DANTE ALIGHIERI
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE SECOND BOOK OF SAMUEL: Rivingtons, 1898. (‘_The Books of
the Bible._’)
CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES: Rivingtons, 1900; 2nd Edn. (4th
Impression) 1913. (‘_Oxford Church Textbooks._’)
ASPECTS OF THE ATONEMENT: Rivingtons, 1904.
CHRIST AND OUR IDEALS: Rivingtons, 1906.
DANTE AND HIS ITALY: Methuen, 1907.
¹THE MOHAMMEDAN GOSPEL OF BARNABAS: Clarendon Press, 1907.
THE CHURCH OF THE APOSTLES: Rivingtons, 1909. (‘_The Church
Universal._’)
THE BOOK OF BOOKS: Edward Arnold, 1910.
MEMOIR OF CHARLES EDWARD WICKHAM: Edward Arnold, 1911.
¹THINGS SEEN IN VENICE: Seeley, 1913.
¹VENICE: A. and C. Black, 1914.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. LUKE: Methuen, 1922. (_Westminster
Commentaries._)
¹ In collaboration with Mrs. Lonsdale Ragg.
[Illustration: INAUGURATION OF DANTE’S STATUE, FLORENCE, 1865.
(See pp. IX., 19 and 165)]
DANTE ALIGHIERI
APOSTLE OF FREEDOM
War-Time and Peace-Time Essays
By
LONSDALE RAGG, B.D.
CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD
PREBENDARY OF LINCOLN, MEMBER OF THE SOCIETÀ DANTESCA
ITALIANA
_Author of “Dante and His Italy.”_
LONDON
ARTHUR H. STOCKWELL
29 LUDGATE HILL, E.C. 4
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY WHITFELD & NEWMAN, LTD., DEVONPORT
DEDICATED BY PERMISSION
TO THE
DOTTORESSA MARIA MONTESSORI
A TRUE APOSTLE OF FREEDOM IN THE EDUCATIONAL SPHERE
Tu m’ hai di servo tratto a libertate.
—_Par._ xxxi. 85.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
AUTHOR’S PREFACE ix
PROLOGUE: DANTE, APOSTLE OF LOVE 1
I. DANTE AND THE REDEMPTION OF ITALY 10
II. DANTE AND POLITICAL LIBERTY 24
III. WIT AND HUMOUR IN DANTE 41
IV. DANTE AND MEDIAEVAL THOUGHT 72
V. DANTE AND EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES 83
VI. DANTE AND ISLAM 118
VII. DANTE AND THE CASENTINO 137
VIII. THE LAST CRUSADE 151
APPENDIX I—ANTONIO MASCHIO AND THE
CELEBRATION OF 1865 165
APPENDIX II—DANTE AND THE POPE 168
APPENDIX III—DANTE THE POET 171
INDEX 175
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
Dante, like Shakespere, speaks to every age, and has a word for every
crisis in the life of men and nations. Perhaps at no time since he passed
into the other world has his spirit been so potent as in these last
years, when his Italy has been putting the last touches to the redemption
of that territory whose boundaries he sketched in famous phrase.[1]
Scarce were his ashes cold, ere Boccaccio began to expound, from the
professorial chair founded by a repentant Florence, the mysteries of his
great Poem. Scarcely had Italy awaked from her long sleep of slavery to
the foreigner ere she erected in Florence, in the very year in which it
became temporary capital of a free nation,[2] a statue of the prophet of
Italian liberty and unity.
Some forty-three years later, on the anniversary of the Poet’s death,
September 14th, 1908, Ravenna was _en fête_ with a gathering in which the
“Unredeemed” Brethren from Pola, Fiume, Trieste, and the Trentino mingled
their vows and gifts with those of the City that was his last refuge
and the City that bore him and cast him out. All along, and especially
in the crises of her fate, his great spirit has brooded over the Italy
he loved, the Italy to whom he bequeathed the splendid instrument of
a classical language. To-day, perchance he “sees of the travail of his
soul, and is satisfied.”
His many-sided genius reveals new splendours when viewed from fresh
angles; and the following Essays, which make no claim to special learning
or originality, attempt to approach him from different sides, and so to
bring out varied aspects of his greatness. But they all, or nearly all,
have one point in common: each sets him forth as an Apostle of Liberty.
Freedom political, intellectual, spiritual—all these ideals are wrought
into the “Sacred poem to which Heaven and Earth have set their hand,”[3]
and that Poem enshrines, as we have endeavoured to shew, principles
of liberty in the Educational Sphere,[4] which our present age is apt
to hug to itself as its own discovery. The Essays, in their present
form, are all coloured by the atmosphere of the world’s great fight for
freedom. From some of them, written at the very height of the conflict,
a few of the fiercer touches have been removed as “out of tune” in these
critical years of would-be reconciliation and reconstruction, when old
rancours must perforce be exorcised if we would save civilisation from
its post-War perils. If any undue traces of bitterness remain, may Dante
shelter them under the ample cloak of his righteous indignation. He, too,
spoke hotly—of a Florence and of an Italy whose highest good was ever in
his heart.
The problems and ideals of the Great War are still with us in a new
shape, and man’s greatest need is individual and corporate “freedom of
soul.” If these Essays be recognised as reflecting to any extent Dante’s
great mind on such problems and ideals, the Author will be more than
satisfied.
Two of these Essays had been published some years ago in the _Modern
Language Review_,[5] and have been slightly retouched: four appeared
during the course of the War, in a somewhat briefer form, in the
_Anglo-Italian Review_[6]; while the Prologue, product of the so-called
days of Peace, was published in the _Guardian_ of August 19th, 1921.
