Of which this rude paraphrase may serve as a translation:--

The rights of Monarchy, the Heavens, the Stream of Fire, the Pit,

In vision seen, I sang as far as to the Fates seemed fit;

But since my soul, an alien here, hath flown to nobler wars,

And, happier now, hath gone to seek its Maker 'mid the stars,

Here am I Dante shut, exiled from the ancestral shore,

Whom Florence, the of all least-loving mother, bore.[37]

If these be not the words of Dante, what is internal evidence worth? The

indomitably self-reliant man, loyal first of all to his most unpopular

convictions (his very host, Guido, being a Guelph), puts his Ghibellinism

(_jura monarchiae_) in the front. The man whose whole life, like that of

selected souls always, had been a war fare, calls heaven another camp,--a

better one, thank God! The wanderer of so many years speaks of his soul

as a guest,--glad to be gone, doubtless. The exile, whose sharpest

reproaches of Florence are always those of an outraged lover, finds it

bitter that even his unconscious bones should lie in alien soil.

Giovanni Villani, the earliest authority, and a contemporary, thus

sketches him: "This man was a great scholar in almost every science,

though a layman; was a most excellent poet, philosopher, and rhetorician;

perfect, as well in composing and versifying as in haranguing; a most

noble speaker.... This Dante, on account of his learning, was a little

haughty, and shy, and disdainful, and like a philosopher almost

ungracious, knew not well how to deal with unlettered folk." Benvenuto da

Imola tells us that he was very abstracted, as we may well believe of a

man who carried the _Commedia_ in his brain. Boccaccio paints him in this

wise: "Our poet was of middle height; his face was long, his nose

aquiline, his jaw large, and the lower lip protruding somewhat beyond the

upper; a little stooping in the shoulders; his eyes rather large than

small; dark of complexion; his hair and beard thick, crisp, and black;

and his countenance always sad and thoughtful. His garments were always

dignified; the style such as suited ripeness of years; his gait was grave

and gentlemanlike; and his bearing, whether public or private,

wonderfully composed and polished. In meat and drink he was most

temperate, nor was ever any more zealous in study or whatever other

pursuit. Seldom spake he, save when spoken to, though a most eloquent

person. In his youth he delighted especially in music and singing, and

was intimate with almost all the singers and musicians of his day. He was

much inclined to solitude, and familiar with few, and most assiduous in

study as far as he could find time for it. Dante was also of marvellous

capacity and the most tenacious memory." Various anecdotes of him are

related by Boccaccio, Sacchetti, and others, none of them verisimilar,

and some of them at least fifteen centuries old when revamped. Most of

them are neither _veri_ nor _ben trovati_. One clear glimpse we get of

him from the _Ottimo Comento_, the author of which says:[38] "I, the

writer, heard Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to say other than

he would, but that many a time and oft (_molte e spesse volte_) he had

made words say for him what they were not wont to express for other

poets." That is the only sincere glimpse we get of the living, breathing,

word-compelling Dante.

Looked at outwardly, the life of Dante seems to have been an utter and

disastrous failure. What its inward satisfactions must have been, we,

with the _Paradiso_ open before us, can form some faint conception. To

him, longing with an intensity which only the word _Dantesque_ will

express to realize an ideal upon earth, and continually baffled and

misunderstood, the far greater part of his mature life must have been

labor and sorrow. We can see how essential all that sad experience was to

him, can understand why all the fairy stories hide the luck in the ugly

black casket; but to him, then and there, how seemed it?

Thou shalt relinquish everything of thee,

Beloved most dearly; this that arrow is

Shot from the bow of exile first of all;

And thou shalt prove how salt a savor hath

The bread of others, and how hard a path

To climb and to descend the stranger's stairs![39]

_Come sa di sale!_ Who never wet his bread with tears, says Goethe, knows

ye not, ye heavenly powers! Our nineteenth century made an idol of the

noble lord who broke his heart in verse once every six months, but the

fourteenth was lucky enough to produce and not to make an idol of that

rarest earthly phenomenon, a man of genius who could hold heartbreak at

bay for twenty years, and would not let himself die till he had done his

task. At the end of the _Vita Nuova_, his first work, Dante wrote down

that remarkable aspiration that God would take him to himself after he

had written of Beatrice such things as were never yet written of woman.

It was literally fulfilled when the _Commedia_ was finished twenty-five

years later. Scarce was Dante at rest in his grave when Italy felt

instinctively that this was her great man. Boccaccio tells us that in

1329[40] Cardinal Poggetto (du Poiet) caused Dante's treatise _De

Monarchiâ_, to be publicly burned at Bologna, and proposed further to dig

up and burn the bones of the poet at Ravenna, as having been a heretic;

but so much opposition was roused that he thought better of it. Yet this

was during the pontificate of the Frenchman, John XXII., the reproof of

whose simony Dante puts in the mouth of St. Peter, who declares his seat

vacant,[41] whose damnation the poet himself seems to prophesy,[42] and

against whose election he had endeavored to persuade the cardinals, in a

vehement letter. In 1350 the republic of Florence voted the sum of ten

golden florins to be paid by the hands of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio to

Dante's daughter Beatrice, a nun in the convent of Santa Chiara at

Ravenna. In 1396 Florence voted a monument, and begged in vain for the

metaphorical ashes of the man of whom she had threatened to make literal

cinders if she could catch him alive. In 1429[43] she begged again, but

Ravenna, a dead city, was tenacious of the dead poet. In 1519 Michel

Angelo would have built the monument, but Leo X. refused to allow the

sacred dust to be removed. Finally, in 1829, five hundred and eight years

after the death of Dante, Florence got a cenotaph fairly built in Santa

Croce (by Ricci), ugly beyond even the usual lot of such, with three

colossal figures on it, Dante in the middle, with Italy on one side and

Poesy on the other. The tomb at Ravenna, built originally in 1483, by

Cardinal Bembo, was restored by Cardinal Corsi in 1692, and finally

rebuilt in its present form by Cardinal Gonzaga, in 1780, all three of

whom commemorated themselves in Latin inscriptions. It is a little shrine

covered with a dome, not unlike the tomb of a Mohammedan saint, and is

now the chief magnet which draws foreigners and their gold to Ravenna.

The _valet de place_ says that Dante is not buried under it, but beneath

the pavement of the street in front of it, where also, he says, he saw my

Lord Byron kneel and weep. Like everything in Ravenna, it is dirty and

neglected.

In 1373 (August 9) Florence instituted a chair of the _Divina Commedia_,

and Boccaccio was named first professor. He accordingly began his

lectures on Sunday, October 3, following, but his comment was broken off

abruptly at the 17th verse of the 17th canto of the _Inferno_ by the

illness which ended in his death, December 21, 1375. Among his successors

were Filippo Villani and Filelfo. Bologna was the first to follow the

example of Florence, Benvenuto da Imola having begun his lectures,

according to Tiraboschi, so early as 1375. Chairs were established also

at Pisa, Venice, Piacenza, and Milan before the close of the century. The

lectures were delivered in the churches and on feast-days, which shows

their popular character. Balbo reckons (but this is guess-work) that the

MS. copies of the _Divina Commedia_ made during the fourteenth century,

and now existing in the libraries of Europe, are more numerous than those

of all other works, ancient and modern, made during the same period.

Between the invention of printing and the year 1500 more than twenty

editions were published in Italy, the earliest in 1472. During the

sixteenth century there were forty editions; during the seventeenth,--a

period, for Italy, of sceptical dilettanteism,--only three; during the

eighteenth, thirty-four; and already, during the first half of the

nineteenth, at least eighty. The first translation was into Spanish, in

1428.[44] M. St. René Taillandier says that the _Commedia_ was condemned

by the inquisition in Spain; but this seems too general a statement, for,

according to Foscolo,[45] it was the commentary of Landino and

Vellutello, and a few verses in the _Inferno_ and _Paradiso_, which were

condemned. The first French translation was that of Grangier, 1596, but

the study of Dante struck no root there till the present century.

Rivarol, who translated the _Inferno_ in 1783, was the first Frenchman

who divined the wonderful force and vitality of the _Commedia_.[46] The

expressions of Voltaire represent very well the average opinion of

cultivated persons in respect of Dante in the middle of the eighteenth

century. He says: "The Italians call him divine; but it is a hidden

divinity; few people understand his oracles. He has commentators, which,

perhaps, is another reason for his not being understood. His reputation

will go on increasing, because scarce anybody reads him."[47] To Father

Bettinelli he writes: "I estimate highly the courage with which you have

dared to say that Dante was a madman and his work a monster." But he

adds, what shows that Dante had his admirers even in that flippant

century: "There are found among us, and in the eighteenth century, people

who strive to admire imaginations so stupidly extravagant and

barbarous."[48] Elsewhere he says that the _Commedia_ was "an odd poem,

but gleaming with natural beauties, a work in which the author rose in

parts above the bad taste of his age and his subject, and full of

passages written as purely as if they had been of the time of Ariosto and

Tasso."[49] It is curious to see this antipathetic fascination which

Dante exercised over a nature so opposite to his own.

At the beginning of this century Châteaubriand speaks of Dante with vague

commendation, evidently from a very superficial acquaintance, and that

only with the _Inferno_, probably from Rivarol's version.[50] Since then

there have been four or five French versions in prose or verse, including

one by Lamennais. But the austerity of Dante will not condescend to the

conventional elegance which makes the charm of French, and the most

virile of poets cannot be adequately rendered in the most feminine of

languages. Yet in the works of Fauriel, Ozanam, Ampère, and Villemain,

France has given a greater impulse to the study of Dante than any other

country except Germany. Into Germany the _Commedia_ penetrated later. How

utterly Dante was unknown there in the sixteenth century is plain from a

passage in the "Vanity of the Arts and Sciences" of Cornelius Agrippa,

where he is spoken of among the authors of lascivious stories: "There

have been many of these historical pandars, of which some of obscure

fame, as Aeneas Sylvius, Dantes, and Petrarch, Boccace, Pontanus,"

etc.[51] The first German translation was that of Kannegiesser (1809).

Versions by Streckfuss, Kopisch, and Prince John (late king) of Saxony

followed. Goethe seems never to have given that attention to Dante which

his ever-alert intelligence might have been expected to bestow on so

imposing a moral and aesthetic phenomenon. Unless the conclusion of the

second part of "Faust" be an inspiration of the _Paradiso_, we remember

no adequate word from him on this theme. His remarks on one of the German

translations are brief, dry, and without that breadth which comes only of

thorough knowledge and sympathy. But German scholarship and constructive

criticism, through Witte, Kopisch, Wegele, Ruth, and others, have been of

pre-eminent service in deepening the understanding and facilitating the

study of the poet. In England the first recognition of Dante is by

Chaucer in the "Hugelin of Pisa" of the "Monkes Tale,"[52] and an

imitation of the opening verses of the third canto of the _Inferno_

("Assembly of Foules"). In 1417 Giovanni da Serravalle, bishop of Fermo,

completed a Latin prose translation of the _Commedia_, a copy of which,

as he made it at the request of two English bishops whom he met at the

council of Constance, was doubtless sent to England. Later we find Dante

now and then mentioned, but evidently from hearsay only,[53] till the

time of Spenser, who, like Milton fifty years later, shows that he had

read his works closely. Thenceforward for more than a century Dante

became a mere name, used without meaning by literary sciolists. Lord

Chesterfield echoes Voltaire, and Dr. Drake in his "Literary Hours"[54]

could speak of Darwin's "Botanic Garden" as showing the "wild and

terrible sublimity of Dante"! The first complete English translation was

by Boyd,--of the _Inferno_ in 1785, of the whole poem in 1802. There have

been eight other complete translations, beginning with Cary's in 1814,

six since 1850, beside several of the _Inferno_ singly. Of these that of

Longfellow is the best. It is only within the last twenty years, however,

that the study of Dante, in any true sense, became at all general. Even

Coleridge seems to have been familiar only with the _Inferno_. In America

Professor Ticknor was the first to devote a special course of

illustrative lectures to Dante; he was followed by Longfellow, whose

lectures, illustrated by admirable translations, are remembered with

grateful pleasure by many who were thus led to learn the full

significance of the great Christian poet. A translation of the _Inferno_

into quatrains by T.W. Parsons ranks with the best for spirit,

faithfulness, and elegance. In Denmark and Russia translations of the

_Inferno_ have been published, beside separate volumes of comment and

illustration. We have thus sketched the steady growth of Dante's fame and

influence to a universality unparalleled except in the case of

Shakespeare, perhaps more remarkable if we consider the abstruse and

mystical nature of his poetry. It is to be noted as characteristic that

the veneration of Dantophilists for their master is that of disciples for

their saint. Perhaps no other man could have called forth such an

expression as that of Ruskin, that "the central man of all the world, as

representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual

faculties, all at their highest, is Dante."

