‘The Figure of Beatrice’

Abstract

On his first page Mr. Williams tells us what he has undertaken to study in this book. It is a good statement and may be quoted at length. ‘Beatrice was, in her degree an image of nobility, of virtue, of the Redeemed Life, and in some sense of Almighty God himself. But she also remained Beatrice right to the end . . . . Just as there is no point in Dante’s thought at which the image of Beatrice in his mind was supposed to exclude the actual objective Beatrice, so there is no point at which the objective Beatrice is to exclude the Power which is expressed through her. But as the mental knowledge or image of her is the only way by which she herself can be known, so she ... is (for Dante) the only way by which that other Power can be known—since, in fact, it was known so. The maxim of his study, as regards the final Power, was : ‘This also is Thou, neither is this Thou.’I say ‘the only way,’ but only to modify it. There were .... many other shapes—of people and places, of philosophies and poems. All these had their own identities. . . . But in his poetry Dante determined to relate them all to the Beatrician figure, and he brought that figure as near as he could to the final image, so far as he could express it, of Almighty God. It is, we all agree, one of the marks of his poetic genius. But it is something else also. It is the greatest expression in European literature of the way of approach of the soul to its ordained end through the affirmation of the validity of all those images, beginning with the image of a girl.’