To the Editors and Publishers concerned the writer hereby accords his
acknowledgements and thanks; as also to his friend, Professor Cesare
Foligno,[7] for a kindly glance at the MS., and for the suggestion
that the critical text of 1921 should be cited.[8] Two of the Essays
now see the light for the first time.[9] The longer of these, “Dante
and Educational Principles,” a paper delivered at University College,
London, in the Sexcentenary Series of lectures last year, may perhaps,
with the reprinted articles on “Wit and Humour in Dante,” and “Dante and
Islam,” claim, in a manner, to break new ground. But all alike are humbly
commended to the patient indulgence of the Dante-reading public.
LONSDALE RAGG.
_Holy Cross Day_, 1921.
DANTE ALIGHIERI
PROLOGUE
DANTE, APOSTLE OF LOVE
_But we all with unveiled face, reflecting as a mirror the
glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image, from
glory to glory._—2 Cor. iii. 18.
These words form the sequel of to-day’s Epistle[10] in which the
temporary reflection of the Shekinah in Moses’s face is contrasted with
the permanent and complete illumination of the Spirit. They form the
climax of a passage which, full of mystery and splendour, leads us up
to those things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard—to that beatific
Vision prepared for God’s unfeigned lovers, who shall shine with His own
likeness because and when they “see Him as He is.”
A month from to-day—on the day of the Holy Cross—we shall be celebrating
the six hundredth “birthday” into the world beyond of the man whose
eagle vision pierced, dazzled but unafraid, into the blazing glory of
Paradise—Dante, the pilgrim of the world to come. St. Paul’s inspired and
inspiring words bring back to mind the swift upward movement of Dante’s
_Paradiso_, where the spirit mounts from sphere to sphere, from glory to
glory, impelled and wafted by the sheer force of Love, till at last, in
face of the Triune blessedness, it is plunged into an ineffable joy and
wonder—ineffable because, as he says, “as it draweth nigh to its ideal,
the object of its longing, our intellect sinketh so deep that memory
cannot go back upon the track”—
Perchè, appressando sè al suo disire
Nostro intelletto si profonda tanto,
Che dietro la memoria non può ire.[11]
The glory of which we speak—which makes the _Paradiso_ a marvel of
dazzling, but, so to speak, graduated splendour—is the glory of Love,
Divine and human; and it is of Dante, the Apostle of Love, that I would
speak to you to-day. In this sexcentenary year all the civilised world is
acclaiming him, and it is well that our Christian Churches should echo
thanksgiving to Almighty God for this most Christian poet, and for the
magnificent bequest that he left, not only to Italian literature, but
to the world. The Pope in his encyclical last spring[12] bore eloquent
testimony to Dante’s loyalty to the Christian heritage, and to the power
by which, as a teacher of the Faith, “he being dead, yet speaketh.”
He speaks, indeed, with a voice from six hundred years ago, yet not in
the remote language of one nurtured in leisure, ease, and comfort, far
from the annoyances and disappointments, the worries and anxieties and
ugly problems of the rough-and-tumble world we know. On the contrary,
the world in which Dante prayed and strove and studied and dreamed and
wrote-the world from which comes down to us the serene glory of his
Paradise of Love—was astonishingly like our own on its uglier side:
a world of religious and political unrest, of clashing interests and
ideals, of faction, violence, and cruelty, of individual and corporate
predatory self-assertion; a world in which the poet himself, called to
“abandon all that man holds most dear”—
Ogni cosa diletta
Più caramente[13]—
wrought out his great work as a nameless wanderer, and died in bitter
exile. So we may listen to him as to one who has a genuine message for us.
THE POET OF LOVE
Amid all that has been said and written this year about the author of the
_Divina Commedia_, there is one note that has rarely, if at all, been
struck; yet it is surely, in some sense, the keynote of all his singing.
Dante is, from the first and to the last, the poet of Love. “I am one,”
he says, “who, when Love breathes in me, take note, and that which he
dictates within I express”—
I’ mi son un che quando
Amor mi spira, noto, ed a quel modo
Ch’ e’ ditta dentro vo significando.[14]
His first book—the _Vita Nuova_—testifies to this. It represents a new
movement in love-poetry.[15] The songs of the Troubadours had been, in
their earlier forms, with all their strange beauty, frankly sensual
and immoral; and when, after the religious movement of the Albigensian
Crusade, a greater strictness had perforce been introduced, they had lost
their first warmth and glow and naturalness. The “sweet new style”—_Dolce
Stil nuovo_[16]—of Dante and his circle combined the two requisites of
sincere purity and glowing life. The story of the _Vita Nuova_ is the
story of the precocious passion of a boy of nearly ten years old for a
little girl of nine. It passes through its phase of refined sensuousness
and self-absorption, but it emerges as a pure mystic love that leads
ultimately up to the very Throne of God.
In the vision with which the book closes—the vision of his Beatrice
after God has called her to Himself—lies the germ of the greatest poem
of Christendom; the poem which, just because it sings the story of man’s
freewill in contact with God’s redeeming grace, has as its supreme and
final theme—Love. We are familiar, no doubt, with the main lines of
Dante’s vision of the world beyond—of the three kingdoms as he conceived
them, of hell, purgatory, and heaven. But I will ask you to be patient if
I attempt to sketch for you something of the great contours of each, that
we may see together how, for this love-poet, eternal Love dominates and
shapes the universe.
