Great Men as Prophets of a New Era
By Newell Dwight Hillis
REBUILDING EUROPE IN THE FACE OF WORLD-WIDE BOLSHEVISM
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THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME
Great Men as Prophets
of a New Era
By
NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS
_Author of "The Investment of Influence,"
"A Man's Value to Society," "Great
Books as Life Teachers"_
NEW YORK CHICAGO
Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
Copyright, 1922, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street
Foreword
Great institutions are the shadows that great men cast across the
centuries. A great law, a great liberty, a great art or tool or reform
represents a great soul, organized, and made unconsciously immortal
for all time. Explorers trace the Nile or Amazon back to the lake in
which the river takes its rise. Historians trace institutions back to
some hero from whose mind and heart the life-giving movement pours
forth. When the scholar travels back to the far-off beginnings of
jurisprudence, he comes to some Moses, toiling in Thebes, to some
Solon in Athens, to some Justinian in Rome. Not otherwise the
renaissance of painting, sculpture, and architecture begins with some
Giotto, some Michael Angelo, some Christopher Wren. Scholars often
speak of history as narratory or philosophical, but in the last
analysis, history is biographical. These studies were prepared for the
students of Plymouth Institute in the belief that biography is life's
wisest teacher, and that the lives of great men are the most inspiring
books to be found in our libraries.
N. D. H.
_Plymouth Institute,
Brooklyn, N. Y._
Contents
I. Dante, and the Dawn After the Dark
Ages 9
(1265-1321)
II. Savonarola, and the Renaissance of Conscience 34
(1452-1498)
III. William the Silent, and Brave Little
Holland 55
(1533-1584)
IV. Oliver Cromwell, and the Rise of Democracy
in England 84
(1599-1658)
V. John Milton, the Scholar in Politics 115
(1608-1674)
VI. John Wesley, and the Moral Awakening
of the Common People 143
(1703-1791)
VII. Garibaldi, the Idol of the New Italy 166
(1807-1882)
VIII. John Ruskin, and the Diffusion of the
Beautiful 190
(1819-1900)
Index 217
I
DANTE
(1265-1321)
_And the Dawn After the Dark Ages_
All scholars are agreed as to the classes of men who build the State.
There are the soldiers who keep the State in liberty, the physicians
who keep the State in health, the teachers who sow the land with
wisdom and knowledge, the farmers and merchants who feed and clothe
the people, the prophets who keep the visions burning, and the poets
who inspire and fertilize the soul of the race. But in every age and
clime, the poet has been the real builder of his city and country. The
only kind of work that lives forever is the work of the poet.
Parthenons and cathedrals crumble, tools rust, bridges decay, bronzes
melt, but the truth, put in artistic work, survives war, flood, fire,
and the tooth of time itself. "The poet's power," said George William
Curtis, "is not dramatic, obvious, imposing, immediate, like that of
the statesman, the warrior and the inventor. But it is as deep and as
strong and abiding. The soldier fights for his native land, but the
poet makes it worth fighting for. The statesman enlarges liberty, but
the poet fosters that love in the heart of the citizen. The inventor
multiplies the conveniences of life, but the poet makes the life
itself worth living. We cannot find out the secret of his power. Until
we know why the rose is sweet, or the dewdrop pure, or the rainbow
beautiful, we cannot know why the poet is the best benefactor of
humanity. But we know that the poet is the harmonizer, strengthener
and consoler, and that the inexpressible mystery of Divine Love and
purpose has been best breathed in parable and poem."
By common consent the three great poets of the world are Homer, Dante
and Shakespeare; and of the three, the two supreme names are Dante and
Shakespeare. After six centuries, what Hallam said nearly a hundred
years ago still holds true: "Dante's orbit is his own, and the track
of his wheels can never be confounded with that of any rival." Dante
was the greatest man of his country, he wrote the greatest book of his
era, he started the greatest intellectual movement of any age or time.
The influence of his thinking upon the people of Italy, the Italy of
his own day and of succeeding generations, is one of the marvels of
history. He was the interpreter of his age to itself; but he was also
the interpreter of man to all ages. Some names there are whose light
shines brightly for a brief time, after the fashion of the falling
stars, but Dante's emblem is the sun, whose going forth is unto the
ends of the earth, and whose shining brings universal summer.
Dante has been well-called the "Morning Star of the Renaissance." He
was born at the end of, perhaps, the darkest period in history,--the
five black centuries succeeding the fall of Rome; he lived to see the
first fruits of his own sowing--that wonderful rebirth of art and
culture which was to culminate, two hundred years later, in the
canvases of Raphael and the sculptures of Michael Angelo. It has been
beautifully said that before singing his song Dante had to invent his
harp. No graceful phrase ever had a sounder kernel of truth. Great
poets are more than great artists in language; they create languages,
and Dante, like his two great compeers, Homer and Shakespeare, moulded
and shaped the tongue for future generations. He began his career at a
moment when the Latin tongue was dying and the Italian language was
still waiting to be born. He took the vulgar speech of his own day and
gave it colour and richness, form and substance, eternal dignity and
beauty. What Homer did for the Greek language, what King Alfred's
Bible did for English literature, that, and more, did Dante for the
Italian tongue. The influence of his thinking upon the people of Italy
is indicated by the fact that _The Divine Comedy_ was printed three
times in the one year of 1472, nine times before the fifteenth century
ended, and, to-day, there are literally thousands of volumes in the
libraries of the world upon Dante and his poems. With loving
extravagance d'Annunzio said at the great celebration held last year
in Italy: "Single-handed Dante created Italy, as Michael Angelo by
sheer force of genius created his _Moses_, and made it the supreme
marble in history."