The first remark to be made upon the writings of Dante is that they are

all (with the possible exception of the treatise _De Vulgari Eloquio_)

autobiographic, and that all of them, including that, are parts of a

mutually related system, of which the central point is the individuality

and experience of the poet. In the _Vita Nuova_ he recounts the story of

his love for Beatrice Portinari, showing how his grief for her loss

turned his thoughts first inward upon his own consciousness, and, failing

all help there, gradually upward through philosophy to religion, and so

from a world of shadows to one of eternal substances. It traces with

exquisite unconsciousness the gradual but certain steps by which memory

and imagination transubstantiated the woman of flesh and blood into a

holy ideal, combining in one radiant symbol of sorrow and hope that faith

which is the instinctive refuge of unavailing regret, that grace of God

which higher natures learn to find in the trial which passeth all

understanding, and that perfect womanhood, the dream of youth and the

memory of maturity, which beckons toward the forever unattainable. As a

contribution to the physiology of genius, no other book is to be compared

with the _Vita Nuova_. It is more important to the understanding of Dante

as a poet than any other of his works. It shows him (and that in the

midst of affairs demanding practical ability and presence of mind)

capable of a depth of contemplative abstraction, equalling that of a

Soofi who has passed the fourth step of initiation. It enables us in some

sort to see how, from being the slave of his imaginative faculty, he rose

by self-culture and force of will to that mastery of it which is art. We

comprehend the _Commedia_ better when we know that Dante could be an

active, clear-headed politician and a mystic at the same time. Various

dates have been assigned to the composition of the _Vita Nuova_. The

earliest limit is fixed by the death of Beatrice in 1290 (though some of

the poems are of even earlier date), and the book is commonly assumed to

have been finished by 1295; Foscolo says 1294. But Professor Karl Witte,

a high authority, extends the term as far as 1300.[55] The title of the

book also, _Vita Nuova_, has been diversely interpreted. Mr. Garrow, who

published an English version of it at Florence in 1846, entitles it the

"Early Life of Dante." Balbo understands it in the same way.[56] But we

are strongly of the opinion that "New Life" is the interpretation

sustained by the entire significance of the book itself.

His next work in order of date is the treatise _De Monarchiâ_. It has

been generally taken for granted that Dante was a Guelph in politics up

to the time of his banishment, and that out of resentment he then became

a violent Ghibelline. Not to speak of the consideration that there is no

author whose life and works present so remarkable a unity and logical

sequence as those of Dante, Professor Witte has drawn attention to a fact

which alone is enough to demonstrate that the _De Monarchiâ_ was written

before 1300. That and the _Vita Nuova_ are the only works of Dante in

which no allusion whatever is made to his exile. That bitter thought was

continually present to him. In the _Convito_ it betrays itself often, and

with touching unexpectedness. Even in the treatise _De Vulgari Eloquio_,

he takes as one of his examples of style: "I have most pity for those,

whosoever they are, that languish in exile, and revisit their country

only in dreams." We have seen that the one decisive act of Dante's

priorate was to expel from Florence the chiefs of both parties as the

sowers of strife, and he tells us (_Paradiso_, XVII.) that he had formed

a party by himself. The king of Saxony has well defined his political

theory as being "an ideal Ghibellinism"[57] and he has been accused of

want of patriotism only by those short-sighted persons who cannot see

beyond their own parish. Dante's want of faith in freedom was of the same

kind with Milton's refusing (as Tacitus had done before) to confound

license with liberty. The argument of the _De Monarchiâ_ is briefly this:

As the object of the individual man is the highest development of his

faculties, so is it also with men united in societies. But the individual

can only attain the highest development when all his powers are in

absolute subjection to the intellect, and society only when it subjects

its individual caprices to an intelligent head. This is the order of

nature, as in families, and men have followed it in the organization of

villages, towns, cities. Again, since God made man in his own image, men

and societies most nearly resemble him in proportion as they approach

unity. But as in all societies questions must arise, so there is need of

a monarch for supreme arbiter. And only a universal monarch can be

impartial enough for this, since kings of limited territories would

always be liable to the temptation of private ends. With the internal

policy of municipalities, commonwealths, and kingdoms, the monarch would

have nothing to do, only interfering when there was danger of an

infraction of the general peace. This is the doctrine of the first book,

enforced sometimes eloquently, always logically, and with great fertility

of illustration. It is an enlargement of some of the _obiter dicta_ of

the _Convito_. The earnestness with which peace is insisted on as a

necessary postulate of civic well-being shows what the experience had

been out of which Dante had constructed his theory. It is to be looked on

as a purely scholastic demonstration of a speculative thesis, in which

the manifold exceptions and modifications essential in practical

application are necessarily left aside. Dante almost forestalls the

famous proposition of Calvin, "that it is possible to conceive a people

without a prince, but not a prince without a people," when he says, _Non

enim gens propter regem, sed e converso rex propter gentem_.[58] And in

his letter to the princes and peoples of Italy on the coming of Henry

VII., he bids them "obey their prince, but so as freemen preserving their

own constitutional forms." He says also expressly: _Animadvertendum sane,

quod cum dicitur humanum genus potest regi per unum supremum principem,

non sic intelligendum est ut ab illo uno prodire possint municipia et

leges municipales. Habent namque nationes, regna, et civitates inter se

proprietates quas legibus differentibus regulari oportet_. Schlosser the

historian compares Dante's system with that of the United States.[59] It

in some respects resembled more the constitution of the Netherlands under

the supreme stadtholder, but parallels between ideal and actual

institutions are always unsatisfactory.[60]

The second book is very curious. In it Dante endeavors to demonstrate the

divine right of the Roman Empire to universal sovereignty. One of his

arguments is, that Christ consented to be born under the reign of

Augustus; another, that he assented to the imperial jurisdiction in

allowing himself to be crucified under a decree of one of its courts. The

atonement could not have been accomplished unless Christ suffered under

sentence of a court having jurisdiction, for otherwise his condemnation

would have been an injustice and not a penalty. Moreover, since all

mankind was typified in the person of Christ, the court must have been

one having jurisdiction over all mankind; and since he was delivered to

Pilate, an officer of Tiberius, it must follow that the jurisdiction of

Tiberius was universal. He draws an argument also from the wager of

battle to prove that the Roman Empire was divinely permitted, at least,

if not instituted. For since it is admitted that God gives the victory,

and since the Romans always won it, therefore it was God's will that the

Romans should attain universal empire. In the third book he endeavors to

prove that the emperor holds by divine right, and not by permission of

the pope. He assigns supremacy to the pope in spirituals, and to the

emperor in temporals. This was a delicate subject, and though the king of

Saxony (a Catholic) says that Dante did not overstep the limits of

orthodoxy, it was on account of this part of the book that it was

condemned as heretical.[61]

Next follows the treatise _De Vulgari Eloquio_. Though we have doubts

whether we possess this book as Dante wrote it, inclining rather to think

that it is a copy in some parts textually exact, in others an abstract,

there can be no question either of its great glossological value or that

it conveys the opinions of Dante. We put it next in order, though written

later than the _Convito_, only because, like the _De Monarchiâ_, it is

written in Latin. It is a proof of the national instinct of Dante, and of

his confidence in his genius, that he should have chosen to write all his

greatest works in what was deemed by scholars a _patois_, but which he

more than any other man made a classic language. Had he intended the _De

Monarchiâ_ for a political pamphlet, he would certainly not have composed

it in the dialect of the few. The _De Vulgari Eloquio_ was to have been

in four books. Whether it was ever finished or not it is impossible to

say; but only two books have come down to us. It treats of poetizing in

the vulgar tongue, and of the different dialects of Italy. From the

particularity with which it treats of the dialect of Bologna, it has been

supposed to have been written in that city, or at least to furnish an

argument in favor of Dante's having at some time studied there. In Lib.

II. Cap. II., is a remarkable passage in which, defining the various

subjects of song and what had been treated in the vulgar tongue by

different poets, he says that his own theme had been righteousness.

The _Convito_ is also imperfect. It was to have consisted of fourteen

treatises, but, as we have it, contains only four. In the first he

justifies the use of the vulgar idiom in preference to the Latin. In the

other three he comments on three of his own _Canzoni_. It will be

impossible to give an adequate analysis of this work in the limits

allowed us.[62] It is an epitome of the learning of that age,

philosophical, theological, and scientific. As affording illustration of

the _Commedia_, and of Dante's style of thought, it is invaluable. It is

reckoned by his countrymen the first piece of Italian prose, and there

are parts of it which still stand unmatched for eloquence and pathos. The

Italians (even such a man as Cantù among the rest) find in it and a few

passages of the _Commedia_ the proof that Dante, as a natural philosopher

was wholly in advance of his age,--that he had, among other things,

anticipated Newton in the theory of gravitation. But this is as idle as

the claim that Shakespeare had discovered the circulation of the blood

before Harvey,[63] and one might as well attempt to dethrone Newton

because Chaucer speaks of the love which draws the apple to the earth.

The truth is, that it was only as a poet that Dante was great and

original (glory enough, surely, to have not more than two competitors),

and in matters of science, as did all his contemporaries, sought the

guiding hand of Aristotle like a child. Dante is assumed by many to have

been a Platonist, but this is not true, in the strict sense of the word.

Like all men of great imagination, he was an idealist, and so far a

Platonist, as Shakespeare might be proved to have been by his sonnets.

But Dante's direct acquaintance with Plato may be reckoned at zero, and

we consider it as having strongly influenced his artistic development for

the better, that transcendentalist as he was by nature, so much so as to

be in danger of lapsing into an Oriental mysticism, his habits of thought

should have been made precise and his genius disciplined by a mind so

severely logical as that of Aristotle. This does not conflict with what

we believe to be equally true, that the Platonizing commentaries on his

poem, like that of Landino, are the most satisfactory. Beside the prose

already mentioned, we have a small collection of Dante's letters, the

recovery of the larger number of which we owe to Professor Witte. They

are all interesting, some of them especially so, as illustrating the

prophetic character with which Dante invested himself. The longest is one

addressed to Can Grande della Scalla, explaining the intention of the

_Commedia_ and the method to be employed in its interpretation. The

authenticity of this letter has been doubted, but is now generally

admitted.

We shall barely allude to the minor poems, full of grace and depth of

mystic sentiment, and which would have given Dante a high place in the

history of Italian literature, even had he written nothing else. They are

so abstract, however, that without the extrinsic interest of having been

written by the author of the _Commedia_, they would probably find few

readers. All that is certainly known in regard to the _Commedia_ is that

it was composed during the nineteen years which intervened between

Dante's banishment and death. Attempts have been made to fix precisely

the dates of the different parts, but without success, and the

differences of opinion are bewildering. Foscolo has constructed an

ingenious and forcible argument to show that no part of the poem was

published before the author's death. The question depends somewhat on the

meaning we attach to the word "published." In an age of manuscript the

wide dispersion of a poem so long even as a single one of the three

divisions of the _Commedia_ would be accomplished very slowly. But it is

difficult to account for the great fame which Dante enjoyed during the

latter years of his life, unless we suppose that parts, at least, of his

greatest work had been read or heard by a large number of persons. This

need not, however, imply publication; and Witte, whose opinion is

entitled to great consideration, supposes even the _Inferno_ not to have

been finished before 1314 or 1315. In a matter where certainty would be

impossible, it is of little consequence to reproduce conjectural dates.

In the letter to Can Grande, before alluded to, Dante himself has stated

the theme of his song. He says that "the literal subject of the whole

work is the state of the soul after death simply considered. But if the

work be taken allegorically, the subject is man, as by merit or demerit,

through freedom of the will, he renders himself liable to the reward or

punishment of justice." He tells us that the work is to be interpreted in

a literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical sense, a mode then commonly

employed with the Scriptures,[64] and of which he gives the following

example: "To make which mode of treatment more clear, it may be applied

in the following verses: _In exitu Israel de Aegypto, domus Jacob de

populo barbaro, facta est Judaea sanctificatio ejus, Israel potestas

ejus_.[65] For if we look only at the literal sense, it signifies the

going out of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses; if

at the allegorical, it signifies our redemption through Christ; if at the

moral, it signifies the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery

of sin to a state of grace; and if at the anagogical, it signifies the

passage of the blessed soul from the bondage of this corruption to the

freedom of eternal glory." A Latin couplet, cited by one of the old

commentators, puts the matter compactly together for us:--

"_Litera_ gesta refert; quid credas _allegoria_;

_Moralis_ quid agas; quid speres _anagogia_."

Dante tells us that he calls his poem a comedy because it has a fortunate

ending, and gives its title thus: "Here begins the comedy of Dante

Alighieri, a Florentine by birth, but not in morals."[66] The poem

consists of three parts, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each part is

divided into thirty-three cantos, in allusion to the years of the

Saviour's life; for though the Hell contains thirty-four, the first canto

is merely introductory. In the form of the verse (triple rhyme) we may

find an emblem of the Trinity, and in the three divisions, of the

threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude. Symbolic meanings

reveal themselves, or make themselves suspected, everywhere, as in the

architecture of the Middle Ages. An analysis of the poem would be out of

place here, but we must say a few words of Dante's position as respects

modern literature. If we except Wolfram von Eschenbach, he is the first

Christian poet, the first (indeed, we might say the only) one whose whole

system of thought is colored in every finest fibre by a purely Christian

theology. Lapse through sin, mediation, and redemption, these are the

subjects of the three parts of the poem: or, otherwise stated,

intellectual conviction of the result of sin, typified in Virgil (symbol

also of that imperialism whose origin he sang); moral conversion after

repentance, by divine grace, typified in Beatrice; reconciliation with

God, and actual blinding vision of him,--"The pure in heart shall see

God." Here are general truths which any Christian may accept and find

comfort in. But the poem comes nearer to us than this. It is the real

history of a brother man, of a tempted, purified, and at last triumphant

human soul; it teaches the benign ministry of sorrow, and that the ladder

of that faith by which man climbs to the actual fruition of things not

seen _ex quovis ligno non fit_, but only of the cross manfully borne. The

poem is also, in a very intimate sense, an apotheosis of woman Indeed, as

Marvell's drop of dew mirrored the whole firmament, so we find in the

_Commedia_ the image of the Middle Ages, and the sentimental gyniolatry

of chivalry, which was at best but skin-deep, is lifted in Beatrice to an

ideal and universal plane. It is the same with Catholicism, with

imperialism, with the scholastic philosophy, and nothing is more

wonderful than the power of absorption and assimilation in this man, who

could take up into himself the world that then was, and reproduce it with

such, cosmopolitan truth to human nature and to his own individuality, as

to reduce all contemporary history to a mere comment on his vision. We

protest, therefore, against the parochial criticism which would degrade

Dante to a mere partisan, which sees in him a Luther before his time, and

would clap the _bonnet rouge_ upon his heavenly muse.