His world beyond is conceived in terms partly belonging to the age
in which he lived, with its scholastic theology and its Ptolemaic
cosmography, partly in terms of the originality of his own genius. Its
details and its hard outlines may be largely obsolete; but its lessons
are true and effective. It is because of its essential Christianity
that Dante’s poetry is so much alive, is more “modern,” as the Papal
Encyclical put it, than much actually contemporary poetry that is
conceived in the spirit of paganism. Dante, for his soul’s health—and
for the benefit of untold generations—must needs pass through all three
kingdoms of the world to come, guided by Virgil, who represents human
reason. Descending down and down into the very bowels of the earth he
sees the doom of unrepented sin. Then, after a wearying subterranean
climb from earth’s centre to the antipodes, he emerges at the foot of
the lofty terraced mountain where repentant souls are cleansed and
brought back to their primal innocence. At the top of this mountain he
finds himself in the earthly paradise, and meets Beatrice, the glorified
“lady of his mind,” who now represents at once Revelation and Grace; sees
wondrous things, submits to mystic rites, and finally is drawn up side
by side with her, by the motive power of Love, from sphere to sphere,
up to the Throne of God, where the redeemed worship Him for ever in the
form of a mystic white rose. That Love is the motive power in Paradise is
obvious. It is the radiant beauty of Beatrice, ever more dazzling as they
mount higher, that lifts him up, and the spirits he meets glow one and
all with the fire of Divine charity. It is not easy, perhaps, to detect
the influence of Love in the dark abyss of the _Inferno_, or in the
stern, long discipline of the Mount of Purgation.
But love is written even across the portal of Hell. “Abandon hope all ye
that enter here” we all know as its inscription; but that is but the last
line of a nine-line title, and part of that title runs thus—“Divine Power
made me, and Highest Wisdom, and Primal Love”—
Fecemi la divina potestate
La somma sapienza e ’l primo amore.[17]
This means, of course, the Blessed Trinity, but the last word about the
Blessed Trinity is—Love. Love can be stern, and outraged love can draw
down, as it were, by the law of being rather than by such vengeful wrath
as we humanly attribute to the Most High, an unimaginable ruin and loss
upon the outrager. In the stern, grim, cruel, sometimes grotesquely
revolting picture Dante draws of the eternal future sinners can
deliberately make for themselves, we see but the fruits of Love offered
and rejected—the inevitable outcome of their own choice.
When we enter the second kingdom, and begin to climb the mount which
forms the pedestal to Eden, the home of man’s innocency, the breath of
Love is stronger and its radiance more clear. It reveals itself in the
changing beauty of sky and landscape, in the glories of star-light, dawn
and sunset and high noon, in the glad brilliance of wild-flowers, in the
melody and harmony of music, but, not least, in the very structure and
arrangement of Purgatory. Seven terraces ring the mountain round—one
above another—separated by rugged cliffs and sheer precipices which
Dante needs all his cragsmanship to overcome. And on each terrace one
of the seven deadly sins is purged—Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Avarice,
Gluttony, Lust. These are arranged on a scheme which brings into relief
a great principle—that all our actions, good or evil, are the fruits of
Love—right love or wrong—
Esser convene
Amor sementa in voi d’ogni virute
E d’ ogne operazion che merta pene.[18]
These sins are all results of Love—excessive or defective, or aimed at
the wrong object; and the purgatorial discipline is just the action
of the educative Love of God upon willing penitents—straightening,
developing, governing, and directing the disordered love that has so
marred and stunted the beauty of their souls. The discipline and the
humiliation are seen for what they are, and the Divine Love that speaks
through them finds a ready and prompt response from souls “happy in the
fire,” because of the hope of what it can do for them.
Contenti
Nel fuoco, perchè speran di venire
Quando che sia a le beate genti.[19]
Even as Christ ‘for the joy set before Him endured the Cross,’
So they find in their ‘pain’ their ‘solace.’[20]
When we pass into the third kingdom, up and up through sphere after
sphere of the heavens, each more radiant with the light of Love, we feel
ourselves “reflecting, as a mirror, the glory of the Lord, transformed
into the same image from glory to glory.” “One star,” indeed, “differeth
from another star in glory.” There is higher and lower in the abode of
bliss, in the “many mansions” of the Father’s House. Dante questions
one whom he meets in the lower sphere—Piccarda—on earth a playmate of
his childhood. “Are you happy? Are you content? Have you no wish to
be placed higher still?” Her answer enunciates the basal principle of
heaven—“Brother, the quality of our love stilleth our will and maketh us
long only for what we have, and giveth us no other thirst.... In His Will
is our peace”—
Frate, la nostra volontà quieta
Virtù di carità, che fa volerne
Sol quel ch’ avemo, e d’ altro non ci’asseta.
...
E ’n la sua volontade è nostra pace.[21]
Here Love rules imperially, and the image of God’s Will is stamped in
glory on the souls of those who, “with unveiled face,” are granted to
feast upon the vision of His glory. Pure in heart, their whole being is
full of light. And so, too, the poet, when at last he looked upon God,
found his own will and desire moving in perfect harmony with that “Love
that moves the sun and the other stars.”
