^ Dante says, in one of the finest passages of the Purgatorio, that it is love that evokes individuality and compels it to its highest and best, and in so doing draws it home to God. The whole of the Divine Comedy is, in fact, the allegorical story of the poet's own salvation through the upward reaching power of a great personal love. He shows this love as greater and stronger ^ Canon Knox Little, The Outlook of the Soul, 333,
476 IN PRAISE OF LOVE
than both the lust of the flesh and the gates of hell, triumphing over every force that would tend to degrade or destroy it. He makes Beatrice speaks thus from heaven :
When from the flesh to spirit I ascended,
And beauty and virtue were in me increased,
I was to him less dear and less delightful;
And into ways untrue he turned his steps,
Pursuing the false images of good,
That never any promises fulfil ;
Nor prayer for inspiration me availed,
By means of which in dreams and otherwise
I called him back, so little did he heed them.
So low he fell, that all appliances
For his salvation were already short,
Save showing him the people of perdition.
For this I visited the gates of death,
And unto him, who so far up has led him,
My intercessions were with weeping borne.
The thought here is, as you see, that a mighty and unquench- able human love becomes God's instrument on both sides of the grave for disgusting the soul with the filthiness of the flesh, refining its dross, and enabling it to fulfil itself in the eternal bliss.^
^ In Kossetti's sweet poem. The Blessed Damozel, the poet pictures a maiden in paradise, with whom the ten years which have passed since she left her earthly home had scarcely seemed a single day, for time is not there what it is here. But she does not give herself up much to the enjoyment of her surroundings ; her heart is filled with the memory of one she has left behind mourning her loss ; and amid all the delights of the higher work she is thinking, thinking, thinking of him and planning what they will do together when he rejoins her :
She gazed and listened and then said,
Less sad of speech than mild, — "All this is when he comes." She ceased.
The light thrilled towards her, fill'd With angels in strong level flight.
Her eyes prayed, and she smil'd.
(I saw her smile.) But soon their path Was vague in distant spheres: * fL J. CJampbell, in The Ghriatian Commonwealth, Not. 13, 1912,
SONG OF SONGS viii. 6, 7 477
And then she cast her arms along
The golden barriers, And laid her face between her hands,
And wept. (I heard her tears.)
Yes, there was room for tears, in spite of all the gladness, for she wanted him there before heaven could quite be heaven.^
III.
The Origin of Love.
*' The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, a very flame of the Lord."
This is the only place in which the name of God appears throughout the whole poem. The " flame of the Lord " may be compared with " the voice of the Lord," which is described in Hebrew poetry as connected with the fury of the storm. The flame, therefore, would be lightning and the voice thunder.
1. It is startling to find such lofty teaching in an age when polygamy was still tolerated, and in a land where, after centuries of religion, woman was commonly regarded as man's servant and plaything, and even as a creature incapable of knowing God's law. The light shed by the Song on the heavenly origin and significance of true love amply justifies its inclusion in the record of Divine revelation, and gives it a place of pre-eminence in the poetry of the ancient and the modern world. Other elements in human passion have been analysed and embodied in many a creation of literary genius, but it is strange that the highest element of all should have been most neglected. What other thing in love can be so ennobling as the consciousness that, in that experience, God Himself is present, to bring us into actual relation with the unseen and eternal.
^ In the poems of Sappho and Anacreon, of Catullus and Virgil, Horace and Ovid, you see at once the gulf that separates their representations of love from that of the Hebrew poem. With them love is a human passion, beautiful, happy-making, ecstatic, or tormenting, maddening, tragic, a prism that breaks up the light of human feeling into manifold colours bright and dark ; with the author of the Canticle, love is the immediate presence of the
1 E. J. Campbell.
478 IN PRAISE OF LOVE
living God in a human life raised by an inspired afifection to a loftier plane of moral being. No doubt in the noble dramatic literature of Greece, for example in the Antigone and in Alcestis, the higher moral and religious aspects of human affection are recognized ; but, for the most part, classic literature associates love with the gods or goddesses only in an ornamental and mytho- logical fashion, and shows no trace of the faith and ethic so characteristic of the Song. The classic writers say, not with the Shulamite, but with the Chorus :