Like all great artistic minds, Dante was essentially conservative, and,

arriving precisely in that period of transition when Church and Empire

were entering upon the modern epoch of thought, he strove to preserve

both by presenting the theory of both in a pristine and ideal perfection.

The whole nature of Dante was one of intense belief. There is proof upon

proof that he believed himself invested with a divine mission Like the

Hebrew prophets, with whose writings his whole soul was imbued, it was

back to the old worship and the God of the fathers that he called his

people, and not Isaiah himself was more destitute of that humor, that

sense of ludicrous contrast, which is an essential in the composition of

a sceptic. In Dante's time, learning had something of a sacred character,

the line was hardly yet drawn between the clerk and the possessor of

supernatural powers, it was with the next generation, with the elegant

Petrarch, even more truly than with the kindly Boccaccio, that the purely

literary life, and that dilettanteism, which is the twin sister of

scepticism, began. As a merely literary figure, the position of Dante is

remarkable. Not only as respects thought, but as respects aesthetics

also, his great poem stands as a monument on the boundary line between

the ancient and modern. He not only marks, but is in himself, the

transition. _Arma virumque cano_, that is the motto of classic song; the

things of this world and great men. Dante says, _subjectum est homo_, not

_vir_; my theme is man, not a man. The scene of the old epic and drama

was in this world, and its catastrophe here; Dante lays his scene in the

human soul, and his fifth act in the other world. He makes himself the

protagonist of his own drama. In the _Commedia_ for the first time

Christianity wholly revolutionizes Art, and becomes its seminal

principle. But aesthetically also, as well as morally, Dante stands

between the old and the new, and reconciles them. The theme of his poem

is purely subjective, modern, what is called romantic; but its treatment

is objective (almost to realism, here and there), and it is limited by a

form of classic severity. In the same way he sums up in himself the two

schools of modern poetry which had preceded him, and, while essentially

lyrical in his subject, is epic in the handling of it. So also he

combines the deeper and more abstract religious sentiment of the Teutonic

races with the scientific precision and absolute systematism of the

Romanic. In one respect Dante stands alone. While we can in some sort

account for such representative men as Voltaire and Goethe (nay, even

Shakespeare) by the intellectual and moral fermentation of the age in

which they lived, Dante seems morally isolated and to have drawn his

inspiration almost wholly from his own internal reserves. Of his mastery

in style we need say little here. Of his mere language, nothing could be

better than the expression of Rivarol "His verse holds itself erect by

the mere force of the substantive and verb, without the help of a single

epithet." We will only add a word on what seems to us an extraordinary

misapprehension of Coleridge, who disparages Dante by comparing his

Lucifer with Milton's Satan. He seems to have forgotten that the precise

measurements of Dante were not prosaic, but absolutely demanded by the

nature of his poem. He is describing an actual journey, and his exactness

makes a part of the verisimilitude. We read the "Paradise Lost" as a

poem, the _Commedia_ as a record of fact; and no one can read Dante

without believing his story, for it is plain that he believed it himself.

It is false aesthetics to confound the grandiose with the imaginative.

Milton's angels are not to be compared with Dante's, at once real and

supernatural; and the Deity of Milton is a Calvinistic Zeus, while

nothing in all poetry approaches the imaginative grandeur of Dante's

vision of God at the conclusion of the _Paradiso_. In all literary

history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life

and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the

unessential; and there is no moral more touching than that the

contemporary recognition of such a nature, so endowed and so faithful to

its endowment, should be summed up in the sentence of Florence: _Igne

comburatur sic quod moriatur_.[67]

The range of Dante's influence is not less remarkable than its intensity.

Minds, the antipodes of each other in temper and endowment, alike feel

the force of his attraction, the pervasive comfort of his light and

warmth. Boccaccio and Lamennais are touched with the same reverential

enthusiasm. The imaginative Ruskin is rapt by him, as we have seen,

perhaps beyond the limit where critical appreciation merges in

enthusiasm; and the matter-of-fact Schlosser tells us that "he, who was

wont to contemplate earthly life wholly in an earthly light, has made use

of Dante, Landino, and Vellutello in his solitude to bring a heavenly

light into his inward life." Almost all other poets have their seasons,

but Dante penetrates to the moral core of those who once fairly come

within his sphere, and possesses them wholly. His readers turn students,

his students zealots, and what was a taste becomes a religion. The

homeless exile finds a home in thousands of grateful hearts. _E venne da

esilio in questa pace!_

Every kind of objection, aesthetic and other, may be, and has been, made

to the _Divina Commedia_, especially by critics who have but a

superficial acquaintance with it, or rather with the _Inferno_, which is

as far as most English critics go. Coleridge himself, who had a way of

divining what was in books, may be justly suspected of not going further,

though with Carey to help him. Mr. Carlyle, who has said admirable things

of Dante the man, was very imperfectly read in Dante the author, or he

would never have put Sordello in hell and the meeting with Beatrice in

paradise. In France it was not much better (though Rivarol has said the

best thing hitherto of Dante's parsimony of epithet)[68] before Ozanam,

who, if with decided ultramontane leanings, has written excellently well

of our poet, and after careful study. Voltaire, though not without

relentings toward a poet who had put popes heels upward in hell, regards

him on the whole as a stupid monster and barbarian. It was no better in

Italy, if we may trust Foscolo, who affirms that "neither Pelli nor

others deservedly more celebrated than he ever read attentively the poem

of Dante, perhaps never ran through it from the first verse to the

last."[69] Accordingly we have heard that the _Commedia_ was a sermon, a

political pamphlet, the revengeful satire of a disappointed Ghibelline,

nay, worse, of a turncoat Guelph. It is narrow, it is bigoted, it is

savage, it is theological, it is mediaeval, it is heretical, it is

scholastic, it is obscure, it is pedantic, its Italian is not that of _la

Crusca_, its ideas are not those of an enlightened eighteenth century, it

is everything, in short, that a poem should not be; and yet, singularly

enough, the circle of its charm has widened in proportion as men have

receded from the theories of Church and State which are supposed to be

its foundation, and as the modes of thought of its author have become

more alien to those of his readers. In spite of all objections, some of

which are well founded, the _Commedia_ remains one of the three or four

universal books that have ever been written.

We may admit, with proper limitations, the modern distinction between the

Artist and the Moralist. With the one Form is all in all, with the other

Tendency. The aim of the one is to delight, of the other to convince. The

one is master of his purpose, the other mastered by it. The whole range

of perception and thought is valuable to the one as it will minister to

imagination, to the other only as it is available for argument. With the

moralist use is beauty, good only as it serves an ulterior purpose; with

the artist beauty is use, good in and for itself. In the fine arts the

vehicle makes part of the thought, coalesces with it. The living

conception shapes itself a body in marble, color, or modulated sound, and

henceforth the two are inseparable. The results of the moralist pass into

the intellectual atmosphere of mankind, it matters little by what mode of

conveyance. But where, as in Dante, the religious sentiment and the

imagination are both organic, something interfused with the whole being

of the man, so that they work in kindly sympathy, the moral will

insensibly suffuse itself with beauty as a cloud with light. Then that

fine sense of remote analogies, awake to the assonance between facts

seemingly remote and unrelated, between the outward and inward worlds,

though convinced that the things of this life are shadows, will be

persuaded also that they are not fantastic merely, but imply a substance

somewhere, and will love to set forth the beauty of the visible image

because it suggests the ineffably higher charm of the unseen original.

Dante's ideal of life, the enlightening and strengthening of that native

instinct of the soul which leads it to strive backward toward its divine

source, may sublimate the senses till each becomes a window for the light

of truth and the splendor of God to shine through. In him as in Calderon

the perpetual presence of imagination not only glorifies the philosophy

of life and the science of theology, but idealizes both in symbols of

material beauty. Though Dante's conception of the highest end of man was

that he should climb through every phase of human experience to that

transcendental and super-sensual region where the true, the good, and the

beautiful blend in the white light of God, yet the prism of his

imagination forever resolved the ray into color again, and he loved to

show it also where, entangled and obstructed in matter, it became

beautiful once more to the eye of sense. Speculation, he tells us, is the

use, without any mixture, of our noblest part (the reason). And this part

cannot in this life have its perfect use, which is to behold God (who is

the highest object of the intellect), except inasmuch as the intellect

considers and beholds him in his effects.[70] Underlying Dante the

metaphysician, statesman, and theologian, was always Dante the poet,[71]

irradiating and vivifying, gleaming through in a picturesque phrase, or

touching things unexpectedly with that ideal light which softens and

subdues like distance in the landscape. The stern outline of his system

wavers and melts away before the eye of the reader in a mirage of

imagination that lifts from beyond the sphere of vision and hangs in

serener air images of infinite suggestion projected from worlds not

realized, but substantial to faith, hope, and aspiration. Beyond the

horizon of speculation floats, in the passionless splendor of the

empyrean, the city of our God, the Rome whereof Christ is a Roman,[72]

the citadel of refuge, even in this life, for souls purified by sorrow

and self denial, transhumanized[73] to the divine abstraction of pure

contemplation. "And it is called Empyrean," he says in his letter to Can

Grande, "which is the same as a heaven blazing with fire or ardor, not

because there is in it a material fire or burning, but a spiritual one,

which is blessed love or charity." But this splendor he bodies forth, if

sometimes quaintly, yet always vividly and most often in types of winning

grace.

Dante was a mystic with a very practical turn of mind. A Platonist by

nature, an Aristotelian by training, his feet keep closely to the narrow

path of dialectics, because he believed it the safest, while his eyes are

fixed on the stars and his brain is busy with things not demonstrable,

save by that grace of God which passeth all understanding, nor capable of

being told unless by far off hints and adumbrations. Though he himself

has directly explained the scope, the method, and the larger meaning of

his greatest work,[74] though he has indirectly pointed out the way to

its interpretation in the _Convito_, and though everything he wrote is

but an explanatory comment on his own character and opinions,

unmistakably clear and precise, yet both man and poem continue not only

to be misunderstood popularly, but also by such as should know

better.[75] That those who confined their studies to the _Commedia_

should have interpreted it variously is not wonderful, for out of the

first or literal meaning others open, one out of another, each of wider

circuit and purer abstraction, like Dante's own heavens, giving and

receiving light.[76] Indeed, Dante himself is partly to blame for this.

"The form or mode of treatment," he says, "is poetic, fictive,

descriptive, digressive, transumptive, and withal definitive, divisive,

probative, improbative, and positive of examples." Here are conundrums

enough, to be sure! To Italians at home, for whom the great arenas of

political and religious speculation were closed, the temptation to find a

subtler meaning than the real one was irresistible. Italians in exile, on

the other hand, made Dante the stalking-horse from behind which they

could take a long shot at Church and State, or at obscurer foes.[77]

Infinitely touching and sacred to us is the instinct of intense sympathy

which drawst hese latter toward their great forerunner, _exul immeritus_

like themselves.[78] But they have too often wrung a meaning from Dante

which is injurious to the man and out of keeping with the ideas of his

age. The aim in expounding a great poem should be, not to discover an

endless variety of meanings often contradictory, but whatever it has of

great and perennial significance; for such it must have, or it would long

ago have ceased to be living and operative, would long ago have taken

refuge in the Chartreuse of great libraries, dumb thenceforth to all

mankind. We do not mean to say that this minute exegesis is useless or

unpraiseworthy, but only that it should be subsidiary to the larger way.

It serves to bring out more clearly what is very wonderful in Dante,

namely, the omnipresence of his memory throughout the work, so that its

intimate coherence does not exist in spite of the reconditeness and

complexity of allusion, but is woven out of them. The poem has many

senses, he tells us, and there can be no doubt of it; but it has also,

and this alone will account for its fascination, a living soul behind

them all and informing all, an intense singleness of purpose, a core of

doctrine simple, human, and wholesome, though it be also, to use his own

phrase, the bread of angels.

