal of the suffocating fumes on the Terrace of Wrath, he diverts his pupil’s attention with a sketch of the order and inner meaning of the purgatorial terraces, and explains how Sin, in all its deadly forms, is just “disordered Love.”[245] And we may note in passing how this postponement of the explanation and the detailed scheme till the movement of learning is well on its course, is itself typical of the New Teaching,[246] and grounded on sound psychological principles. Virgil supplies, indeed, in the first Canto of the Inferno, a summary forecast of the journey, but does not sit down at the beginning and burden his Pupil’s mind with an elaboration of details. Nor can we leave the lecture on “Disordered Love” of Purg. xvii. without drawing attention to the ideal relations of Teacher and Pupil depicted in the following Canto, and especially to the masterly way in which Virgil suggests ever fresh problems to Dante’s mind and draws him on with an increasing “thirst to know.”[247]

The liberty which Education “goes seeking,” and in which its nobler forms live and move as in a bracing atmosphere, demands some sacrifice alike from Teacher and from Pupil. From the Pupil, especially in its earlier middle stages, it demands a degree of submissiveness and docility, and courage and perseverance to face distasteful drudgery; from the Teacher, that self-restraint of which we have already spoken—yet not mere self-effacement. Like the Divine Master, he must “begin to do and to teach.”[248] He must be a fellow-pilgrim, sharing the toils of the road, and over the roughest places a leader, even as Virgil volunteers to go first where the grim descent begins into the “cieco mondo”: “I will go first and thou shalt follow me.”

As fellow-pilgrim, he will not hesitate to let the Pupil witness something of his distress. The Master girds himself to the descent pallid with sympathetic suffering—tutto smorto[250]—nor does he hide the tokens of shame and confusion when he becomes conscious that he has been a party to an unwarranted delay.[251] And we note the effect of this frankness on the Pupil—an enhancement of loyal admiration for the Master; and, for his own conscience, a more delicate perception of moral values: “He appeared to me self-reproached. O noble, stainless, conscience, how bitter to thy taste is a trifling fault!”

Even so pleads the spirit of the New Teaching.[252] Let not the Teacher “put on airs of omniscience and solemnity. He must be a part of the gay company; he must not mind ‘giving himself away,’ he must be a human being, not a wooden stick; gladly must he learn, and then he will gladly teach.” Thus Virgil moves in Dante’s company as a fellow-learner, not omniscient, not infallible; ever ready to confess with frankness his own limitations, and to own up to his mistakes. In this spirit he apologises to Pier delle Vigne[253] for the inconsiderate act to which he was forced owing to his inability to convince Dante through the medium of his own verses. In the same spirit he gives place to Nessus when a description is needed of Nessus’ own region of the Inferno, reversing his dictum about the original descent: “Regard him (Nessus) as thy prime authority, and me as secondary.”

In like manner he gives way to Statius when an explanation is wanted of the emaciation of spirits no longer subject to bodily hunger,[255] and leads Dante to expect from Beatrice the completion of his own careful but yet not fully satisfying exposition of a heavenly matter: “And if this argument of mine doth not appease thy cravings thou wilt see Beatrice, and she will fully relieve thee of this and every other desire.”

Dante in his portrait of Virgil reminds us that the quest of Truth demands “truth in the inward parts,” that a humble and limpid sincerity is essential. Finally, he shews us this humility transfigured into a Divine self-effacement, where the elder Poet hands over his disciple entirely into his own guidance and that of Beatrice, in humble acknowledgement of his own limitations.[257] This act of self-effacement has indeed been in his mind from the first. When the time shall come for Dante’s ascent to the realms of the beate genti, “a spirit more worthy than I shall be appointed thereto, with whom I will leave thee at my departure; for that Potentate who reigns in heaven above, because I was rebellious against His law, wills not that any by my guidance should enter His city.”

And so Virgil’s work is done, and the Teacher shews himself sublimest in the last act. “The hardest lesson,” says the apostle of the New Teaching, “for a clever teacher to learn, is to let a clever pupil be clever in his own way,” nor “has a teacher been really successful” until “he has, by skilful preparation, enabled his pupil to do without him.”[259] This final self-effacement of the Teacher, with its corollary, the achievement of self-mastery and self-determination in the Pupil—the achievement of that liberty of soul which is the supreme aim of the pilgrimage—is best described in Virgil’s matchless words of farewell, which we may now quote in their fulness. His “skilful preparation” has all led up to this ... to make itself dispensable! “By force of wit and skill I have conducted thee hither; henceforward let thine own pleasure be thy guide; from both the steep and the narrow ways thou art now free.... No longer await either word or sign from me; free, sound, and upright is thy will, and it would be amiss not to do its bidding; wherefore over thyself I invest thee with supreme control.”