If ever the philosophy of history were complete, the historian would still be undismayed. There are other things for him to do; he might perhaps attend to the history of Ireland, which has probably escaped the notice of the philosopher. The justification of history, if it wants any, may be found in the Journey to the Western Islands, and in the last voyage of Ulysses: Considerate la vostra semenza :

Fatti non foste a viver come i bruti,

Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.

Adventure is the motive. And if we may judge from the freedom of some of his casual remarks, the adventurers will find Hegel ready to be of their company and to join in all fresh discoveries. He had faith in the real world.

XXXVI

ALLEGORY AND MYTH

DANTE is more given to analytical reasoning than any other poet what seems at first most alien to poetry, the process of analytical division and explanation, accompanies his poems from the Vita Nuova to the Paradiso. But he cannot, any more than the most prosaic scholiast, make analysis do the work of poetry, or even explain it, and his account of allegory, in the letter to Can Grande, leaves out the main thing. Compare the prose interpretation of the Psalm In exitu Israel with the same phrase as it is sung in the celestial ship at the beginning of Purgatorio. The allegory is the same in poetry as in prose; only in the poem the double reference which is part of the nature of allegory is absorbed in the one real meaning. In exitu Israel de Egypto is not a text to be explained tropologically; it is the song of the redeemed, and they are what they sing. Imaginative and poetical allegory is a different thing from the common allegorical interpretation of Scripture; but there are no convenient words to express the differences.

Poetical allegory has a way of turning into poetical reality; the image into the thing itself. The psalm In convertendo Dominus is not surpassed even by Dante in the transcendent beauty of its change from allegory

to direct utterance: When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion, then were we like unto men that dream." You take this, rightly, for a song of triumph, but the triumph is verily a dream, a thought, a hope : and the true passion of the Church, not yet triumphant, is heard breaking through the dream: "Lord, turn again our captivity as streams in the South!"

Much of the allegory in Dante's poetry is of this sort; reality breaking through and sweeping away the imagery. In Piers Plowman and the Pilgrim's Progress likewise, often, what we find is not an allegorical pilgrimage, but a true story. Dante's vision of eternal life in the Paradiso makes use of allegory, like other figures of speech, but the main argument is what he believed without any figure. He has nothing in verse or prose at all like the conventional epic allegory which descended from the medieval moralisations of Ovid to Tasso, who wrote an allegorical interpretation of his Gerusalemme liberata; to Pope, who adopted one readymade for his Iliad.

It is not easy always to distinguish allegory from myth. Myth was allegory for the readers of Ovid Moralised, the popular old French book which was not quite antiquated in the days of Rabelais. In a different way passages of mythology, like Narcissus or the spear of Peleus, became part of the tradition of the lyrical courtly makers," used in similes and comparisons, not strictly allegorical. Dante in his copious use of mythology does not stop to interpret allegorically. He does not point out that Cain is historical (Purg. xiv. 133) and Aglaurus not so (ibid. 139), if indeed he thought of any such difference. That he was not careless about historical truth appears curiously in Monarchia, iii. 9, where the allegorical interpretation of

Peter's two swords, which did not suit Dante's theory, is rejected in favour of plain historical fact. "Peter, as usual, answered without thinking of any deeper meaning."-" Dicunt enim illos duos gladios quos adsignaverit Petrus duo praefata regimina importare : quod omnino negandum est, tum quia illa responsio non fuisset ad intentionem Christi, tum quia Petrus, de more, subito respondebat ad rerum superficiem tantum."

Dante here, of course, had a particular motive for preferring the literal sense, but that does not spoil the force of this example, which shows clearly that his mind was not confused, as so many were, by tropological interpretations, to the point of not caring whether historical fact were fact or not.

With regard to Apollo and the other gods, he did not raise any question of historic truth or falsehood. He accepts what Jupiter said to Mercury in the Aeneid as evidence of the destiny of Rome. He does not encourage the common theory of the ancient gods, that they were fiends deceiving the people through oracles. He thinks more nobly of Apollo, though the other theory had been taught by St. Augustine, and was popularly current in Ovide Moralisé, and other books.

In certain most miraculous works of modern poetry, in Collins's Ode to Evening, in Keats's Autumn, there is mythological imagination, personifying, and at the same time keeping what may be called the truth of ordinary experience. Wordsworth goes beyond this in his Ode to Duty: "Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong": no figurative imagination, but vision of the law of the world. Dante thinks in the same way of Fortune (Inf. vii.), so intensely that he sees her as a goddess, turning her sphere in like manner as the

Intelligences move the spheres of the planets. There is nothing like this anywhere else in his verse or prose; nowhere else does allegory or mythology turn into the revelation of an unknown deity. Nowhere else in Dante is there more clearly the accent of true worship than in Virgil's defence of Fortune :

Quest' è colei ch'è tanto posta in croce
Pur da color che le dovrian dar lode,
Dandole biasmo a torto e mala voce.
Ma ella s'è beata e ciò non ode:
Con l'altre prime creature lieta
Volve sua spera, e beata si gode.

Words like allegory and mythology fail utterly to describe this poetical mode of imagination, yet both are required when one thinks of this passage, though it is as far removed as Wordsworth's brave translunary things" from the common fashion of allegory.