Nor is this unity characteristic only of the _Divina Commedia_. All the

works of Dante, with the possible exception of the _De vulgari Eloquio_

(which is unfinished), are component parts of a Whole Duty of Man

mutually completing and interpreting one another. They are also, as truly

as Wordsworth's "Prelude," a history of the growth of a poet's mind. Like

the English poet he valued himself at a high rate, the higher no doubt

after Fortune had made him outwardly cheap. _Sempre il magnanimo si

magnifica in suo cuore; e così lo pusillanimo per contrario sempre si

tiene meno che non è._[79] As in the prose of Milton, whose striking

likeness to Dante in certain prominent features of character has been

remarked by Foscolo, there are in Dante's minor works continual allusions

to himself of great value as material for his biographer. Those who read

attentively will discover that the tenderness he shows toward Francesca

and her lover did not spring from any friendship for her family, but was

a constant quality of his nature, and that what is called his revengeful

ferocity is truly the implacable resentment of a lofty mind and a lover

of good against evil, whether showing itself in private or public life;

perhaps hating the former manifestation of it the most because he

believed it to be the root of the latter,--a faith which those who have

watched the course of politics in a democracy, as he had, will be

inclined to share. His gentleness is all the more striking by contrast,

like that silken compensation which blooms out of the thorny stem of the

cactus. His moroseness,[80] his party spirit, and his personal

vindictiveness are all predicated upon the _Inferno_, and upon a

misapprehension or careless reading even of that. Dante's zeal was not of

that sentimental kind, quickly kindled and as soon quenched, that hovers

on the surface of shallow minds,

"Even as the flame of unctuous is wont

To move upon the outer surface only";[81]

it was the steady heat of an inward fire kindling the whole character of

the man through and through, like the minarets of his own city of

Dis.[82] He was, as seems distinctive in some degree of the Latinized

races, an unflinching _à priori_ logician, not unwilling to "syllogize

invidious verities,"[83] wherever they might lead him, like Sigier, whom

he has put in paradise, though more than suspected of heterodoxy. But at

the same time, as we shall see, he had something of the practical good

sense of that Teutonic stock whence he drew a part of his blood, which

prefers a malleable syllogism that can yield without breaking to the

inevitable, but incalculable pressure of human nature and the stiffer

logic of events. His theory of Church and State was not merely a

fantastic one, but intended for the use and benefit of men as they were;

and he allowed accordingly for aberrations, to which even the law of

gravitation is forced to give place; how much more, then, any scheme

whose very starting-point is the freedom of the will!

We are thankful for a commentator at last who passes dry-shod over the

_turbide onde_ of inappreciative criticism, and, quietly waving aside the

thick atmosphere which has gathered about the character of Dante both as

man and poet, opens for us his City of Doom with the divining-rod of

reverential study. Miss Rossetti comes commended to our interest, not

only as one of a family which seems to hold genius by the tenure of

gavelkind, but as having a special claim by inheritance to a love and

understanding of Dante. She writes English with a purity that has in it

something of feminine softness with no lack of vigor or precision. Her

lithe mind winds itself with surprising grace through the metaphysical

and other intricacies of her subject. She brings to her work the refined

enthusiasm of a cultivated woman and the penetration of sympathy. She has

chosen the better way (in which Germany took the lead) of interpreting

Dante out of himself, the pure spring from which, and from which alone,

he drew his inspiration, and not from muddy Fra Alberico or Abbate

Giovacchino, from stupid visions of Saint Paul or voyages of Saint

Brandan. She has written by far the best comment that has appeared in

English, and we should say the best that has been done in England, were

it not for her father's _Comento analitico_, for excepting which her

filial piety will thank us. Students of Dante in the original will be

grateful to her for many suggestive hints, and those who read him in

English will find in her volume a travelling map in which the principal

points and their connections are clearly set down. In what we shall say

of Dante we shall endeavor only to supplement her interpretation with

such side-lights as may have been furnished us by twenty years of

assiduous study. Dante's thought is multiform, and, like certain street

signs, once common, presents a different image according to the point of

view. Let us consider briefly what was the plan of the _Divina Commedia_

and Dante's aim in writing it, which, if not to justify, was at least to

illustrate, for warning and example, the ways of God to man. The higher

intention of the poem was to set forth the results of sin, or unwisdom,

and of virtue, or wisdom, in this life, and consequently in the life to

come, which is but the continuation and fulfilment of this. The scene

accordingly is the spiritual world, of which we are as truly denizens now

as hereafter. The poem is a diary of the human soul in its journey

upwards from error through repentance to atonement with God. To make it

apprehensible by those whom it was meant to teach, nay, from its very

nature as a poem, and not a treatise of abstract morality, it must set

forth everything by means of sensible types and images.

"To speak thus is adapted to your mind,

Since only from the sensible it learns

What makes it worthy of intellect thereafter,

On this account the Scripture condescends

Unto your faculties, and feet and hands

To God attributes, and means something else."[84]

Whoever has studied mediaeval art in any of its branches need not be told

that Dante's age was one that demanded very palpable and even revolting

types. As in the old legend, a drop of scalding sweat from the damned

soul must shrivel the very skin of those for whom he wrote, to make them

wince if not to turn them away from evil doing. To consider his hell a

place of physical torture is to take Circe's herd for real swine. Its

mouth yawns not only under Florence, but before the feet of every man

everywhere who goeth about to do evil. His hell is a condition of the

soul, and he could not find images loathsome enough to express the moral

deformity which is wrought by sin on its victims, or his own abhorrence

of it. Its inmates meet you in the street every day.

"Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed

In one self place, for where we are is hell,

And where hell is there we must ever be."[85]

It is our own sensual eye that gives evil the appearance of good, and out

of a crooked hag makes a bewitching siren. The reason enlightened by the

grace of God sees it as it truly is, full of stench and corruption.[86]

It is this office of reason which Dante undertakes to perform, by divine

commission, in the _Inferno_. There can be no doubt that he looked upon

himself as invested with the prophetic function, and the Hebrew

forerunners, in whose society his soul sought consolation and

sustainment, certainly set him no example of observing the conventions of

good society in dealing with the enemies of God. Indeed, his notions of

good society were not altogether those of this world in any generation.

He would have defined it as meaning "the peers" of Philosophy, "souls

free from wretched and vile delights and from vulgar habits, endowed with

genius and memory."[87] Dante himself had precisely this endowment, and

in a very surprising degree. His genius enabled him to see and to show

what he saw to others; his memory neither forgot nor forgave. Very

hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind would have been the modern

theory which deals with sin as involuntary error, and by shifting off the

fault to the shoulders of Atavism or those of Society, personified for

purposes of excuse, but escaping into impersonality again from the grasp

of retribution, weakens that sense of personal responsibility which is

the root of self-respect and the safeguard of character. Dante indeed saw

clearly enough that the Divine justice did at length overtake Society in

the ruin of states caused by the corruption of private, and thence of

civic, morals; but a personality so intense as his could not be satisfied

with such a tardy and generalized penalty as this. "It is Thou," he says

sternly, "who hast done this thing, and Thou, not Society, shalt be

damned for it; nay, damned all the worse for this paltry subterfuge. This

is not my judgment, but that of universal Nature[88] from before the

beginning of the world."[89] Accordingly the highest reason, typified in

his guide Virgil, rebukes him for bringing compassion to the judgments of

God,[90] and again embraces him and calls the mother that bore him

blessed, when he bids Filippo Argenti begone among the other dogs.[91]

This latter case shocks our modern feelings the more rudely for the

simple pathos with which Dante makes Argenti answer when asked who he

was, "Thou seest I am one that weeps." It is also the one that makes most

strongly for the theory of Dante's personal vindictiveness,[92] and it

may count for what it is worth. We are not greatly concerned to defend

him on that score, for he believed in the righteous use of anger, and

that baseness was its legitimate quarry. He did not think the Tweeds and

Fisks, the political wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his day

merely amusing, and he certainly did think it the duty of an upright and

thoroughly trained citizen to speak out severely and unmistakably. He

believed firmly, almost fiercely, in a divine order of the universe, a

conception whereof had been vouchsafed him, and that whatever and whoever

hindered or jostled it, whether wilfully or blindly it mattered not, was

to be got out of the way at all hazards; because obedience to God's law,

and not making things generally comfortable, was the highest duty of man,

as it was also his only way to true felicity. It has been commonly

assumed that Dante was a man soured by undeserved misfortune, that he

took up a wholly new outfit of political opinions with his fallen

fortunes, and that his theory of life and of man's relations to it was

altogether reshaped for him by the bitter musings of his exile. This

would be singular, to say the least, in a man who tells us that he "felt

himself indeed four-square against the strokes of chance," and whose

convictions were so intimate that they were not merely intellectual

conclusions, but parts of his moral being. Fortunately we are called on

to believe nothing of the kind. Dante himself has supplied us with hints

and dates which enable us to watch the germination and trace the growth

of his double theory of government, applicable to man as he is a citizen

of this world, and as he hopes to become hereafter a freeman of the

celestial city. It would be of little consequence to show in which of two

equally selfish and short-sighted parties a man enrolled himself six

hundred years ago, but it is worth something to know that a man of

ambitious temper and violent passions, aspiring to office in a city of

factions, could rise to a level of principle so far above them all.

Dante's opinions have life in them still, because they were drawn from

living sources of reflection and experience, because they were reasoned

out from the astronomic laws of history and ethics, and were not

weather-guesses snatched in a glance at the doubtful political sky of the

hour.

Swiftly the politic goes: is it dark? he borrows a lantern;

Slowly the statesman and sure, guiding his feet by the stars.

It will be well, then, to clear up the chronology of Dante's thought.

When his ancestor Cacciaguida prophesies to him the life which is to be

his after 1300,[93] he says, speaking of his exile:--

"And that which most shall weigh upon thy shoulders

Will be the bad and foolish company

With which into this valley thou shalt fall;

* * * * *

"Of their bestiality their own proceedings

Shall furnish proof; _so 'twill be well for thee

A party to have made thee by thyself_."

Here both context and grammatical construction (infallible guides in a

writer so scrupulous and exact) imply irresistibly that Dante had become

a party by himself before his exile. The measure adopted by the Priors of

Florence while he was one of them (with his assent and probably by his

counsel), of sending to the frontier the leading men of both factions,

confirms this implication. Among the persons thus removed from the

opportunity of doing mischief was his dearest friend Guido Cavalcanti, to

whom he had not long before addressed the _Vita Nuova_.[94] Dante

evidently looked back with satisfaction on his conduct at this time, and

thought it both honest and patriotic, as it certainly was disinterested.

"We whose country is the world, as the ocean to the fish," he tells us,

"though we drank of the Arno in infancy, and love Florence so much that,

_because we loved her, we suffer exile unjustly,_ support the shoulders

of our judgment rather upon reason than the senses."[95] And again,

speaking of old ago, he says: "And the noble soul at this age blesses

also the times past, and well may bless them, because, revolving them in

memory, she recalls her righteous conduct, without which she could not

enter the port to which she draws nigh, with so much riches and so great

gain." This language is not that of a man who regrets some former action

as mistaken, still less of one who repented it for any disastrous

consequences to himself. So, in justifying a man for speaking of himself,

he alleges two examples,--that of Boethius, who did so to "clear himself

of the perpetual infamy of his exile"; and that of Augustine, "for, by

the process of his life, which was from bad to good, from good to better,

and from better to best, he gave us example and teaching."[96] After

middle life, at least, Dante had that wisdom "whose use brings with it

marvellous beauties, that is, contentment with every condition of time,

and contempt of those things which others make their masters."[97] If

Dante, moreover, wrote his treatise _De Monarchiâ_ before 1302, and we

think Witte's inference,[98] from its style and from the fact that he

nowhere alludes to his banishment in it, conclusive on this point, then

he was already a Ghibelline in the same larger and unpartisan sense which

ever after distinguished him from his Italian contemporaries.

"Let, let the Ghibellines ply their handicraft

Beneath some other standard; for this ever

Ill follows he who it and justice parts,"

he makes Justinian say, speaking of the Roman eagle.[99] His

Ghibellinism, though undoubtedly the result of what he had seen of

Italian misgovernment, embraced in its theoretical application the

civilized world. His political system was one which his reason adopted,

not for any temporary expediency, but because it conduced to justice,

peace, and civilization,--the three conditions on which alone freedom was

possible in any sense which made it worth having. Dante was intensely

Italian, nay, intensely Florentine, but on all great questions he was, by

the logical structure of his mind and its philosophic impartiality,

incapable of intellectual provincialism.[100] If the circle of his

affections, as with persistent natures commonly, was narrow, his thought

swept a broad horizon from that tower of absolute self which he had

reared for its speculation. Even upon the principles of poetry,

mechanical and other,[101] he had reflected more profoundly than most of

those who criticise his work, and it was not by chance that he discovered

the secret of that magical word too few, which not only distinguishes his

verse from all other, but so strikingly from his own prose. He never took

the bit of art[102] between his teeth where only poetry, and not

doctrine, was concerned.

If Dante's philosophy, on the one hand, was practical a guide for the

conduct of life, it was, on the other, a much more transcendent thing,

whose body was wisdom her soul love, and her efficient cause truth. It is

a practice of wisdom from the mere love of it, for so we must interpret

his _amoroso uso di sapienzia_, when we remember how he has said

before[103] that "the love of wisdom for its delight or profit is not

true love of wisdom." And this love must embrace knowledge in all its

branches, for Dante is content with nothing less than a pancratic

training, and has a scorn of _dilettanti_, specialists, and quacks.

"Wherefore none ought to be called a true philosopher who for any delight

loves any part of knowledge, as there are many who delight in composing

_Canzoni_, and delight to be studious in them, and who delight to be

studious in rhetoric and in music, and flee and abandon the other

sciences which are all members of wisdom."[104] "Many love better to be

held masters than to be so." With him wisdom is the generalization from

many several knowledges of small account by themselves; it results

therefore from breadth of culture, and would be impossible without it.