No one has ever been able to define genius, though many scholars have
told us what genius is not. Many men in the English lecture halls and
universities had talent, but that stablekeeper's son, John Keats, had
genius. More than one of the four hundred members of the House of
Lords during Charles the Second's reign had talent, but a poor tinker,
John Bunyan, had genius, that blazed like the sun. There were
multitudes of men living in the Thirteen Colonies, and many of them
rich, but that poor boy flying a kite, Benjamin Franklin, had the
divine gift. Not otherwise, many men living in Florence at the end of
the thirteenth century had talent, but Dante Alighieri had the gift,
and he towered above his fellows as Monte Rosa towers above the
burning plains of Italy. Strictly speaking, Dante's gift was not that
of the poet alone. He was a moralist as well as a poet--above all
others, the singer of man's soul. He believed himself to be ordained
of God to explain the moral order of the universe, man's share in that
order, his duty and his destiny. Blind Homer gave us the immortal
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, but Homer was a poet, not a teacher, and if
there are lessons in the story of Achilles and Ulysses we have to
learn those lessons for ourselves. Shakespeare, the organ-voice of
England, gave us _Lear_ and _Hamlet_, _Othello_ and _Macbeth_, but
Shakespeare was a poet, not a teacher, and Macbeth's sin, written
though it is in letters of fire, is nevertheless accompanied by no
comments of the author. Not so with the immortal _Comedy_ of Dante.
For Dante was a teacher first, and a poet afterward. Without the
brilliancy of intellect or the compass of achievements that were
Shakespeare's, without the directness or the simplicity of Homer, he
was more serious than either. He had the passion of a reformer, the
fiery courage of a prophet. He poured his very heart's blood into his
pages. Hating oppression, he was like one specially raised up to point
the path to peace, and to vindicate the ways of God to man.
The great thinker was born in Florence in the year 1265. His era was
the era of the Dark Ages; his century one of the submerged centuries.
For five hundred years black darkness had lain upon the world. It was
an era of war, when barons were constantly at strife. Feudalism was
entrenched behind stone walls, the landowners were masters, and the
serfs were slaves. Every road was infested with bandits. There was no
shipping upon the Mediterranean. The mariner's compass had not yet
been invented. Commerce was scant and factories almost unknown. Men
lived, for the most part, on coarse bread and vegetables, without
luxuries, and without what we call the simplest necessities. The
common people were huddled in miserable villages, behind stone walls,
with unpaved streets and windowless houses, in which ignorance, filth,
squalor, and bestiality prevailed. Peasants wore the same leather
garments for a lifetime. The dead were buried under the churches.
Prisoners rotted in dungeons under the banqueting hall of the castle.
Two hundred years were to pass before Columbus set foot upon the deck
of the _Santa Maria_. Two hundred and fifty years were to pass before
Michael Angelo could lift the dome above St. Peter's. But if the
peasant was ignorant, and the poor man wretched, the nobleman and
courtier was the child of luxury and gilded vice. It was an age of
contrasts so violent as to be all but incredible to the modern reader.
There were no books, for the art of printing was still to be invented,
yet in an age of parchment manuscripts young noblemen were taught to
speak in verse and to write in rhymed pentameters. There was no
science of geography and the world was believed to be a flat board
with a fence around it. Yet in this era, when few men could spell and
fewer read, the very monks in the monasteries were writing theses on
problems so abstract as to weary the modern scholar. For five hundred
years the world had looked to the Church, but the Church had descended
to the perpetration of crimes so terrible, that their mere chronicle
sickens the heart and chills the blood.
Into this world of paradox and contradiction--a world of gloom, shot
through with fitful gleams of superstition--was born Dante, the poet of
love and hope and divine regeneration. We know little of Dante's
parentage, as we know all too little of his life, but this much we do
know--the family was the noble family of the Alighieri, followers and
supporters of the party then in power in Florence. Dante was educated by
his mother, and by his mother's relative, the scholar-poet Brunetto
Latini. Like John Stuart Mill he was a mental prodigy from infancy. Like
Milton he was trained in the strictest academical education which the
age afforded. Like Bacon he was a universal scholar before he passed out
of his teens. Like Pope he thought and wrote in verse before he could
write in prose. Among his friends and intimates were the poets Guido
Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoria, Dino Frescobaldi and Lapo Guianni, the
musician Casella and the artist Giotto. With such companions and under
such guidance, Dante mastered all the sciences of the day at a time when
it was not impossible to know all that could be known.