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.[22]
So a great lover of Dante, the late Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, summoned up
the teaching of the _Paradiso_: “Wouldst thou enter into God’s Kingdom, O
pilgrim of earth? then love. Wouldst thou share the sweet activities of
its citizens? then love. Wouldst thou know Him who rules over them and
all? then love. For love opens the Kingdom of Heaven, and love makes the
joyousness of its happy services, and none can know the heart of God save
through love; for God is love.”[23]
Is it not meet that we should thank God this year for the sublime
poet who has drawn for us so splendid a picture of the glory of Love
“penetrating the whole universe”; who has shown us in Love the one motive
force in the world, the one constructive principle? Was there ever a
time when the world needed this teaching more than it does to-day? A
true doctrine, if ever there was one. If God is Love, then Love is the
only principle of life. “He that abideth in love, abideth in God, and
God abideth in him.”[24] Real love—not selfish, sensual passion, not
sentimental sweetness, not unwise and poisonous indulgence; but love,
wise, strong, straight, and pure, like the love of God; love patient,
self-forgetful, self-giving, like the love of Jesus Christ; love
illuminating, invigorating, recreative, like that of the Holy Ghost. If
we could but “reflect” in life and character the “glory” of the Lord!...
There is no glory but love.
We must descend from the ethereal splendour of Dante’s _Paradiso_ into
the hard realities of workaday life, even as Peter, John, and James came
down from the Mount of Transfiguration to face the shouting, wrangling
crowd and the convulsions of the epileptic boy. But though the radiance
seems to fade, the glory is still with us, for it is the unfailing Love
of Him Who promised to be with us “all the days.” Love, then, accompanied
them down from the height, unlocked the prison house of afflicted souls,
and solved the problems of sin-stricken humanity. And Love, and Love
alone, can do the same to-day.
Let us face our bewildering problems with confidence, knowing that the
secret of life is ours. Love, the only constructive principle, the only
ultimately victorious power. Our enemies in the late war sounded their
own doom when they promulgated a gospel of hate. Hate can never build up,
only destroy. Alas! they sowed the seeds of hatred outside the sphere
where armies clash, and the devil’s doctrine of class-hatred has been
disseminated far and wide. If only the eyes of those concerned might be
opened to see the mad futility of hate! There is one force at work in the
world that can teach this, that can heal the bleeding wounds of society,
untie the knots of the industrial and social and international tangle—the
force of Christian Love—yours and mine—a love like that of Him Who came
not to be served, but to serve and to give His life as ransom for many;
a love that brought Him to die for a world yet steeped in rebellion
and sin, and moved Him to lay upon His disciples the injunction “Bless
them that curse you.” No merely human organisation for philanthropic
succour or for peace; not even a League of Nations, even though, thank
God, its power and capacity at last be recognised with a gift of solemn
responsibility; nothing but the steady action of that “love of God” which
His grace sheds into Christian hearts, leavening and inspiring such
movements, such organisations, can hope for final success. But Love,
after all, sits enthroned above the water floods, and abideth king for
ever. There is no limit to our opportunity for blessing this poor world
alike by prayer and by action—blessing our own immediate circle, our
civic and Church life, blessing our country, our Empire, and the world’s
fellowship of Nations—if but our wills are moving in one motion with His—
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
CHAPTER I
DANTE AND THE REDEMPTION OF ITALY
Sol nel tuo verbo è per noi la luce, o Rivelatore,
Sol nel tuo canto è per noi la forza, o Liberatore,
Sol nella tua melodia è la molt’ anni lagrimata pace, o Consolatore.
—_D’ Annunzio._
La severa immagine del poeta governa tuttavia i fati delle
generazioni d’ Italia.—_Mazzini._
Dante stands forth as the Apostle of Freedom in many spheres—that
Freedom for which all the world is now longing: freedom for unhindered
self-development of men and nations, freedom of spirit—the true
atmosphere of all education. The _Monarchia_, the Epistles, and, most of
all, the _Divina Commedia_—that “mystical epos of Man’s Free Will”—bear
witness to the truth of the word which Virgil speaks of him at the foot
of the Mount of Purgation—
Libertà va cercando ...
This all-pervading spirit of his teaching might perhaps of itself have
been sufficient to make his name an inspiration to the heroes and martyrs
who struggled for Italy’s liberation in the nineteenth century; but it
may be worth while to draw attention to certain aspects of his work,
which give him a more definite and specific claim to be the Father of
Free Italy.
The other day I turned up, after many years of neglect, Karl Witte’s
Essay on Dante and United Italy. For this suspicious intercourse with
“enemy alien literature” I can plead two extenuating circumstances:
first, the absorbing nature of the topic at this moment, and secondly
that I approached Witte in an English translation. Another point which
might count in my favour is the fact that this particular Essay was
written before 1870. That certainly lends to it a special interest; and
the interest is rather enhanced than otherwise by the circumstance that
Witte prefixed a Prefatory note and added a peroration in 1878.
Karl Witte, who was born in 1800 and died in 1883, represents the old
vigorous and admirable type of German scholarship which was in very truth
“Stupor Mundi”: a blend of genius and conscientious painstaking on the
reputation of which the Prussianised Kultur of to-day bases a claim to
deference which Europe will more and more hesitate to accord.
How far, for instance, Germany has fallen from her former position as
regards Dante Scholarship may be gauged from E. Benvenuti’s slashing
article in the _Bullettino della Società dantesca italiana_ of June,
1914, of which a summary appeared in the _Times_ Literary Supplement
on March 4th. The article is the first instalment of a review of
Dante studies in Germany for the years 1908-1913. It is a record, as
the _Times_ reviewer remarks, of “monumental ignorance, inaccuracy,
arrogance, bad taste, and sheer stupidity ... hailed with salvoes of
approbation by the majority of German critics.”
But Karl Witte is a man of other build than these modern Pan-Germanisers
who are patriotic enough to attribute to Dante pure German ancestry, and
too patriotic by far to soil their hands with the recent works of sound
Italian critics, or their minds with the elements of Italian grammar and
idiom.