Philosophy is a noble lady (_donna gentil_),[105] partaking of the divine

essence by a kind of eternal marriage, while with other intelligences she

is united in a less measure "as a mistress of whom no lover takes

complete joy."[106] The eyes of this lady are her demonstrations, and her

smile is her persuasion. "The eyes of wisdom are her demonstrations by

which truth is beheld most certainly; and her smile is her persuasions in

which the interior light of wisdom is shown under a certain veil, and in

these two is felt that highest pleasure of beatitude which is the

greatest good in paradise."[107] "It is to be known that the beholding

this lady was so largely ordained for us, not merely to look upon the

face which she shows us, but that we may desire to attain the things

which she keeps concealed. And as through her much thereof is seen by

reason, so by her we believe that every miracle may have its reason in a

higher intellect, and consequently may be. Whence our good faith has its

origin, whence comes the hope of those unseen things which we desire, and

through that the operation of charity, by the which three virtues we rise

to philosophize in that celestial Athens where the Stoics, Peripatetics,

and Epicureans through the art of eternal truth accordingly concur in one

will."[108]

As to the double scope of Dante's philosophy we will cite a passage from

the _Convito_, all the more to our purpose as it will illustrate his own

method of allegorizing. "Verily the use of our mind is double, that is,

practical and speculative, the one and the other most delightful,

although that of contemplation be the more so. That of the practical is

for us to act virtuously, that is, honorably, with prudence, temperance,

fortitude, and justice. [These are the four stars seen by Dante,

_Purgatorio_, I. 22-27.] That of the speculative is not to act for

ourselves, but to consider the works of God and nature.... Verily of

these uses one is more full of beatitude than the other, as it is the

speculative, which without any admixture is the use of our noblest

part.... And this part in this life cannot have its use perfectly, which

is to see God, except inasmuch as the intellect considers him and beholds

him through his effects. And that we should seek this beatitude as the

highest, and not the other, the Gospel of Mark teaches us if we will look

well. Mark says that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Mary

Salome went to find the Saviour at the tomb and found him not, but found

a youth clad in white who said to them, 'Ye seek the Saviour, and I say

unto you that he is not here; and yet fear ye not, but go and say unto

his disciples and Peter that he will go before them into Galilee, and

there ye shall see him even as he told you.' By these three women may be

understood the three sects of the active life, that is, the Epicureans,

the Stoics, and the Peripatetics, who go to the tomb, that is, to the

present life, which is a receptacle of things corruptible, and seek the

Saviour, that is, beatitude, and find him not, but they find a youth in

white raiment, who, according to the testimony of Matthew and the rest,

was an angel of God. This angel is that nobleness of ours which comes

from God, as hath been said, which speaks in our reason and says to each

of these sects, that is, to whoever goes seeking beatitude in this life,

that it is not here, but go and say to the disciples and to Peter, that

is, to those who go seeking it and those who are gone astray (like Peter

who had denied), that it will go before them into Galilee, that is, into

speculation. Galilee is as much as to say Whiteness. Whiteness is a body

full of corporeal light more than any other, and so contemplation is

fuller of spiritual light than anything else here below. And he says, 'it

will go before,' and does not say, 'it will be with you,' to give us to

understand that God always goes before our contemplation, nor can we ever

overtake here Him who is our supreme beatitude. And it is said, 'There ye

shall see him as he told you,' that is, here ye shall have of his

sweetness, that is, felicity, as is promised you here, that is, as it is

ordained that ye can have. And thus it appears that we find our

beatitude, this felicity of which we are speaking, first imperfect in the

active life, that is, in the operations of the moral virtues, and

afterwards wellnigh perfect in the operation of the intellectual ones,

the which two operations are speedy and most direct ways to lead to the

supreme beatitude, the which cannot be had here, as appears by what has

been said."[109]

At first sight there may seem to be some want of agreement in what Dante

says here of the soul's incapacity of the vision of God in this life with

the triumphant conclusion of his own poem. But here as elsewhere Dante

must be completed and explained by himself. "We must know that everything

most greatly desires its own perfection, and in that its every desire is

appeased, and by that everything is desired. [That is, the one is drawn

toward, the other draws.] And this is that desire which makes every

delight maimed, for no delight is so great in this life that it can take

away from the soul this thirst so that desire remain not in the

thought."[110] "And since it is most natural to wish to be in God, the

human soul naturally wills it with all longing. And since its being

depends on God and is preserved thereby it naturally desires and wills to

be united with God in order to fortify its being. And since in the

goodnesses of human nature is shown some reason for those of the Divine,

it follows that the human soul unites itself in a spiritual way with

those so much the more strongly and quickly as they appear more perfect,

and this appearance happens according as the knowledge of the soul is

clear or impeded. And this union is what we call Love, whereby may be

known what is within the soul, seeing those it outwardly loves.... And

the human soul which is ennobled with the ultimate potency, that is,

reason, participates in the Divine nature after the manner of an eternal

Intelligence, because the soul is so ennobled and denuded of matter in

that sovran potency that the Divine light shines in it as in an

angel."[111] This union with God may therefore take place before the

warfare of life is over, but is only possible for souls _perfettamente

naturati_, perfectly endowed by nature.[112] This depends on the virtue

of the generating soul and the concordant influence of the planets. "And

if it happen that through the purity of the recipient soul, the

intellectual virtue be well abstracted and absolved from every corporeal

shadow, the Divine bounty is multiplied in it as a thing sufficient to

receive the same."[113] "And there are some who believe that if all the

aforesaid virtues [powers] should unite for the production of a soul in

their best disposition, so much of the Deity would descend into it that

it would be almost another incarnate God."[114] Did Dante believe himself

to be one of these? He certainly gives us reason to think so. He was born

under fortunate stars, as he twice tells us,[115] and he puts the middle

of his own life at the thirty-fifth year, which is the period he assigns

for it in the diviner sort of men.[116]

The stages of Dante's intellectual and moral growth may, we think, be

reckoned with some approach to exactness from data supplied by himself.

In the poems of the _Vita Nuova_, Beatrice, until her death, was to him

simply a poetical ideal, a type of abstract beauty, chosen according to

the fashion of the day after the manner of the Provençal poets, but in a

less carnal sense than theirs. "And by the fourth nature of animals, that

is, the sensitive, man has another love whereby he loves according to

sensible appearance, even as a beast.... And by the fifth and final

nature, that is, the truly human, or, to speak better, angelic, that is,

rational, man has a love for truth and virtue.... Wherefore, since this

nature is called _mind_, I said that love discoursed in my mind to make

it understood that this love was that which is born in the noblest of

natures, that is, [the love] of truth and virtue, and to _shut out every

false opinion by which it might be suspected that my love was for the

delight of sense._"[117] This is a very weighty affirmation, made, as it

is, so deliberately by a man of Dante's veracity, who would and did speak

truth at every hazard. Let us dismiss at once and forever all the idle

tales of Dante's amours, of la Montanina, Gentucca, Pietra, Lisetta, and

the rest, to that outer darkness of impure thoughts _là onde la stoltezza

dipartille._[118] We think Miss Rossetti a little hasty in allowing that

in the years which immediately followed Beatrice's death Dante gave

himself up "more or less to sensual gratification and earthly aim." The

earthly aim we in a certain sense admit; the sensual gratification we

reject as utterly inconsistent, not only with Dante's principles, but

with his character and indefatigable industry. Miss Rossetti illustrates

her position by a subtle remark on "the lulling spell of an intellectual

and sensitive delight in good running parallel with a voluntary and

actual indulgence in evil." The dead Beatrice beckoned him toward the

life of contemplation, and it was precisely during this period that he

attempted to find happiness in the life of action. "Verily it is to be

known, that we may in this life have two felicities, following two ways,

good and best, which lead us thither. The one is the active, the other

the contemplative life, the which (though by the active we may attain, as

has been said, unto good felicity) leads us to the best felicity and

blessedness."[119] "The life of my heart, that is, of my inward self, was

wont to be a sweet thought which went many times to the feet of God, that

is to say, in thought I contemplated the kingdom of the Blessed. And I

tell the final cause why I mounted thither in thought when I say, 'Where

it [the sweet thought] beheld a lady in glory,' that I might make it

understood that I was and am certain, by _her gracious revelation, that

she was in heaven,_ [not on earth, as I had vainly imagined,] whither I

went in thought, so often as was possible to me, as it were rapt."[120]

This passage exactly answers to another in _Purgatorio_, XXX. 115-138:--

"Not only by the work of those great wheels

That destine every seed unto some end,

According as the stars are in conjunction,

_But by the largess of celestial graces,_

* * * * *

"Such had this man become in his New Life

Potentially, that every righteous habit

Would have made admirable proof in him;

* * * * *

"Some time I did sustain him with my look (_volto_);

Revealing unto him my youthful eyes,

I led him with me turned in the right way.

As soon as ever of my second age

I was upon the threshold and changed life,

Himself from me he took and gave to others.

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[121]

Nor prayer for inspiration me availed,[122]

_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."

Now Dante himself, we think, gives us the clew, by following which we may

reconcile the contradiction, what Miss Rossetti calls "the astounding

discrepancy," between the Lady of the _Vita Nuova_ who made him

unfaithful to Beatrice, and the same Lady in the _Convito_, who in

attributes is identical with Beatrice herself. We must remember that the

prose part of the _Convito_, which is a comment on the _Canzoni_, was

written after the _Canzoni_ themselves. How long after we cannot say with

certainty, but it was plainly composed at intervals, a part of it

probably after Dante had entered upon old age (which began, as he tells

us, with the forty-fifth year), consequently after 1310. Dante had then

written a considerable part of the _Divina Commedia_, in which Beatrice

was to go through her final and most ethereal transformation in his mind

and memory. We say in his memory, for such idealizations have a very

subtle retrospective action, and the new condition of feeling or thought

is uneasy till it has half unconsciously brought into harmony whatever is

inconsistent with it in the past. The inward life unwillingly admits any

break in its continuity, and nothing is more common than to hear a man,

in venting an opinion taken up a week ago, say with perfect sincerity, "I

have always thought so and so." Whatever belief occupies the whole mind

soon produces the impression on us of having long had possession of it,

and one mode of consciousness blends so insensibly with another that it

is impossible to mark by an exact line where one begins and the other

ends. Dante in his exposition of the _Canzoni_ must have been subject to

this subtlest and most deceitful of influences. He would try to reconcile

so far as he conscientiously could his present with his past. This he

could do by means of the allegorical interpretation. "For it would be a

great shame to him," he says in the _Vita Nuova_, "who should poetize

something under the vesture of some figure or rhetorical color, and

afterwards, when asked, could not strip his words of that vesture in such

wise that they should have a true meaning." Now in the literal exposition

of the _Canzone_ beginning, "Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel

movete,"[123] he tells us that the _grandezza_ of the _Donna Gentil_ was

"temporal greatness" (one certainly of the felicities attainable by way

of the _vita attiva_), and immediately after gives us a hint by which we

may comprehend why a proud[124] man might covet it. "How much wisdom and

how great a persistence in virtue (_abito virtuoso_) are hidden for want

of this lustre!"[125] When Dante reaches the Terrestrial Paradise[126]

which is the highest felicity of this world, and therefore the

consummation of the Active Life, he is welcomed by a Lady who is its

symbol,

"Who went along

Singing and culling floweret after floweret."

and warming herself in the rays of Love, or "actual speculation," that

is, "where love makes its peace felt."[127] That she was the symbol of

this is evident from the previous dream of Dante,[128] in which he sees

Leah, the universally accepted type of it,

"Walking in a meadow,

Gathering flowers; and singing she was saying,

'Know whosoever may my name demand

That I am Leah, who go moving round

My beauteous hands to make myself a garland,'"

that is to say, of good works. She, having "washed him thoroughly from

sin,"[129]

"All dripping brought

Into the dance of the four beautiful,"[130]

who are the intellectual virtues Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and

Fortitude, the four stars, guides of the Practical Life, which he had

seen when he came out of the Hell where he had beheld the results of sin,

and arrived at the foot of the Mount of Purification. That these were the

special virtues of practical goodness Dante had already told us in a

passage before quoted from the _Convito_.[131] That this was Dante's

meaning is confirmed by what Beatrice says to him,[132]

"Short while shalt thou be here a forester (_silvano_)

And thou shalt be with me forevermore

A citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman";

for by a "forest" he always means the world of life and action.[133] At

the time when Dante was writing the _Canzoni_ on which the _Convito_ was

a comment, he believed science to be the "ultimate perfection itself, and

not the way to it,"[134] but before the _Convito_ was composed he had

become aware of a higher and purer light, an inward light, in that

Beatrice, already clarified wellnigh to a mere image of the mind, "who

lives in heaven with the angels, and on earth with my soul."[135]

So spiritually does Dante always present Beatrice to us, even where most

corporeal, as in the _Vita Nuova_, that many, like Biscione and Rossetti,

have doubted her real existence. But surely we must consent to believe

that she who speaks of

"The fair limbs wherein

I was enclosed, which scattered are in earth,"

was once a creature of flesh and blood,--

"A creature not too bright and good

For human nature's daily food."