But dreamer and student though he was, he early insisted upon sharing
the burdens of the State. On two occasions he bore arms for his
country. While still in his twenties he was offered the post of
ambassador to Rome; before he was thirty he had represented his native
city at foreign courts, and from his thirtieth to his thirty-fifth
year his voice was heard with growing frequency in municipal affairs.
In the summer of the year 1300, when he was thirty-five years of age,
he was chosen as one of the Priors, or magistrates, of Florence.
The opening year of the new century--the year in which Giotto was
meditating his immortal _Duomo_, with its famous tower--was ushered in
by a civic revolution in Florence. Dante, with other innocent
citizens, was banished and condemned to death by burning. A statesman,
he saw his party defeated and driven from the land; a man of property,
he lost his whole fortune; one of the proudest of men, he was forced
to humble himself and live on foreign alms. Inspired by the noblest
intentions, the world gave him no thanks, but drove him forth like a
wild beast, branded his name with foul crimes and condemned him to
wander over the hills of Italy till death at last gave him release. He
never saw Florence again. For years he knew poverty, neglect and
hatred. Sick with the noise of political dissension, he strained his
eyes toward the hills for the appearance of a universal monarch; but
the vision was never realized. We know but little of his wanderings.
Many cities and castles have claimed the honour of giving him shelter;
we know only that in old age he was compelled to "climb the
stranger's toilsome stairs, and eat the bitter bread of others."
Such, briefly sketched, is the life-history of this man who has been
called "the voice of ten silent centuries." In an era of luxury he had
lived simply and frugally; in an era of debate and publicity, he had
preferred seclusion; drawn at last into public life by his own sense
of duty, he had been driven forth into exile, to die alone in a
foreign city. It is the greatness of Dante that, in spite of defeat
and disappointment, in spite of every form of hardship, in the face of
every conceivable form of adversity, he went on with his work and
completed his masterpiece, the greatest achievement in the whole
history of Italian literature. Out of his own heart-break he distilled
hope and encouragement for others and from the broken harmonies of his
own life he created a world-symphony.
The best-loved books in our libraries are books of heroism, books of
eloquence, books of success, and books of love. It is a matter of
misfortune that no history of human love has ever been written.
Scholars have set forth the history of wars, the history of engines
and ships, the history of laws and reforms, but no library holds a
history of the greatest gift of man, the gift of love. That is the one
creative gift that belongs to his soul. Beyond all other writers, the
author of the _Divine Comedy_ is the poet of love. Love was the
inspiration of his youth, the beacon of his middle life and the
transfiguring glory of his old age. All his poems are monuments to the
abiding and ennobling power of a pure passion. His love for Beatrice
has fascinated the generations, and remains to-day one of the few
immortal love stories of the world, as moving as the romance of
Abelard and Héloise, and infinitely more exalting. No understanding of
his poems is possible without a knowledge of that love and its
tremendous influence upon his life and work.
Beatrice Portinari, the object of Dante's devotion, was the daughter
of a merchant, living in a street not far from his father's house.
Dante saw her but a few times, and she died when he was twenty-seven,
but from the moment when, on that bright spring morning, he first
viewed her lovely face, his whole heart and mind were kindled. "She
appeared to me," he writes, "at a festival, dressed in that most noble
and honourable colour, scarlet--girden and ornamented in a manner
suitable to her age, and from that moment love ruled my soul. After
many days had passed, it happened that passing through the streets,
she turned her eyes to the spot where I stood, and with ineffable
courtesy, she greeted me, and this had such an effect on me that it
seemed I had reached the furthest limit of blessedness." He describes
but three other meetings. While he was absent from the city--probably
during one of the two campaigns in which he fought--her father gave
her in marriage to another man. She was only twenty-four when she died.
No one will ever know whether Beatrice was indeed the loveliest girl
in Italy; whether she really was the daughter of intellect, or whether
the greatness was in Dante, who projected the image of beauty, created
by his imagination and superimposed upon Beatrice. We all know that it
is within the power of the sun in the late afternoon to cast the
brilliant hues of gold and purple upon the vine and transform slender
tendrils into purest gold. Dante had a powerful intellect, the finest
imagination of any known artist, vast moral endowments--gifts,
however, that in themselves are impotent. The sailing vessel, no
matter how large the sails, is helpless until the winds fill the
canvas, and hurl the cargo toward some far-off port. Just as Abelard
waited for the coming of Héloise; just as Robert Browning's soul was
never properly enkindled before the coming of Elizabeth Barrett, so
the intellect of Dante waited for Beatrice. The quality and quantity
of flame in the fireplace is not determined by the size of the match
that kindles the fire, but by the quality of fuel that waits for the
spark. The strength and power of Dante's attachment was in the vast
endowments of his soul, and not in Beatrice. It may well be that
thirty years later, Dante, who realized that he was the strongest man
then living in the world and who was at once a scholar, a statesman
and a soldier, during the solitude of his exile in a distant city
turned his mind backward and broke the alabaster box of genius upon
the head of a commonplace girl, just as Raphael lent the beauty of St.