Karl Witte, on the contrary—though he began life as an Infant Prodigy,
matriculating at Leipsic when only nine and a half years old, and reading
his Doctor’s thesis before he was fourteen—won recognition in Italy and
England as well as in Germany as a real force in Dante scholarship: a
great pioneer, who made his mistakes, as all pioneers will, but has won
the gratitude of all subsequent Dantists.
In the Essay of which I have spoken, written and delivered as a lecture
in 1861, Witte notes the fact and investigates the grounds of the
constant association of Dante’s name with the patriotic aspirations
of Young Italy. “It is a fact,” he says, “that, during the last half
century, a great number of those who aimed at transforming Italy—and
not only men of such moderation as Cesare Balbo, Gino Capponi, or Carlo
Troya, but also the democratic revolutionaries who would take the world
by storm—have hung, and still hang, upon Dante’s _Divine Comedy_, with
passionate enthusiasm. Ugo Foscolo, who preferred poverty and exile to
place and honour under the rule of Austria, devoted the last years of
his life exclusively to a great work on the poem; and after Foscolo’s
death, this new edition of the ‘Prophecy of Italy’s Future,’ as he called
the Comedy, was published by no other than Giuseppe Mazzini himself....”
If the Italian of the Sixties “were asked whence his countrymen drew
their inspiration, he would scarcely hesitate,” says Witte, “to name the
greatest poet of his fatherland.” And again, “the fact that in the days
of foreign oppression patriots recognised each other by their love of the
immortal poet, and greeted one another, as by a secret password, with
the inspiring lines of the Divine Poem, is a symbol of the fact that the
roots of this temper of mind”—the temper of national “self-reliance and
self-renouncing enthusiasm”—“are to be sought in Dante.”
There are three passions, according to Witte, which are (rightly or
wrongly) traced back to Dante: (1) a glowing love for Italy, (2) a
hatred of the foreign, and above all of the Teuton yoke, and (3) a hatred
of the temporal power of the Pope.
In the first case—and this is the point that more immediately concerns
us—Witte holds that the contention is justified. “In hope, in sorrow, in
reproof, we see Dante filled,” he says, “with the same glowing love for
the Fatherland of Italy, a love which he is the first to put into words.”
Before Dante, at any rate, Italy was, in Metternich’s famous phrase,
“nothing but a geographical expression.” The Roman poets of the Empire
praise her scenery, but their devotion as patriots is to Rome itself.
When the Empire broke up, Italy lost her one bond of superficial
cohesion, though a shadowy unity emerged now and again under Visigothic
and Longobardic domination, and the pressure now of Gothic Arianism, now
of Byzantine Iconoclasm, drew Italy’s various groups in self defence
closer to Papal Rome.
The phenomenon of an apparently independent and united “Kingdom of Italy”
(888-961) after the fall of the House of Charlemagne, is, from this point
of view, as illusory as those of Odoacer and Theodoric, effecting little
or nothing towards the evolution of a national spirit or a national
self-consciousness. Dante is, it would seem, the first to see Italy with
a patriot’s eyes, as being, and as having been for countless ages, a
fatherland for whom one might sing—
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
She is “that lowlying Italy” on whose behalf the heroes and heroines of
the _Aeneid_ shed their blood so freely:
... Quell’ umile Italia....
Per cui morì la vergine Cammilla,
Eurialo, e Turno, e Niso di ferute.
He loves her passionately, torn as she is by faction, her own worst
enemy; and he calls on the representative of the Holy Roman Empire to
control her madness and to bring her peace.
The close association of Italian aspiration with the name of Dante which
Witte observed in 1861, came forcibly under my own notice nearly fifty
years later, when I made a pilgrimage to Ravenna to take part in the
“Feste dantesche,” on September 13th, 1908. Isidoro del Lungo, perhaps
the greatest of Italy’s modern Dantists, was to inaugurate the opening of
a special Dante wing in the Ravenna library, and to dedicate a beautiful
silver lamp—an expiatory offering from the Commune of Florence—to adorn
his tomb.
The occasion was nominally a Dantist celebration; but it might with
equal truth have been described as an “Irredentist Orgy.” For one of
the great features of the festival was the arrival of a pilgrim-ship,
flying the Italian tricolour, from Trieste, bearing some hundreds of
Italian-speaking devotees from “Italia Irredenta”—the “unredeemed” cities
which remained under Austrian rule when the rest of Italy threw off the
yoke of the foreigner—Trieste itself, and Pola, and Fiume. The people
of Ravenna and the visitors to the Festival, spurred on by eloquent
“posters” exhibited in the streets at the instance of clubs and societies
of every description, and by the proclamation of the Municipality itself,
to give the “Fratelli irredenti” a fraternal welcome, poured out towards
the quay in their thousands, and escorted the pilgrims through the
streets with flags flying and bands playing patriotic airs. Conspicuous
in the procession were half a dozen Garibaldini, veterans of the War of
Liberation, clad in their red shirts; and emotion rose to a high point
when the monument was reached which commemorates those who fell in the
struggle for a free and united Italy. Laughter, tears, embraces and
echoing Evvivas proclaimed the arrival of the _cortège_ at the Municipal
Buildings.... It was a scene which one will never forget, as the Italians
from across the water flung themselves upon their fellow-disciples of
Dante, with the romping and vociferous enthusiasm of children just let
out of school!
There were, so far as one could judge, from the floods of printed and
of spoken eloquence which marked that day, two prominent thoughts
in people’s minds: two prominent points of contact and association
between the thought of the Divino Poeta and the aspirations of Italian
patriotism. The first of these is more general, the second more specific.