When she died, Dante's grief, like that of Constance, filled her room up

with something fairer than the reality had ever been. There is no

idealizer like unavailing regret, all the more if it be a regret of fancy

as much as of real feeling. She early began to undergo that change into

something rich and strange in the sea[136] of his mind which so

completely supernaturalized her at last. It is not impossible, we think,

to follow the process of transformation. During the period of the

_Convito Canzoni_, when he had so given himself to study that to his

weakened eyes "the stars were shadowed with a white blur,"[137] this star

of his imagination was eclipsed for a time with the rest. As his love had

never been of the senses (which is bestial),[138] so his sorrow was all

the more ready to be irradiated with celestial light, and to assume her

to be the transmitter of it who had first awakened in him the nobler

impulses of his nature,--

("Such had this man become in his New Life

Potentially,")

and given him the first hints of a higher, nay, of the highest good. With

that turn for double meaning and abstraction which was so strong in him,

her very name helped him to allegorize her into one who makes blessed

(_beat_), and thence the step was a short one to personify in her that

Theosophy which enables man to see God and to be mystically united with

him even in the flesh. Already, in the _Vita Nuova_,[139] she appears to

him as afterwards in the Terrestrial Paradise, clad in that color of

flame which belongs to the seraphim who contemplate God in himself,

simply, and not in his relation to the Son or the Holy Spirit.[140] When

misfortune came upon him, when his schemes of worldly activity failed,

and science was helpless to console, as it had never been able wholly to

satisfy, she already rose before him as the lost ideal of his youth,

reproaching him with his desertion of purely spiritual aims. It is,

perhaps, in allusion to this that he fixes the date of her death with

such minute precision on the 9th June, 1390, most probably his own

twenty-fifth birthday, on which he passed the boundary of

adolescence.[141]

That there should seem to be a discrepancy between the Lady of the _Vita

Nuova_ and her of the _Convito_, Dante himself was already aware when

writing the former and commenting it. Explaining the sonnet beginning

_Gentil pensier_, he says, "In this sonnet I make two parts of myself

according as my thoughts were divided in two. The one part I call

_heart_, that is, the appetite, the other _soul_, that is, reason.... It

is true that in the preceding sonnet I take side with the heart against

the eyes [which were weeping for the lost Beatrice], and that appears

contrary to what I say in the present one; and therefore I say that in

that sonnet also I mean by my _heart_ the appetite, because my desire to

remember me of my most gentle Lady was still greater than to behold this

one, albeit I had already some appetite for her, but slight as should

seem: whence it appears that the one saying is not contrary to the

other."[142] When, therefore, Dante speaks of the love of this Lady as

the "adversary of _Reason_," he uses the word in its highest sense, not

as understanding (_Intellectus_), but as synonymous with _soul_. Already,

when the latter part of the _Vita Nuova_, nay, perhaps the whole of the

explanatory portion of it, was written the plan of the _Commedia_ was

complete, a poem the higher aim of which was to keep the soul alive both

in this world and for the next. As Dante tells us, the contradiction in

his mind was, though he did not become aware of it till afterwards, more

apparent than real. He sought consolation in study, and, failing to find

it in Learning (_scienza_), he was led to seek it in Wisdom (_sapienza_),

which is the love of God and the knowledge of him.[143] He had sought

happiness through the understanding; he was to find it through intuition.

The lady Philosophy (according as she is moral or intellectual) includes

both. Her gradual transfiguration is exemplified in passages already

quoted. The active life leads indirectly by a knowledge of its failures

and sins (_Inferno_), or directly by a righteous employment of it

(_Purgatorio_), to the same end. The use of the sciences is to induce in

us the ultimate perfection, that of speculating upon truth; the use of

the highest of them, theology, the contemplation of God.[144] To this

they all lead up. In one of those curious chapters of the _Convito_,[145]

where he points out the analogy between the sciences and the heavens,

Dante tells us that he compares moral philosophy with the crystalline

heaven or _Primum Mobile_, because it communicates life and gives motion

to all the others below it. But what gives motion to the crystalline

heaven (moral philosophy) itself? "The most fervent appetite which it has

in each of its parts to be conjoined with each part of that most divine

quiet heaven" (Theology).[146] Theology, the divine science, corresponds

with the Empyrean, "because of its peace, the which, through the most

excellent certainty of its subject, which is God, suffers no strife of

opinions or sophistic arguments."[147] No one of the heavens is at rest

but this, and in none of the inferior sciences can we find repose, though

he likens physics to the heaven of the fixed stars, in whose name is a

suggestion of the certitude to be arrived at in things demonstrable.

Dante had this comparison in mind, it may be inferred, when he said,

"Well I perceive that never sated is

Our intellect unless the Truth illume it

Beyond which nothing true[148] expands itself.

It rests therein as wild beast in his lair;

When it attains it, and it can attain it;

If not, then each desire would frustrate be.

Therefore springs up, in fashion of a shoot,

Doubt at the foot of truth, and this is nature

Which to the top from height to height impels us."[149]

The contradiction, as it seems to us, resolves itself into an essential,

easily apprehensible, if mystical, unity. Dante at first gave himself to

the study of the sciences (after he had lost the simple, unquestioning

faith of youth) as the means of arriving at certainty. From the root of

every truth to which he attained sprang this sucker (_rampollo_) of

doubt, drawing out of it the very sap of its life. In this way was

Philosophy truly an adversary of his soul, and the reason of his remorse

for fruitless studies which drew him away from the one that alone was and

could be fruitful is obvious enough. But by and by out of the very doubt

came the sweetness[150] of a higher and truer insight. He became aware

that there were "things in heaven and earth undreamt of in your

philosophy," as another doubter said, who had just finished _his_

studies, but could not find his way out of the scepticism they engendered

as Dante did.

"Insane is he who hopeth that our reason

Can traverse the illimitable way

Which the one Substance in three Persons follows!

Mortals, remain contented at the _Quia_;

For, if ye had been able to see all,

No need there were [had been] for Mary to bring forth.

And ye have seen desiring without fruit,

Those whose desire would have been quieted

Which evermore is given them for a grief.

I speak of Aristotle and of Plato

And many others."[151]

Whether at the time when the poems of the _Vita Nuova_ were written the

Lady who withdrew him for a while From Beatrice was (which we doubt) a

person of flesh and blood or not, she was no longer so when the prose

narrative was composed. Any one familiar with Dante's double meanings

will hardly question that by putting her at a window, which is a place to

look out of, he intended to imply that she personified Speculation, a

word which he uses with a wide range of meaning, sometimes as _looking

for_, sometimes as seeing (like Shakespeare's

"There is no speculation in those eyes"),

sometimes as _intuition_, or the beholding all things in God, who is the

cause of all. This is so obvious, and the image in this sense so

familiar, that we are surprised it should have been hitherto unremarked.

It is plain that, even when the _Vita Nuova_ was written, the Lady was

already Philosophy, but philosophy applied to a lower range of thought,

not yet ascended from flesh to spirit. The Lady who seduced him was the

science which looks for truth in second causes, or even in effects,

instead of seeking it, where alone it can be found, in the First Cause;

she was the Philosophy which looks for happiness in the visible world (of

shadows), and not in the spiritual (and therefore substantial) world. The

guerdon of his search was doubt. But Dante, as we have seen, made his

very doubts help him upward toward certainty; each became a round in the

ladder by which he climbed to clearer and clearer vision till the

end.[152] Philosophy had made him forget Beatrice; it was Philosophy who

was to bring him back to her again, washed clean in that very stream of

forgetfulness that had made an impassable barrier between them.[153]

Dante had known how to find in her the gift of Achilles's lance,

"Which used to be the cause

First of a sad and then a gracious boon."[154]

There is another possible, and even probable, theory which would

reconcile the Beatrice of the _Purgatorio_ with her of the _Vita Nuova_.

Suppose that even in the latter she signified Theology, or at least some

influence that turned his thoughts to God? Pietro di Dante, commenting

the _pargoletta_ passage in the _Purgatorio_, says expressly that the

poet had at one time given himself to the study of theology and deserted

it for poesy and other mundane sciences. This must refer to a period

beginning before 1290. Again there is an early tradition that Dante in

his youth had been a novice in a Franciscan convent, but never took the

vows. Buti affirms this expressly in his comment on _Inferno_, XVI.

106-123. It is perhaps slightly confirmed by what Dante says in the

_Convito_,[155] that "one cannot only turn to Religion by making himself

like in habit and life to St. Benedict, St. Augustine, St. Francis, and

St. Dominic, but likewise one may turn to good and true religion in a

state of matrimony, for God wills no religion in us but of the heart." If

he had ever thought of taking monastic vows, his marriage would have cut

short any such intention. If he ever wished to wed the real Beatrice

Portinari, and was disappointed, might not this be the time when his

thoughts took that direction? If so, the impulse came indirectly, at

least, from her.

We have admitted that Beatrice Portinari was a real creature,

"Col sangue suo e con le sue giunture";

but _how_ real she was, and whether as real to the poet's memory as to

his imagination, may fairly be questioned. She shifts, as the controlling

emotion or the poetic fitness of the moment dictates, from a woman loved

and lost to a gracious exhalation of all that is fairest in womanhood or

most divine in the soul of man and ere the eye has defined the new image

it has become the old one again, or another mingled of both.

"Nor one nor other seemed now what it was,

E'en as proceedeth on before the flame

Upward along the paper a brown color,

Which is not black as yet, and the white dies."[156]

As the mystic Griffin in the eyes of Beatrice (her demonstrations), so

she in his own,

"Now with the one, now with the other nature;

Think, Reader, if within myself I marvelled

When I beheld the thing itself stand still

And in its image it transformed itself."[157]

At the very moment when she had undergone her most sublimated allegorical

evaporation, his instinct as poet, which never failed him, realized her

into woman again in those scenes of almost unapproached pathos which make

the climax of his _Purgatorio_. The verses tremble with feeling and shine

with tears.[158] Beatrice recalls her own beauty with a pride as natural

as that of Fair Annie in the old ballad, and compares herself as

advantageously with the "brown, brown bride" who had supplanted her. If

this be a ghost, we do not need be told that she is a woman still.[159]

We must remember, however, that Beatrice had to be real that she might be

interesting, to be beautiful that her goodness might be persuasive, nay,

to be beautiful at any rate, because beauty has also something in it of

divine. Dante has told, in a passage already quoted, that he would rather

his readers should find his doctrine sweet than his verses, but he had

his relentings from this Stoicism.

"'Canzone, I believe those will be rare

Who of thine inner sense can master all,

Such toil it costs thy native tongue to learn;

Wherefore, if ever it perchance befall

That thou in presence of such men shouldst fare

As seem not skilled thy meaning to discern,

I pray thee then thy grief to comfort turn,

Saying to them, O thou my new delight,

'Take heed at least how fair I am to sight.'"[160]

We believe all Dante's other Ladies to have been as purely imaginary as

the Dulcinea of Don Quixote, useful only as _motives_, but a real

Beatrice is as essential to the human sympathies of the _Divina Commedia_

as her glorified Idea to its allegorical teaching, and this Dante

understood perfectly well.[161] Take _her_ out of the poem, and the heart

of it goes with her; take out her ideal, and it is emptied of its soul.

She is the menstruum in which letter and spirit dissolve and mingle into

unity. Those who doubt her existence must find Dante's graceful

sonnet[162] to Guido Cavalcante as provoking as Sancho's story of his

having seen Dulcinea winnowing wheat was to his master, "so alien is it

from all that which eminent persons, who are constituted and preserved

for other exercises and entertainments, do and ought to do."[163] But we

should always remember in reading Dante that with him the allegorical

interpretation is the true one (_verace sposizione_), and that he

represents himself (and that at a time when he was known to the world

only by his minor poems) as having made righteousness (_rettitudine_, in

other words, moral philosophy) the subject of his verse.[164] Love with

him seems first to have meant the love of truth and the search after it

(_speculazione_), and afterwards the contemplation of it in its infinite

source (_speculazione_ in its higher and mystical sense). This is the

divine love "which where it shines darkens and wellnigh extinguishes all

other loves."[165] Wisdom is the object of it, and the end of wisdom to

contemplate God the true mirror (_verace spegio, speculum_), wherein all

things are seen as they truly are. Nay, she herself "is the brightness of

the eternal light, the unspotted mirror of the majesty of God."[166]

There are two beautiful passages in the _Convito_, which we shall quote,

both because they have, as we believe a close application to Dante's own

experience, and because they are good specimens of his style as a writer

of prose. In the manly simplicity which comes of an earnest purpose, and

in the eloquence of deep conviction, this is as far beyond that of any of

his contemporaries as his verse, nay, more, has hardly been matched by

any Italian from that day to this. Illustrating the position that "the

highest desire of everything and the first given us by nature is to

return to its first cause," he says: "And since God is the beginning of

our souls and the maker of them like unto himself, according as was

written, 'Let us make man in our image and likeness,' this soul most

greatly desires to return to him. And as a pilgrim who goes by a way he

has never travelled, who believes every house he sees afar off to be his

inn, and not finding it to be so directs his belief to another, and so

from house to house till he come to the inn, so our soul forthwith on

entering upon the new and never-travelled road of this life directs its

eyes to the goal of its highest good, and therefore believes whatever

thing it sees that seems to have in it any good to be that. And because

its first knowledge is imperfect by reason of not being experienced nor

indoctrinated, small goods seem to it great. Wherefore we see children

desire most greatly an apple, and then proceeding further on desire a

bird, and then further yet desire fine raiment, and then a horse, and

then a woman, and then, riches not great, and then greater and greater.