Cecilia to the face and figure of a flower-woman, a girl whose face
and figure furnished the outlines for his drawing, but held no part of
the divine, ineffable and dazzling loveliness of an angel.
Whatever the truth--and there is little chance that we shall ever know
the truth--this much is certain: Dante's earliest long poem, the
famous "_Vita Nuova_" (New Life) celebrates his love for Beatrice, and
is nothing more than a journal of the heart, a secret diary of his
emotions. The _Vita Nuova_ is as far removed from the modern
sentimental love tale as June is removed from some almanac prepared a
year in advance of the weather changes predicted. It records Dante's
first glimpse of Beatrice, the adoration she awakened in him, and the
fervour of devotion to which she lifted him; it describes his
premonition of her death, and it ends with his resolve to devote his
remaining years to her memory. The last chapter of the book looks
forward to the _Divine Comedy_. About a year after Beatrice's death,
he writes: "It was given me to behold a wonderful vision, wherein I
saw things which determined me to say nothing further of this blessed
one unto such time as I could discourse more worthily concerning her.
And to this end I labour all I can, as she in truth knoweth. Therefore
if it be His pleasure through whom is the life of all things that my
life continue with me a few years, it is my hope that I shall yet
write concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman."
Completed years later, the immortal _Comedy_ exists to-day as the most
wonderful tribute to a woman ever penned by any poet.
In a mood of lofty pride, Dante placed himself among the six great
poets of all time. To-day, all scholars applaud the accuracy and
humility of his judgment. Every strong man knows what he can do. He
is conscious of his own vast reserves. So often has he measured
himself with his fellow-men that he realizes the number, the magnitude
and relative strength of his divine endowments. All men of the first
order of genius have realized the endowment they have received from
God and their fathers. And the _Divine Comedy_ justifies Dante's pride
in his own powers. It cannot be classified with a phrase nor dismissed
with a label. It is not a poem, like one of Tennyson's _Idylls of the
King_; it is rather an encyclopedia upon Italy. It is at one and the
same moment an autobiography, a series of personal reminiscences, a
philosophy, an oration and the spiritual pilgrimage of a thirteenth
century _Childe Harold_, with here and there a lyric poem. The motive
which inspired Dante was his sense of the wretchedness of man in this
mortal life. The only means of rescue from this wretchedness he
conceived to be the exercise of reason, enlightened by God. To
convince man of this truth, to bring home to him the conviction of the
eternal consequences of his conduct in this world, to show him the
path of salvation, was Dante's aim. To lend force and beauty to such a
design he conceived the poem as an allegory, and made himself to be
its protagonist. He depicts a vision, in which the poet is conducted
first by Virgil, as the representative of human reason, through Hell
and Purgatory, and then by Beatrice, as the representative of divine
revelation, through Paradise to the Heaven, where at last he beholds
the triune God.
The action of the _Divine Comedy_ opens in the early morning of the
Thursday before Easter in the year 1300. Dante dreams that he had
"reached the half-way point in his path of life, at the entrance of an
obscure forest." He would advance, but three horrible beasts bar the
way, a wolf, a lion and a leopard, symbolical of the temptations of the
world--cupidity, the pride of life and the lusts of the flesh. Then the
shade of Virgil appears, representing the intellect and conscience,
glorified--to serve as his guide in the long wanderings through the
Inferno. Virgil tells him he can accompany him only through Hell and
Purgatory, but that Beatrice shall conduct him through those happy
spheres, the portals of which a pagan may not enter. So begins that
wondrous journey through the regions of the damned, over the entrance of
which is written the awful words: "All hope abandon ye who enter here."
The world through which the two poets journey is peopled, not with
characters of heroic story, but with men and women known personally or
by repute to Dante. Popes, kings, emperors, poets and warriors,
Florentine citizens of all degrees are there, "some doomed to hopeless
punishment, others expiating their offenses in milder torments and
looking forward to deliverance in due time." Hell is conceived as a vast
conical hollow, reaching to the center of the earth. It has three great
divisions, corresponding to Aristotle's three classes of vice,
incontinence, brutishness and malice. The sinners, by malice, are
divided from the last by a yet more formidable barrier. They lie at the
bottom of a pit, with vertical sides, and accessible only by
supernatural means; a monster named Geryon bears the poets down on his
back. At the very bottom of the pit is Lucifer, immovably fixed in ice.
And climbing down his limbs, the travellers reach the center of the
earth, whence a cranny conducts them back to the surface, which they
reach as Easter Day is dawning.