In general, Dante is rightly held to be the true Father of the Italian
language and literature—that “bond which unites us to our native place.”
“Love for our native tongue,” says Witte—and he has in mind a passage of
Dante’s _Convivio_—“is the expression of our love of our native land.”
For Dante Italy is—
Il bel paese dove il _Si_ suona.
“The beauteous land where _si_ is uttered”; and to that land the work
of his mind and of his pen lent an added beauty, and wove a spell which
should draw together all her scattered elements in the enthusiasm of a
common speech and a common literary heritage. That is Dante’s first claim
to supply the inspiration of a “United Italy.”
The second claim is, as we have said, more specific. It is claimed for
him that he described, as it were prophetically, the future boundaries of
Italy.
In the ninth Canto of the _Inferno_ (113-114) he includes the whole of
the Istrian peninsula in Italy, describing the broad inlet to the east of
it—the bay which stretches northward up to Fiume—as “The Quarnaro which
shuts in Italy and bathes her boundaries”—
Sì come a Pola presso del Carnaro,
Che Italia chiude e suoi termini bagna....
Again, in his words about the Lago di Garda in the Twentieth Canto of the
_Inferno_ (61-63)—
Suso in Italia bella giace un laco
A piè dell’ alpe che serra Lamagna
Sovra Tiralli, ch’ ha nome Benaco.
“Up in fair Italy there lies a lake afoot the Alp that bars out Germany
above Tyrol, that bears the name Benaco:” he seems to include not only
the whole of Lake Garda but the Trentino too, “barring out Germany”
beyond the great watershed.
At Ravenna, in 1908, one might have been led to suppose that these two
passages summed up the main interest of the _Divina Commedia_; but though
the utterances are, as a matter of fact incidental, they do point to
the fact that the Italy which Dante so passionately loved, and which
consciously or unconsciously he did so much to bring into being, was a
definite “geographical expression” if it was also something more.
If with Witte we go on to enquire how far Young Italy is justified in
fathering upon Dante the passion of “hatred of the foreign, and above
all of the Teuton yoke,” the question is at once confused by the fact
that in Dante’s day the authority and prestige of that Holy Roman Empire,
of which the Poet was so convinced and so enthusiastic an advocate, was
associated with a succession of German princes. Teutons of the Swabian
House of Hohenstaufen, albeit Italian born, were “the illustrious
heroes Frederic the Caesar and his well-begotten Manfred” whom in the
_De Vulgari Eloquentia_ (I. xii. 20; Bemp. p. 330) he extols for their
nurture, in the Sicilian Court, of the beginnings of Italian vernacular
poetry; Teutons the Rudolf and Albert of Hapsburg, to whom the poet of
the _Divine Comedy_ looks in vain for the liberation of Italy from its
overwhelming ills; Teuton also Henry of Luxemburg, on whom his hopes were
finally fixed, the “Alto Arrigo” of the _Paradiso_—
... Ch’ a drizzare Italia
Verrà in prima ch’ ella sia disposta,
for whom he sees a vacant throne prepared in the White Rose of heaven.[25]
These heroes are not for him, however, Germans, _Tedeschi_, but Roman
Caesars; and had the sceptre of Empire chanced, then, as afterwards, to
have been wielded by other hands, we cannot doubt that a non-Teutonic
line of monarchs would have drawn from him a like reverence, a like
expectation and a like passionate appeal. Similarly, had the House of
Swabia been dissociated from the Roman Imperial tradition and played a
_rôle_ of overweening and unscrupulous self-aggrandisement like that
actually played by Philippe le Bel, Hugh Capet’s words in the fifth
Cornice of _Purgatory_—so well applied by a recent writer in the _Times_
to the Hohenzollern—would have been put into the mouth of an ancestor of
the two Frederics, and applied to the House of Hohenstaufen. “I was the
root,” he says, “of the evil plant whose shadow blights the whole land of
Christendom”—[26]
Io fui radice de la mala pianta,
Che la terra cristiana tutta aduggia.
There is indeed one passage at least where Dante mentions the German
people in a non-political context (_Inf._ xvii. 21), and designates them
from the point of view of their national or racial habits. _Tedeschi
lurchi_—“Guzzling Germans”—he calls them. How one’s heart goes out to
him, as one recalls memories of sojourns in Swiss hotels! Had poor Dante
like experiences or worse to put up with in the days of his wanderings?
Witte, who spontaneously brings forward this word of insight into
national character, is delightfully frank about it. “Only in one place,”
he says, “does he accuse us of a weakness which we would fain repudiate,
but it has been laid to the charge of Germany down even to our own day,
on so many hands, that we cannot escape the fear that our forefathers at
least must have given grounds for the accusation.” ...
This is a poor note on which to end our study of Witte. Yet it is one on
which recent events have thrown a portentous illumination. The tendency
which we are combating together, Italians and English, with the haughty
spirit of Dante on our side, is one which begins in grossness of bodily
appetite, and goes all lengths of cruel and brutalising bestiality.
* * * * *
It is a relief to turn one’s back on this sordid atmosphere and launch
out once more into the “better waters”[27] of Italian Patriotism.
I have by me a book which corroborates very strongly—for the sixties at
least—Witte’s contention that Young Italy consciously draws her patriotic
inspiration from Dante. Some few years ago I picked up in Venice a bound
copy of the _Giornale del Centenario di Dante Allighieri_, of which
the first number was published in Florence on February 10th, 1864, and
the 48th on May 31st, 1865. There should by rights have been two more
numbers, published after an interval, with Index and Frontispiece.
Whether these ever appeared in fact, I have not been able to discover.