And this befalls because in none of these things it finds that which it

goes seeking, and thinks to find it further on. By which it may be seen

that one desirable stands before another in the eyes of our soul in a

fashion as it were pyramidal, for the smallest at first covers the whole

of them, and is as it were the apex of the highest desirable, which is

God, as it were the base of all; so that the further we go from the apex

toward the base the desirables appear greater; and this is the reason why

human desires become wider one after the other. Verily this way is lost

through error as the roads of earth are; for as from one city to another

there is of necessity one best and straightest way, and one that always

leads farther from it, that is, the one which goes elsewhere, and many

others, some less roundabout and some less direct, so in human life are

divers roads whereof one is the truest and another the most deceitful,

and certain ones less deceitful, and certain less true. And as we see

that that which goes most directly to the city fulfils desire and gives

repose after weariness, and that which goes the other way never fulfils

it and never can give repose, so it falls out in our life. The good

traveller arrives at the goal and repose, the erroneous never arrives

thither, but with much weariness of mind, always with greedy eyes looks

before him."[167] If we may apply Dante's own method of exposition to

this passage, we find him telling us that he first sought felicity in

knowledge,

"That apple sweet which through so many branches

The care of mortals goeth in pursuit of,"[168]

then in fame, a bird that flits before us as we follow,[169] then in

being esteemed of men ("to be clothed in purple, ... to sit next to

Darius, ... and be called Darius his cousin "), then in power,[170] then

in the riches of the Holy Spirit in larger and larger measure.[171] He,

too, had found that there was but one straight road, whether to the

Terrestrial Paradise or the Celestial City, and may come to question by

and by whether they be not parallel one with the other, or even parts of

the same road, by which only repose is to be reached at last. Then, when

in old age "the noble soul returns to God as to that port whence she set

forth on the sea of this life, ... just as to him who comes from a long

journey, before he enters into the gate of his city, the citizens thereof

go forth to meet him, so the citizens of the eternal life go to meet

_her_, and do so because of her good deeds and contemplations, who,

having already betaken herself to God, seems to see those whom she

believes to be nigh unto God."[172] This also was to be the experience of

Dante, for who can doubt that the _Paradiso_ was something very unlike a

poetical exercise to him who appeals to the visions even of sleep as

proof of the soul's immortality?

When did his soul catch a glimpse of that certainty in which "the mind

that museth upon many things" can find assured rest? We have already said

that we believe Dante's political opinions to have taken their final

shape and the _De Monarchiâ_ to have been written before 1300.[173] That

the revision of the _Vita Nuova_ was completed in that year seems

probable from the last sonnet but one, which is addressed to pilgrims on

their way to the Santa Veronica at Rome.[174] In this sonnet he still

laments Beatrice as dead; he would make the pilgrims share his grief. It

is the very folly of despairing sorrow, that calls on the first comer,

stranger though he be, for a sympathy which none can fully give, and he

least of all. But in the next sonnet, the last in the book, there is a

surprising change of tone. The transfiguration of Beatrice has begun, and

we see completing itself that natural gradation of grief which will

erelong bring the mourner to call on the departed saint to console him

for her own loss. The sonnet is remarkable in more senses than one, first

for its psychological truth, and then still more for the light it throws

on Dante's inward history as poet and thinker. Hitherto he had celebrated

beauty and goodness in the creature; henceforth he was to celebrate them

in the Creator whose praise they were.[175] We give an extempore

translation of this sonnet, in which the meaning is preserved so far as

is possible where the grace is left out. We remember with some

compunction as we do it, that Dante has said, "know every one that

nothing harmonized by a musical band can be transmuted from its own

speech to another without breaking all its sweetness and harmony,"[176]

and Cervantes was of the same mind:[177]

"Beyond the sphere that hath the widest gyre

Passeth the sigh[178] that leaves my heart below;

A new intelligence doth love bestow

On it with tears that ever draws it higher;

When it wins thither where is its desire,

A Lady it beholds who honor so

And light receives, that, through her splendid glow,

The pilgrim spirit[179] sees her as in fire;

It sees her such, that, telling me again

I understand it not, it speaks so low

Unto the mourning heart that bids it tell;

Its speech is of that noble One I know,

For 'Beatrice' I often hear full plain,

So that, dear ladies, I conceive it well."

No one can read this in its connection with what goes before and what

follows without feeling that a new conception of Beatrice had dawned upon

the mind of Dante, dim as yet, or purposely made to seem so, and yet the

authentic forerunner of the fulness of her rising as the light of his day

and the guide of his feet, the divine wisdom whose glory pales all meaner

stars. The conception of a poem in which Dante's creed in politics and

morals should be picturesquely and attractively embodied, and of the high

place which Beatrice should take in it, had begun vaguely to shape itself

in his thought. As he brooded over it, of a sudden it defined itself

clearly. "Soon after this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous

vision[180] wherein I saw things which made me propose not to say more of

that blessed one until I could treat of her more worthily. And to arrive

at that I study all I can, as she verily knows. So that, if it be the

pleasure of Him through whom all things live, that my life hold out yet a

few years, I hope to say that of her which was never yet said of any

(woman). And then may it please Him who is the Lord of Courtesy that my

soul may go to see the glory of her Lady, that is, of that blessed

Beatrice who gloriously beholds the face of Him _qui est per omnia

saecula benedictus_." It was the method of presentation that became clear

to Dante at this time,--the plan of the great poem for whose completion

the experience of earth and the inspiration of heaven were to combine,

and which was to make him lean for many years.[181] The doctrinal scope

of it was already determined. Man, he tells us, is the only creature who

partakes at once of the corruptible and incorruptible nature; "and since

every nature is ordained to some ultimate end, it follows that the end of

man is double. And as among all beings he alone partakes of the

corruptible and incorruptible, so alone among all beings he is ordained

to a double end, whereof the one is his end as corruptible, the other as

incorruptible. That unspeakable Providence therefore foreordered two ends

to be pursued by man, to wit, beatitude in this life, which consists in

the operation of our own virtue, and is figured by the Terrestrial

Paradise, and the beatitude of life eternal, which consists in a fruition

of the divine countenance, whereto our own virtue cannot ascend unless

aided by divine light, which is understood by the Celestial Paradise."

The one we attain by practice of the moral and intellectual virtues as

they are taught by philosophers, the other by spiritual teachings

transcending human reason, and the practice of the theological virtues of

Faith, Hope, and Charity. For one, Reason suffices ("which was wholly

made known to us by philosophers"), for the other we need the light of

supernatural truth revealed by the Holy Spirit and "needful for us." Men

led astray by cupidity turn their backs on both, and in their bestiality

need bit and rein to keep them in the way. "Wherefore to man was a double

guidance needful according to the double end," the Supreme Pontiff in

spiritual, the Emperor in temporal things.[182]

But how to put this theory of his into a poetic form which might charm

while it was teaching? He would typify Reason in Virgil (who would serve

also as a symbol of political wisdom as having celebrated the founding of

the Empire), and the grace of God in that Beatrice whom he had already

supernaturalized into something which passeth all understanding. In

choosing Virgil he was sure of that interest and sympathy which his

instinct led him to seek in the predisposition of his readers, for the

popular imagination of the Middle Ages had busied itself particularly

with the Mantuan poet. The Church had given, him a quasi-orthodoxy by

interpreting his _jam redit et virgo_ as a prophecy of the birth of

Christ. At Naples he had become a kind of patron saint, and his bones

were exhibited as relics. Dante himself may have heard at Mantua the hymn

sung on the anniversary of St. Paul, in which the apostle to the Gentiles

is represented as weeping at the tomb of the greatest of poets. Above

all, Virgil had described the descent of Aeneas to the under-world.

Dante's choice of a guide was therefore, in a certain degree, made for

him. But the mere Reason[183] of man without the illumination of divine

Grace cannot be trusted, and accordingly the intervention of Beatrice was

needed,--of Beatrice, as Miss Rossetti admirably well expresses it

"already transfigured, potent not only now to charm and soothe, potent to

rule; to the Intellect a light, to the Affections a compass and a

balance, a sceptre over the Will."

The wood obscure in which Dante finds himself is the world.[184] The

three beasts who dispute his way are the sins that most easily beset us,

Pride, the Lusts of the Flesh, and Greed. We are surprised that Miss

Rossetti should so localize and confine Dante's meaning as to explain

them by Florence, France, and Rome. Had he written in so narrow a sense

as this, it would indeed be hard to account for the persistent power of

his poem. But it was no political pamphlet that Dante was writing.

_Subjectum est Homo_, and it only takes the form of a diary by Dante

Alighieri because of the intense realism of his imagination, a realism as

striking in the _Paradiso_ as the _Inferno_, though it takes a different

shape. Everything, the most supersensual, presented itself to his mind,

not as abstract idea, but as visible type. As men could once embody a

quality of good in a saint and _see_ it, as they even now in moments of

heightened fantasy or enthusiasm can personify their country and speak of

England, France, or America, as if they were real beings, so did Dante

habitually.[185] He saw all his thoughts as distinctly as the

hypochondriac sees his black dog, and, as in that, their form and color

were but the outward form of an inward and spiritual condition. Whatever

subsidiary interpretations the poem is capable of, its great and primary

value is as the autobiography of a human soul, of yours and mine, it may

be, as well as Dante's. In that lie its profound meaning and its

permanent force. That an exile, a proud man forced to be dependent,

should have found some consolation in brooding over the justice of God,

weighed in such different scales from those of man, in contrasting the

outward prosperity of the sinner with the awful spiritual ruin within, is

not wonderful, nay, we can conceive of his sometimes finding the wrath of

God sweeter than his mercy. But it is wonderful that out of the very

wreck of his own life he should have built this three-arched bridge,

still firm against the wash and wear of ages, stretching from the Pit to

the Empyrean, by which men may pass from a doubt of God's providence to a

certainty of his long-suffering and loving-kindness.

"The Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms

That it receives whatever turns to it."[186]

A tear is enough to secure the saving clasp of them.[187] It cannot be

too often repeated that Dante's Other World is not in its first

conception a place of _departed_ spirits. It is the Spiritual World,

whereof we become denizens by birth and citizens by adoption. It is true

that for artistic purposes he makes it conform so far as possible with

vulgar preconceptions, but he himself has told us again and again what

his real meaning was. Virgil tells Dante,--

"Thou shalt behold the people dolorous

Who have foregone the good of intellect."[188]

The "good of the intellect," Dante tells us after Aristotle, is

Truth.[189] He says that Virgil has led him "through the deep night of

the _truly dead_."[190] Who are they? Dante had in mind the saying of the

Apostle, "to be carnally minded is death." He says: "In man to live is to

use reason. Then if living is the being of man, to depart from that use

is to depart from being, and so to be dead. And doth not he depart from

the use of reason who doth not reason out the object of his life?" "I say

that so vile a person is dead, seeming to be alive. For we must know

_that the wicked man may be called truly dead_." "He is dead who follows

not the teacher. And of such a one some might say, how is he dead and yet

goes about? I answer that the man is dead and the beast remains."[191]

Accordingly he has put living persons in the _Inferno_, like Frate

Alberigo and Branca d' Oria, of whom he says with bitter sarcasm that he

still "eats and drinks and puts on clothes," as if that were his highest

ideal of the true ends of life.[192] There is a passage in the first

canto of the _Inferno_[193] which has been variously interpreted:--

"The ancient spirits disconsolate

Who cry out each one for the _second death_."

Miss Rossetti cites it as an example of what she felicitously calls "an

ambiguity, not hazy, but prismatic, and therefore not really perplexing."

She gives us accordingly our choice of two interpretations, "'each cries

out on account of the second death which he is suffering,' and 'each

cries out for death to come a second time and ease him of his

sufferings.'"[194] Buti says: "Here one doubts what the author meant by

the second death, and as for me I think he meant the last damnation,

which shall be at the day of judgment, because they would wish through

envy that it had already come, that they might have more companions,

since the first death is the first damnation, when the soul parted from

the body is condemned to the pains of hell for its sins. The second is

when, resuscitated at the judgment day, they shall be finally condemned,

soul and body together.... It may otherwise be understood as

annihilation." Imola says, "Each would wish to die again, if he could, to

put an end to his pain. Do not hold with some who think that Dante calls

the second death the day of judgment," and then quotes a passage from St.

Augustine which favors that view. Pietro di Dante gives us four

interpretations among which to choose, the first being that,

"allegorically, depraved and vicious men are in a certain sense dead in

reputation, and this is the first death; the second is that of the body."

This we believe to be the true meaning. Dante himself, in a letter to the

"most rascally (_scelestissimis_) dwellers in Florence," gives us the

key: "but you, transgressors of the laws of God and man, whom the direful

maw of cupidity hath enticed not unwilling to every crime, does not the

terror of the _second death_ torment you?" Their first death was in their

sins, the second is what they may expect from the just vengeance of the

Emperor Henry VII. The world Dante leads us through is that of his own

thought, and it need not surprise us therefore if we meet in it purely

imaginary beings like Tristrem[195] and Renoard of the club.[196] His

personality is so strongly marked that it is nothing more than natural

that his poem should be interpreted as if only he and his opinions,

prejudices, or passions were concerned. He would not have been the great

poet he was if he had not felt intensely and humanly, but he could never

have won the cosmopolitan place he holds had he not known how to

generalize his special experience into something mediatorial for all of

us. Pietro di Dante in his comment on the thirty-first canto of the

_Purgatorio_ says that "unless you understand him and his figures

allegorically, you will be deceived by the bark," and adds that our

author made his pilgrimage as the representative of the rest (_in,

persona ceterorum_).[197] To give his vision reality, he has adapted it

to the vulgar mythology, but to understand it as the author meant, it

must be taken in the larger sense. To confine it to Florence or to Italy

is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind. It was not from the

campanile of the Badia that Dante got his views of life and man.