Purgatory is conceived as a mountain, rising solitary from the ocean
on that side of the earth that is opposite to ours. It is divided into
terraces and its top is the terrestrial Paradise, the first abode of
man. The seven terraces correspond to the seven deadly sins, which
encircle the mountain and are reached by a series of steep climbs,
compared by Dante to the path from Florence to Samminiato. The
penalties are not degrading, but rather tests of patience or
endurance; and in several cases Dante has to bear a share in them as
he passes. At one point, the poet hesitates when he comes to a path
filled with a sheet of flame; but Virgil speaks: "Between Beatrice and
thee there is but that wall." Dante at once plunges into the heart of
the flames. On the summit of the mountain is the Earthly Paradise, "a
scene of unsurpassed magnificence," where Beatrice, representing
divine knowledge, divine love and purity, is waiting to lead the
wanderer through the nine spheres of the old Ptolemaic system to the
very throne of God.
Such is the general scheme of the poem, in which Dante's conception of
the universe is depicted in scenes of intense vividness and dramatic
force. It embraces the whole field of human experience. Its aim is
"not to delight, but to reprove, to rebuke, to exhort, to form men's
characters" by teaching them what courses of life will meet reward,
what with penalty hereafter; to "put into verse," as the poet says,
"things difficult to think." The title given it is often
misunderstood. The men of the Middle Ages gave the name "Tragedy" to
every poem that ended sadly, and the name "Comedy" to every tale that
ended happily. There are no traces of wit and humour in this book with
its descriptions of the cleansing pains of Purgatory and the highest
reaches of Paradise. Men who have little imagination seem quite unable
to transport themselves back into the life and thought of the
thirteenth century. Even Voltaire calls Dante a savage, and Goethe,
who blundered often in his judgments of men and books, and often had
to reverse himself, thought Dante's work "dull and unreadable." But
that reader who supposes that Dante is giving a literal description of
the physical torments of hell, or imagines that Michael Angelo, in his
_Last Judgment_, was portraying his own literal belief, will find
nothing inspiring in this wonderful book.
During the last six centuries the thinking of the world has changed.
Physical pain has assumed new importance. No man living to-day has
ever witnessed a brother man sentenced by a court to be burned alive,
or later on, has been tried himself, and upon a false charge sentenced
to death by flame. We stand aghast at Dante's miseries and monsters,
furies and gorgons, snakes and fires, lakes of pitch and pools of
blood, a physical hell of utter and unspeakable dreariness and
despair. But Dante's was an era of outbreaking and almost universal
physical cruelty; sinners and criminals could not be reached by
argument, for they could not think; there was but one way to approach
animal man, and that was from the animal side. Through fear, Dante
endeavoured to scourge men back from the horrors of iniquity. He
appealed to material men through the imagery of material flames, and
slowly by this scourge, tried to drive them back toward obedience,
sympathy and love for the poor and the weak. For their allurement also
he showed them a golden city in the far-off blue, with the flowers
blooming in the fields of Paradise. He used his unrivalled genius to
make vice and sin revolting and infinitely repulsive, just as he tried
to make truth, kindness and justice alluring.
This volume, therefore, represents "the life history of a human soul
redeemed from sin and error, from lust and wrath and mammon, and
restored to the right path by the reason and the grace which enable
him to see things as they are." Dante's conception is that "penalty is
the same thing as sin, only it is sin taken at a later period of its
history and a little lower down the stream." It is in life, here and
now, that men's hands are fouled with the pits of greed; their
tongues tipped with envenomed hate; their hearts steeped in crimson
ooze. It is here and now that materialists "load themselves down with
sacks of yellow clay," that misers plunge into "the boiling pitch of
avarice." The genius of the _Inferno_ is that sins are seeds, big with
the harvest of their own penalty.
Our age makes little of the _Purgatory_ itself--this realm which Dante
describes as the place where the human soul is cleansed and made
worthy to ascend to heaven. It is described as a kind of vestibule of
Paradise, where the soul fronts the results of wrong-doing, through
the debt of penalty and the evil inclination of the will, and the
instincts that have been perverted. The sins of which men are cleansed
are the sins against love and pride, envy and anger; the sins of the
body, avarice and gluttony and passion. The angels that cleanse are
the angels of forgiveness and peace. On that island of cleansing
Virgil and Dante land, and place their hands upon the ground and bathe
in dew their tear-stained cheeks. But climbing up the steep way of
penitence is like climbing up a craggy mountainside, toiling on hands
and knees, with tire that almost brings despair; and yet the higher
Dante climbs the easier the task. Just as in the _Inferno_, Dante
placed certain well-known figures--Judas Iscariot, who for avarice
betrayed his Lord, and Alberigo who with horrible treachery murdered
his own guests at a banquet, and that "youth who made the Great
Refusal"; so in the _Purgatory_ he shows us many men known to history
who have stumbled here and there and are breast-buried in the rubbish
of the world, to whom comes some angel bringing release, and
whispering "Loose him, and let him go."
When he approaches the confines of Paradise and sees from afar the
glorified form of Beatrice, Dante asks that God may become to his soul
like a refiner's fire and cleanse away any stain or dross of sin.