My copy concludes with Number 48, which describes the Festival, to which
the year’s publication was planned to lead up—the _Feste Dantesche_ held
in Piazza Sta Croce, in May, 1865, the six hundredth anniversary of the
Poet’s birth. In that year Florence became the temporary capital of an
Italy free and united, but still barred out from Rome by French bayonets;
and she signalised the occasion by welcoming back in spirit her exiled
Son to the “Bello ovile,” where as a lamb he had slept,[28] when the _Re
Galantuomo_ himself unveiled the Poet’s statue in the Piazza. A quaint
woodcut of the ceremony adorns the volume.[29]
The successive numbers of this _Giornale_, with their varied
contributions to the study and appreciation of the Poet—contributions
drawn from every part of the Peninsula—bear eloquent testimony to the
widespread feeling among the Italian patriots of that epoch, that Dante
was rightly to be acclaimed _Pater Patriae_.
The articles are of all sorts, from chronological and etymological notes
to formal and discursive interpretations and illustrations of Dante’s
writings and his life, and studies of contemporary political and social
problems in the light of his dicta. They would probably repay a fuller
investigation than the present writer has had opportunity to apply to
them. We will take one or two typical utterances to indicate something of
the general tone of the contributors.
“Dante was the first among his contemporaries,” says Prof. A.
Zoncada,[30] “to rise to the conception of a United Italy”—an Italy
united in powers, in purpose, in language, and that in spite of the
manifold disuniting influences at work in his day. “Fatto è che Dante
primo ne’ suoi tempi seppe levarsi al concetto d’un Italia unita e
concorde d’ intenti, di forze, di favella: primo abbraciò nel suo amore
tutta intera l’ Italia, senza divario di cielo, di usi, di memorie, di
legge, di stato, donde appunto risulta il sentimento di nazionalità.”
Dante’s desire for the establishment of an Imperial Court in Italy was,
he says, a desire for national and linguistic unity. “Non può essere
nazione senza una comune favella, nè comune favella dove nazione non sia.
Il perchè voleva Dante stabilito in Italia la sede degli imperatori,
unico mezzo, a suo credere, di conseguire l’ una e l’ altra unità,
della lingua, cioè, e della nazione.” There may perhaps be a little
exaggeration in this statement of the reciprocal relations of nationality
and vernacular, but at any rate it fastens on facts. Dante, as we have
seen, visualised Italy as one, sighed for her divisions, expostulated
with her on her undisciplined factiousness; longed, hoped, and prayed for
the speedy advent of a strong unifying force. He also devised for her
and bequeathed to her the noble instrument of a classical vernacular;
and if it be not strictly true that a nation cannot exist save where
there is one national language spoken, yet it is more than half true.
Dante doubtless did more in the end for the cause of Italian nationality
by his bequest of that splendid vehicle of thought and feeling which
the mother-tongue became in his hands, and by his initiation of a
glorious literary tradition, than he or any other man could have done
by actual utterances, however inspired. The importance of his work for
the vernacular is recognised again and again by the epigraphists who
in the _Giornale del Centenario_ have taken Dante as their theme. “The
mother-tongue supplies a bond of nationality which cannot be broken,”
exclaims Prof. Lorenzo Berardi in his epigraph,[31] “and that bond we owe
to Dante.”
DANTE ALLIGHIERI
FU IL PADRE IMMORTALE
DI NOSTRA LINGUA
QUESTA
FU IL VINCOLO NAZIONALE
CHE MAI SI RUPPE.
Father of the language, father of the national spirit, prophetic
delineator of the national frontiers.[32] So the Festa of 1865 joins
hands with that of 1908, wherein the official document drawn up by
Commendatore Guido Biagi to accompany the gifts offered at the Poet’s
shrine describes the offering communities as—
CONCORDI IN LUI
CHE NEL VERSO IMMORTALE
SEGNAVA I TERMINI AUSPICATI
DELLA PATRIA ITALIANA
But these festas are no longer an ideal and a dream; All-Saint’s-tide,
1918, has sounded a note of triumph which resounds, it may be, in the
world whither Dante is gone. Since the words above were penned, there has
rung out at once the knell of the justly hated Hapsburg autocracy, and
the joy-bells of _Italia Redenta_!
The Piave, associated by Dante[33] with the grim thought of a humbled
and degenerate Italy, harried by the outrageous violence of Eccelino
da Romano and his minions; associated for us all to-day with nobler
memories, as the line of defence where for long months and weary,
patriots shed their blood like water to ward off from Italy horrors of
brutality before which even Eccelino’s record—a byword in the Middle
Age—reads like a little ill-timed horseplay: the Piave and the land
behind it—
... Quella parte de la terra....
Italica che siede tra Rialto
E le fontane di Brenta e di Piava,
have witnessed wonderful events. That famous river of which D’Annunzio
exclaims:[34] “It runs beside the walls and past the doors and through
the streets of all the cities of Italy; runs past the threshold of all
our dwellings, of all our churches, of all our hospitals. It safeguards
from the destroyer all our altars and all our hearths”; it has witnessed
a great victorious onrush that has swamped the very memory of Caporetto,
just a year, exactly, after that day of disaster.
And the dream of the Ravenna pilgrims of 1908 has come true. Trento
and Trieste, “staked out,” as it were, by Dante’s verse as Italian,
proclaimed Italian by race and speech and aspiration, are at last Italian
in fact.