The relation of Dante to literature is monumental, and marks the era at

which the modern begins. He is not only the first great poet, but the

first great prose writer who used a language not yet subdued to

literature, who used it moreover for scientific and metaphysical

discussion, thus giving an incalculable impulse to the culture of his

countrymen by making the laity free of what had hitherto been the

exclusive guild of clerks.[198] Whatever poetry had preceded him, whether

in the Romance or Teutonic tongues, is interesting mainly for its

simplicity without forethought, or, as in the _Nibelungen_, for a kind of

savage grandeur that rouses the sympathy of whatever of the natural man

is dormant in us. But it shows no trace of the creative faculty either in

unity of purpose or style, the proper characteristics of literature. If

it have the charm of wanting artifice, it has not the higher charm of

art. We are in the realm of chaos and chance, nebular, with

phosphorescent gleams here and there, star stuff, but uncondensed in

stars. The _Nibelungen_ is not without far-reaching hints and forebodings

of something finer than we find in it, but they are a glamour from the

vague darkness which encircles it, like the whisper of the sea upon an

unknown shore at night, powerful only over the more vulgar side of the

imagination, and leaving no thought, scarce even any image (at least of

beauty) behind them. Such poems are the amours, not the lasting

friendships and possessions of the mind. They thrill and cannot satisfy.

But Dante is not merely the founder of modern literature. He would have

been that if he had never written anything more than his _Canzoni_, which

for elegance, variety of rhythm, and fervor of sentiment were something

altogether new. They are of a higher mood than any other poems of the

same style in their own language, or indeed in any other. In beauty of

phrase and subtlety of analogy they remind one of some of the Greek

tragic choruses. We are constantly moved in them by a nobleness of tone,

whose absence in many admired lyrics of the kind is poorly supplied by

conceits. So perfect is Dante's mastery of his material, that in

compositions, as he himself has shown, so artificial,[199] the form seems

rather organic than mechanical, which cannot be said of the best of the

Provençal poets who led the way in this kind. Dante's sonnets also have a

grace and tenderness which have been seldom matched. His lyrical

excellence would have got him into the Collections, and he would have

made here and there an enthusiast as Donne does in English, but his great

claim to remembrance is not merely Italian. It is that he was the first

Christian poet, in any proper sense of the word, the first who so subdued

dogma to the uses of plastic imagination as to make something that is

still poetry of the highest order after it has suffered the

disenchantment inevitable in the most perfect translation. Verses of the

kind usually called _sacred_ (reminding one of the adjective's double

meaning) had been written before his time in the vulgar tongue,--such

verses as remain inviolably sacred in the volumes of specimens, looked at

with distant reverence by the pious, and with far other feelings by the

profane reader. There were cycles of poems in which the physical conflict

between Christianity and Paganism[200] furnished the subject, but in

which the theological views of the authors, whether doctrinal or

historical, could hardly be reconciled with any system of religion

ancient or modern. There were Church legends of saints and martyrs

versified, fit certainly to make any other form of martyrdom seem amiable

to those who heard them, and to suggest palliative thoughts about

Diocletian. Finally, there were the romances of Arthur and his knights,

which later, by means of allegory, contrived to be both entertaining and

edifying; every one who listened to them paying the minstrel his money,

and having his choice whether he would take them as song or sermon. In

the heroes of some of these certain Christian virtues were typified, and

around a few of them, as the Holy Grail, a perfume yet lingers of

cloistered piety and withdrawal. Wolfram von Eschenbach, indeed, has

divided his _Parzival_ into three books, of Simplicity, Doubt, and

Healing, which has led Gervinus to trace a not altogether fanciful

analogy between that poem and the _Divina Commedia_. The doughty old

poet, who says of himself,--

"Of song I have some slight control,

But deem her of a feeble soul

That doth not love my naked sword

Above my sweetest lyric word,"

tells us that his subject is the choice between good and evil;

"Whose soul takes Untruth for its bride

And sets himself on Evil's side,

Chooses the Black, and sure it is

His path leads down to the abyss;

But he who doth his nature feed

With steadfastness and loyal deed

Lies open to the heavenly light

And takes his portion with the White."

But Wolfram's poem has no system, and shows good feeling rather than

settled conviction. Above all it is wandering (as he himself confesses),

and altogether wants any controlling purpose. But to whatever extent

Christianity had insinuated itself into and colored European literature,

it was mainly as mythology. The Christian idea had never yet incorporated

itself. It was to make its avatar in Dante. To understand fully what he

accomplished we must form some conception of what is meant by the

Christian idea. To bring it into fuller relief, let us contrast it with

the Greek idea as it appears in poetry; for we are not dealing with a

question of theology so much as with one of aesthetics.

Greek art at its highest point is doubtless the most perfect that we

know. But its circle of motives was essentially limited; and the Greek

drama in its passion, its pathos, and its humor is primarily Greek, and

secondarily human. Its tragedy chooses its actors from certain heroic

families, and finds its springs of pity and terror in physical suffering

and worldly misfortune. Its best examples, like the _Antigone_,

illustrate a single duty, or, like the _Hippolytus_, a single passion, on

which, as on a pivot, the chief character, statuesquely simple in its

details, revolves as pieces of sculpture are sometimes made to do,

displaying its different sides in one invariable light. The general

impression left on the mind (and this is apt to be a truer one than any

drawn from single examples) is that the duty is one which is owed to

custom, that the passion leads to a breach of some convention settled by

common consent,[201] and accordingly it is an outraged society whose

figure looms in the background, rather than an offended God. At most it

was one god of many, and meanwhile another might be friendly. In the

Greek epic, the gods are partisans, they hold caucuses, they lobby and

log-roll for their candidates. The tacit admission of a revealed code of

morals wrought a great change. The complexity and range of passion is

vastly increased when the offence is at once both crime and sin, a wrong

done against order and against conscience at the same time. The relation

of the Greek Tragedy to the higher powers is chiefly antagonistic,

struggle against an implacable destiny, sublime struggle, and of heroes,

but sure of defeat at last. And that defeat is final. Grand figures are

those it exhibits to us, in some respects unequalled, and in their severe

simplicity they compare with modern poetry as sculpture with painting.

Considered merely as works of art, these products of the Greek

imagination satisfy our highest conception of form. They suggest

inevitably a feeling of perfect completeness, isolation, and

independence, of something rounded and finished in itself. The secret of

those old shapers died with them; their wand is broken, their book sunk

deeper than ever plummet sounded. The type of their work is the Greek

Temple, which leaves nothing to hope for in unity and perfection of

design, in harmony and subordination of parts, and in entireness of

impression. But in this aesthetic completeness it ends. It rests solidly

and complacently on the earth, and the mind rests there with it.

Now the Christian idea has to do with the human soul, which Christianity

may be almost said to have invented. While all Paganism represents a few

pre-eminent families, the founders of dynasties or ancestors of races, as

of kin with the gods, Christianity makes every pedigree end in Deity,

makes monarch and slave the children of one God. Its heroes struggle not

against, but upward and onward _toward_, the higher powers who are always

on their side. Its highest conception of beauty is not aesthetic, but

moral. With it prosperity and adversity have exchanged meanings. It finds

enemies in those worldly good-fortunes where Pagan and even Hebrew

literature saw the highest blessing, and invincible allies in sorrow,

poverty, humbleness of station, where the former world recognized only

implacable foes. While it utterly abolished all boundary lines of race or

country and made mankind unitary, its hero is always the individual man

whoever and wherever he may be. Above all, an entirely new conception of

the Infinite and of man's relation to it came in with Christianity. That,

and not the finite, is always the background, consciously or not. It

changed the scene of the last act of every drama to the next world.

Endless aspiration of all the faculties became thus the ideal of

Christian life, and to express it more or less perfectly the ideal of

essentially Christian art. It was this which the Middle Ages

instinctively typified in the Gothic cathedral,--no accidental growth,

but the visible symbol of an inward faith,--which soars forever upward,

and yearns toward heaven like a martyr-flame suddenly turned to stone.

It is not without significance that Goethe, who, like Dante, also

absorbed and represented the tendency and spirit of his age, should,

during his youth and while Europe was alive with the moral and

intellectual longing which preluded the French Revolution, have loved the

Gothic architecture. It is no less significant that in the period of

reaction toward more positive thought which followed, he should have

preferred the Greek. His greatest poem, conceived during the former era,

is Gothic. Dante, endeavoring to conform himself to literary tradition,

began to write the _Divina Commedia_ in Latin, and had elaborated several

cantos of it in that dead and intractable material. But that poetic

instinct, which is never the instinct of an individual, but of his age,

could not so be satisfied, and leaving the classic structure he had begun

to stand as a monument of failure, he completed his work in Italian.

Instead of endeavoring to manufacture a great poem out of what was

foreign and artificial, he let the poem make itself out of him. The epic

which he wished to write in the universal language of scholars, and which

might have had its ten lines in the history of literature, would sing

itself in provincial Tuscan, and turns out to be written in the universal

dialect of mankind. Thus all great poets have been in a certain sense

provincial,--Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Burns, Scott in the

"Heart of Midlothian" and "Bride of Lammermoor,"--because the office of

the poet is always vicarious, because nothing that has not been living

experience can become living expression, because the collective thought,

the faith, the desire of a nation or a race, is the cumulative result of

many ages, is something organic, and is wiser and stronger than any

single person, and will make a great statesman or a great poet out of any

man who can entirely surrender himself to it.

As the Gothic cathedral, then, is the type of the Christian idea, so is

it also of Dante's poem. And as that in its artistic unity is but the

completed thought of a single architect, which yet could never have been

realized except out of the faith and by the contributions of an entire

people, whose beliefs and superstitions, whose imagination and fancy,

find expression in its statues and its carvings, its calm saints and

martyrs now at rest forever in the seclusion of their canopied niches,

and its wanton grotesques thrusting themselves forth from every pinnacle

and gargoyle, so in Dante's poem, while it is as personal and peculiar as

if it were his private journal and autobiography, we can yet read the

diary and the autobiography of the thirteenth century and of the Italian

people. Complete and harmonious in design as his work is, it is yet no

Pagan temple enshrining a type of the human made divine by triumph of

corporeal beauty; it is not a private chapel housing a single saint and

dedicate to one chosen bloom of Christian piety or devotion; it is truly

a cathedral, over whose high altar hangs the emblem of suffering, of the

Divine made human to teach the beauty of adversity, the eternal presence

of the spiritual, not overhanging and threatening, but informing and

sustaining the material. In this cathedral of Dante's there are

side-chapels as is fit, with altars to all Christian virtues and

perfections; but the great impression of its leading thought is that of

aspiration, for ever and ever. In the three divisions of the poem we may

trace something more than a fancied analogy with a Christian basilica.

There is first the ethnic forecourt, then the purgatorial middle-space,

and last the holy of holies dedicated to the eternal presence of the

mediatorial God.

But what gives Dante's poem a peculiar claim to the title of the first

Christian poem is not merely its doctrinal truth or its Christian

mythology, but the fact that the scene of it is laid, not in this world,

but in the soul of man; that it is the allegory of a human life, and

therefore universal in its significance and its application. The genius

of Dante has given to it such a self-subsistent reality, that one almost

gets to feel as if the chief value of contemporary Italian history had

been to furnish it with explanatory foot-notes, and the age in which it

was written assumes towards it the place of a satellite. For Italy, Dante

is the thirteenth century.

Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which

they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean. But Dante had

made up his mind as to the true purpose and meaning of our existence in

this world, shortly after he had passed his twenty-fifth year. He had

already conceived the system about which as a connecting thread the whole

experience of his life, the whole result of his studies, was to cluster

in imperishable crystals. The cornerstone of his system was the Freedom

of the Will (in other words, the right of private judgment with the

condition of accountability), which Beatrice calls the "noble

virtue."[202] As to every man is offered his choice between good and

evil, and as, even upon the root of a nature originally evil a habit of

virtue may be engrafted,[203] no man is excused. "All hope abandon ye who

enter in," for they have thrown away reason which is the good of the

intellect, "and it seems to me no less a marvel to bring back to reason

him in whom it is wholly spent than to bring back to life him who has

been four days in the tomb."[204] As a guide of the will in civil affairs

the Emperor; in spiritual, the Pope.[205] Dante is not one of those

reformers who would assume the office of God to "make all things new." He

knew the power of tradition and habit, and wished to utilize it for his

purpose. He found the Empire and the Papacy already existing, but both

needing reformation that they might serve the ends of their original

institution. Bad leadership was to blame, men fit to gird on the sword

had been turned into priests, and good preachers spoiled to make bad

kings.[206] The spiritual had usurped to itself the prerogatives of the

temporal power.

"Rome, that reformed the world, accustomed was

Two suns to have which one road and the other,

Of God and of the world, made manifest.

One has the other quenched, and to the crosier

The sword is joined, and ill beseemeth it,

* * * * *

"Because, being joined one feareth not the other."[207]