Gladly he enters that healing flame, guided by a sweet voice, which
sang, "Come, ye blessed of my Father;" but, says Dante, "When I was
within I would have flung myself into molten glass to cool myself, so
immeasurable was the burning there." Then, broken down with utter
remorse, he falls in a swoon; but he is plunged in the waters of
forgetfulness and refreshed, like young plants; re-clad as if by the
angel of spring, he issues from the wave, pure and true, ready to
mount to the stars beyond.
Strangely enough, this book, the _Inferno_, is the most widely read.
The _Purgatory_ is less frequently opened, while men value least of
all the _Paradise_ of Dante. Doubtless the reason is that experience
has brought familiarity with sin, so that all men understand its
penalties, and at the selfsame time know something of penitence and of
pardon, while the nature of that realm of perfect happiness,
righteousness and peace is beyond human experience. But if any man was
ever purified by suffering and earned the right to trust his visions
and surrender himself to the pictures that noble imagination painted,
that man was Dante. On the side of culture the measure of education of
any man is his knowledge of Shakespeare. On the side of imagination
and of pure and tender goodness, a man is a man just in proportion as
he knows his Dante. James Russell Lowell's supreme essay was his essay
on Dante, and he tells us that the great Italian "wrote with his
heart's blood, like an inspired prophet of old." 'Midst all his
poverty, exile and grief, he rose triumphant over sorrow and neglect.
He never lost his confidence in the ultimate victory of right and
truth. Hating oppression, he struggled as a prophet of liberty.
Offered an invitation to return to his native city, on the condition
that he would humiliate himself by confessing that he had done a
wrong, he accepted an exile's death rather than be faithless to his
great convictions. Climbing the stairs of other men's houses, he
salted his bread with his own tears.
An old man at fifty-six, his last days were spent in Ravenna, in the
house of a noble duke, who recognized in Dante the greatest man of his
time. Long afterward, Byron sought out the house where Dante died, and
falling upon his knees, beat upon his breast and wept, at the
recollection of the sorrows that overwhelmed the master of them all.
Just as Bunyan was rewarded for the second book in English literature
by twelve years in Bedford Jail, so Dante, as a reward for writing the
greatest book in Italian literature, was exiled from his home and
city, pursued by spies, hunted over the hills with hounds, made to
conceal himself in dens and caves of the earth, and brought to an
untimely death. Dying, Dante might have used the words which, later,
fell from the lips of Bacon, "I leave my name and fame to foreign
lands, and to my own country when long time has passed." Let us
believe that after having lived for fifty-six years in at once an
_Inferno_ and a _Purgatory_, at last Dante, the prisoner, was redeemed
out of his dungeon, the exile out of his loneliness, the fugitive out
of his rags and crusts, and the cave wherein he was hiding from his
pursuers; that the man who for years held heart-break at bay at last
was brought in out of the night, the fire-mist and the hail, into the
imperial palaces of God, where one word of welcome repaid him ten
thousand times for the bitter, grievous years, and where one word of
love leaped forth from the ineffable light--and in a moment, his every
wound was healed!
II
SAVONAROLA
(1452-1498)
_And the Renaissance of Conscience_
When the first warm days of May come to a land chilled through with the
frosts of winter, all pastures and meadows, all vineyards and orchards,
even the desert and the mountain rift awake to a new bloom and beauty.
The revival of learning which culminated in that golden age known as the
Renaissance was ushered in by the poet Dante, with his love for Beatrice
and his immortal poem called the _Divine Comedy_. Dante has been likened
unto that angel who descended from Heaven and, standing with one foot on
the sea and one on the land, lifted the trumpet to his lips, and wakened
the whole world. To Dante belongs the double glory "of immortalizing in
verse the centuries behind him, while he inaugurated a new age and
created a new language." But if Dante's face was turned upward and
backward, his work was taken up by the great humanist, Petrarch, whose
face was toward the future. Soon the whole land was awake, and while
other countries were held in the grip of ice and winter, full summer
burst upon Italy.
Scholars have interpreted the Renaissance from many different angles.
Students of literature identify it with the discovery and reproduction
of the manuscripts of the Greek and Latin authors. Artists associate
it with Giotto's paintings and tower, with Michael Angelo's _Moses and
Last Judgment_, and with the names of Alberti and Leonardo. Scientists
point toward the discoveries of Copernicus and Columbus, just as
jurists think of the rise of popular freedom and the overthrow of
tyranny. Practical men associate the new era with the art of printing
and the manufacture of paper and gunpowder, with the use of the
compass by mariners, and the telescope by astronomers. But none of
these interpretations fully suffice to explain the new era, with its
new energy of the intellect and its outburst of unrivalled genius.