_Evviva Italia Redenta!_
* * * * *
POSTSCRIPT.—September, 1921, takes us back once more to Ravenna. Once
more the short and narrow street that faces the “little cupola more neat
than solemn,” is packed with an enthusiastic crowd. Once more the soul of
Italy is concentrated in that exiguous space, offering votive gifts at
the shrine. But this time the men of the Trentino and of the Dalmatian
cities come as “Redeemed Brothers,” fused in the general life of the
larger Italy. The Army gives a Wreath of bronze and silver, the Communes
of Italy a Bell, the city of Rome a bronze Door.
The sexcentenary of Dante’s birth in 1865 marked a great stage in the
liberation and unification of Italy; the sexcentenary of his death, a
still greater.
May the Poet’s best dreams come true, as interpreted by the Prophet
Mazzini, and Dante’s native land find at last that “peace” which she
has been “seeking from world to world”—find it in the fulfilment of her
God-given mission to the nations.
II
DANTE AND POLITICAL LIBERTY
Libertà va cercando, ch’ è sì cara
Come sa chi per lei vita rifiuta.
—_Purg._ i. 71, 72.
These words, it will be remembered, are addressed by Virgil, at the foot
of the mountain of Purgatory, to Cato of Utica. Virgil is speaking of
Dante, and of his mystical journey through the eternal world. The object
of that quest, he says, is Liberty—that liberty which will make him
master of himself morally and spiritually, when Virgil himself, at the
summit of the Mountain, ere he takes his leave, shall crown him “King and
bishop of his own mind and soul.”[35]
... Te sopra te corono e mitrio.
These moving lines, as D’Ovidio reminds us,[36] have drawn tears
from many a patriot of the last century; they may well form for us
a starting-point for the consideration of Dante’s attitude towards
Political Liberty. True, it is ultimately _spiritual_ liberty, liberty
of soul, that the Poet “goes seeking” in his pilgrimage, even as it is
slavery of soul from which he announces in Paradise[37] that Beatrice
has delivered him. “Thou hast drawn me,” he says, “out of slavery into
freedom ... thou has given health to my soul”—
Tu m’ hai di servo tratto a libertate
...
... l’ anima mia ... fatt’ hai sana....
But the conditions of spiritual and of bodily freedom are very close to
one another—as many a languishing prisoner of war can testify—interlaced
and interwoven if not identical.
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage.
It is possible, thank God, for the human spirit to rise superior to the
most degrading conditions which inhuman brutality or fiendish hatred
can impose. Yet an atmosphere of justice and peace is the right and
normal environment for the soul’s free growth; and steady pressure of
tyranny and calculated injustice will all but infallibly blunt and stunt
the moral growth of its victims, as is witnessed by the universally
blighting effect of Turkish rule. Moreover, unless the received political
interpretation of the three Beasts of the Dark Wood[38] is wholly
unwarranted, Professor D’Ovidio is right in claiming[39] that, in a true
if subsidiary sense, Dante’s supernatural journey was “a refuge and a
remedy” from the troubles in which the Poet found himself immersed in the
tangled thicket[40] of an “enslaved Italy,” full of tyrants, and of that
tyrannous faction-spirit which is the worst enemy of Freedom.[41]
The Italy of his day, like the Florence which cast him out, is a stranger
to that Liberty which only Peace can give—a peace for which, on Dante’s
horizon, no other hope appeared than that of a common subjection to
the “Roman Emperor,” the divinely appointed guardian of justice among
men.[42] Peace is, indeed, so closely linked with freedom that Dante, in
one place,[43] speaks of it as the goal of his mystic quest.
Quella pace, che ...
Di mondo in mondo cercar mi si face.
whereas in the First Canto, Virgil has described that goal as liberty—
Libertà va cercando....
We may pause, then, on the context of these lines, wherein Dante’s quest
of liberty is associated with Cato’s suicide. For the difficulty and
obscurity of the situation which they raise will plunge us at once into
the heart of Dante’s Political Theory.
* * * * *
The opening Canto of the _Purgatorio_ shews us Cato of Utica, the
austere republican who killed himself rather than bow to the rising
dominance of Julius Caesar,[44] accorded a place of honour as Overseer
of the souls in Ante-Purgatory. His loving wife Marcia is in Limbo; his
fellow-republicans Brutus and Cassius are, with Judas Iscariot, in the
lowest depths of Hell. There is, moreover, a special place in Hell[45]
appointed for suicides, in a gruesome wood made fouler by the Harpies.
Yet here is Cato honoured, and, further, held up by Virgil as pattern of
the patriot who gives life for liberty! It has been a traditional crux
to interpreters of the _Divine Comedy_, to explain and justify Cato’s
position. To understand the fulness of the difficulty, and at the same
time familiarise ourselves with Dante’s theory of the ideal government
of the world, we shall need to turn to the treatise in which he holds up
for the general admiration of mankind that Empire which to Cato was more
hateful than death itself.
* * * * *
Next to the _Divina Commedia_, the _De Monarchia_—the “_Monarchia_” as it
is more neatly styled in Italy—is, in many ways, Dante’s most important
work. It lacks the charm as well as the literary importance of the _Vita
Nuova_, and the autobiographical interest of that and the _Convivio_, but
in it Dante develops his political theory, and by it—through Marsiglio
da Padova and his _Defensor Pacis_[46]—he influences all subsequent
generations.
The “Monarchy” which he expounds therein is not Autocracy as such; it
is the traditional suzerainty of the Holy Roman Empire, in which, in
spite of its actual failure in history, he sees an ideal centre of unity
for Christian civilisation, an ideal Court of Appeal for international
quarrels, a divinely ordained curb for personal and national greed and
self-assertion, and so an unique guarantee of peace for the world.