The mental and emotional condition of Europe at the beginning of the
fifteenth century may be likened to the vague longings in the heart of
that child, who, legend hath it, was carried away from his father's
castle by a band of gipsies. The gipsies carried the boy to Spain, and
there they taught him to ride and hunt and steal after the gipsy
fashion. But he had the blood of his ancestors within him, and there
was something burning and throbbing within. Sometimes in his dreams he
saw a beautiful face leaning over him, and heard the bosom pressure
words of his mother, who could not be forgotten. Not otherwise was it
with society at the beginning of the fifteenth century. For centuries
the books, the arts, the tools, once so familiar to Virgil and Horace,
to Mæcenas and Cæsar Augustus had lain neglected on the shores of that
Dead Sea called the Dark Ages. Vague and uneasy memories haunted Europe.
Imagination increased the value of the lost treasure. Looking backward
through an atmosphere roseate through fancy, Helen's face took on new
loveliness. Achilles became the ideal knight, Ulysses a divine hero, and
Penelope the sum of all the gifts distributed among ideal women.
But in the middle of the fifteenth century occurred the fall of
Constantinople, that Saragossa sea into which had been drawn the
literary treasures of the preceding centuries. Constantinople had
become a treasure-house in which were assembled the manuscripts that
had been carried away by the citizens of Rome fleeing from the Huns.
As the centuries came and went, merchants, bankers, rich men from
far-off provinces had taken their jewels, carved furniture, ivories,
paintings, bronzes, marbles, rugs, silks, laces, and housed their
treasure in palaces, looking out upon the Bosphorus. So that in 1452,
when the advancing Saracens approached the city, the scholars and rich
men of Constantinople fled to their boats, and spreading canvas sailed
into the western sun. Months passed before these fugitives dropped
anchor at the mouth of the Po. One morning, an old man, wrapped in a
cloak stained with the salt seawater, stepped from a little boat to
the wharf of Florence. Being poor and also hungry he made his way to a
bread-shop. Having no money, he drew from beneath his cloak a
parchment. When the bread-shop was filled with listeners he began to
read the story of Helen's beauty and Achilles' courage; the story of
Ulysses' wanderings and Penelope's fidelity; the tale of blind
Oedipus, and of his daughter's loving care. He recited the oration of
Pericles after the plague in Athens, and told the story of the
wanderings of Æneas. With ever-increasing excitement the men of
Florence listened. At last, waking from the spell, they lifted the
stranger upon their shoulders and carried him to the palace of a
merchant prince, and bade him tell the story, and soon the merchant's
house was crowded with young men preparing pages of vellum and sheets
of leather, while writers copied the poems and the dramas of the old
manuscript, and artists turned the vellum pages into illuminated
missals. The spark became a flame. Learning became a glorious
contagion. The fires spread from village to village, and city to city.
The dawn of the modern world had come.
In the city of Florence, circumstances and climate were singularly
favourable to the new movement. Florence was the city of flowers; it
lay upon the banks of the Arno, set amidst orange groves, and its
palaces, art galleries, and churches, when the vineyards were in full
bloom, looked like a string of pearls lying in a cup of emeralds. All
that Athens had been to the age of Pericles, Florence was to be to the
era of Savonarola. Neither time nor events have availed to lessen the
hold of Florence upon the great men of earth. Because of her rich
associations with genius and beauty, the greatest souls of the earth
have often turned feet toward Florence, as the birds of paradise leave
the desert to seek out the oasis with its fountain and flowers.
Florence was the city of Dante with his _Divine Comedy_, the city of
Giotto, with his tower, of Gioberti, with the gates of wrought iron
that are so beautiful that Michael Angelo said they were worthy to be
the gates of Paradise. To Florence in after years went Robert
Browning, to write _The Ring and the Book_, and Elizabeth Barrett,
with the finest love sonnets in literature. To Florence centuries
later went George Eliot, to write her _Romola_, and in Florence, Keats
and Shelley dreamed their dreams of song and verse. To Florence came
Cavour, the statesman, and Mazzini, the reformer, Garibaldi, the
soldier, to build the new Italy. Many the scholar and patriot who has
said with Robert Browning, "Italy is a word graven on my heart." And
it was to Florence that there came in the year 1490 Savonarola, the
greatest moral force the city ever knew.
Savonarola was a man of almost universal genius. He was an orator, and
the fire of his eloquence still burns in the sermons he has left the
world. He was a reformer, and descended upon the sins of his age like
a flame of fire, shaking Italy like the stroke of an earthquake. He
was a prophet, and he dreamed dreams of a new Italy and of a golden
age in morals. He was a statesman and he was created a preacher, and
he fulfilled the dreams of a divine Orpheus, who drew all things to
him by the mystery and magic of his speech. He was a martyr, and wore,
not the red hat of the cardinal, but the fire that belonged to the
chariot of flame, in which his soul rode up to Heaven to meet his God.
Like all men of the first order of genius he was great on many sides.
It was his glory that he awakened the moral sense and brought the life
of God into the soul of man. Savonarola was like the Matterhorn or the
Breithorn that lift their peaks so high that they look out upon the
Rhine of the north and the Po of the south, upon the vineyards of
France and the valleys of Austria.
In the very year that Constantinople fell, and the scholars fled,
carrying their manuscripts--as sparks fly from the hammer falling upon
an anvil--Savonarola entered into being in the beautiful little city
of Ferrara. His grandfather was a physician, a teacher of the youth of
his town, and a member of the council. He had achieved some honour as
a scholar, and won much gold and favour as a skillful surgeon. To his
father's house came a few leading men of the villages round about to
read the pages of Dante and to talk about the manuscripts that had
thrown all Italy into a fever of excitement. The boy had a hungry
mind, and rose early and sat up late to read the copies of the few
books that his father had in the little library. His native town was
the capital of the little state, and the Duke of Este was his father's
friend. When the boy was six years of age, Pope Pius II passed through
Ferrara on his way to a celebration in Venice, and in preparation for
his coming a crimson canopy was stretched above the street, while in
the public square a throne was erected, and when the Pope had taken
his seat therein a procession of children passed by, strewing flowers
at the feet of the Pope. Young men and women sang songs in his honour,
and chanted hymns of his praise, midst clouds of golden incense
filling all the air. On the outskirts of the crowd stood the miserable
poor, the half-starved peasants, the ragged children, the miserable
lepers. Their faces were gaunt, their eyes hollow, their bread,
crusts, their garments, rags, and the spectacle of gluttony,
drunkenness and luxury, in contrast with the vast multitude of
starving poor, created such a revulsion in the mind of the boy that
from that hour all should have known that it was only a question of
time when this gifted youth would become an ascetic and a reformer.
The revulsion in the heart of Savonarola was inevitably deepened by
the lust and cruelty laid to the door of the Church itself. That was
a dark hour for the Papacy and Italy. Paul II was a Venetian merchant,
greedy, ambitious, who, in middle age, saw that the Pope was
incidentally an ecclesiastic, but essentially an emperor, a statesman
and a banker. Everything he touched in business turned to gold. He had
agents out in all the world buying diamonds, pearls, rubies and
emeralds. He hired architects, sculptors and painters, and made the
church an art gallery. "Once the church had wooden cups and plates for
the communion, but golden priests. Now," wrote Savonarola, "the church
has golden cups and plates, but wooden-headed priests." The Rome of
that time was a Rome of art and vice, gold and blood, cathedrals and
mud huts. The least shocking page in the papal history of the time
describes Alexander VI, and his son Cæsare and his daughter Lucretia,
standing in the open window of the papal palace, looking down into the
courtyard, filled with unlucky criminals. These prisoners, sentenced
to death, ran round and round the court, while Cæsare let fly his
arrows, and the Pope and Lucretia applauded each lucky hit. The scene
is one of many, and the knowledge of such scenes inevitably brought
about rebellion in the soul of Savonarola.
At the beginning of his career, the young reformer attracted but
little attention. He entered a monastery and became a monk, and his
novitiate was chiefly marked by a fervour of humilities. He sought the
most menial offices, and did penance for his sins by the severest
austerities. He was soon worn to a shadow, but his gaunt features were
beautified by an expression of singular force and benevolence.
Luminous dark eyes sparkled and flamed beneath his thick brows and his
large mouth was as capable of gentle sweetness as of power and set
resolve. But the spectacle of the sensualism, drunkenness, cruelty,
theft, ignorance and wretchedness of Florence, that had a handful of
aristocrats at one extreme and thousands of paupers at the other,
gradually filled his soul with burning indignation. He began to see
visions and to make prophecies which afterward were mysteriously
fulfilled. His first success as a preacher came when he was thirty-one
and the following year at Brescia, in a sermon on the Apocalypse, he
shook men's souls by his terrible picture of the wrath to come. A halo
of light was reported to have been seen about his head, and when, six
years later, he returned to Florence, to preach in the cathedral, his
fame as an orator had gone before him and the cloister gardens were
too small to contain the crowds that flocked to hear him.
The occasion of his first sermon in the cathedral was one long
remembered in the city. The vast multitudes saw a gaunt figure whose
thick hood covered the whole head and shoulders. From deeply sunken
eye-sockets there looked out two eyes that blazed as with lightning.
The nose was strong and prominent, with wide nostrils, capable of
terrible distention under the stress of emotion. The mouth was full,
with compressed, projecting lips, and large, as if made for a torrent
of eloquence. The speaker was a visionary, and a seer. At one moment
he melted his audience to tears, at another he stirred them to horror,
again quickening their souls with prayer and pleadings, that had in
them the sweetness of the very spirit of Christ. Soon the walls of the
church reëchoed with sobs and wailings, dominated by one ringing
voice. One scribe explains fragments of the sermon with these words:
"Here I was so overcome with weeping that I could not go on." The
poet, Mirandola, tells us that Savonarola's voice was like a clap of
doom: a cold shiver ran through the marrow of his bones, and the hair
of his head stood on end as he listened. The theme that morning was
this: "Repent! A judgment of God is at hand. A sword is suspended
over you. Italy is doomed for her iniquity." The speaker prophesied
coming bloodshed, the ruin of cities, the trampling down of provinces,
the passage of armies, and the devastating wars that were about to
fall on Italy.