might have been the governors and guides of the Republic--if they had
chosen, and had known how; and both, though condemning the two parties
equally, seem to have thought that this would have been the best result
for the state. But the accounts of both, though they are very different
writers, agree in their scorn of the leaders of the White Guelfs. They
were upstarts, purse-proud, vain, and coarse-minded; and they dared to
aspire to an ambition which they were too dull and too cowardly to
pursue, when the game was in their hands. They wished to rule; but when
they might, they were afraid. The commons were on their side, the
moderate men, the party of law, the lovers of republican government, and
for the most part the magistrates; but they shrank from their fortune,
"more from cowardice than from goodness, because they exceedingly feared
their adversaries." Boniface VIII had no prepossessions in Florence,
except for energy and an open hand; the side which was most popular he
would have accepted and backed. But he said, "_Io non voglio perdere gli
uomini perle femminelle_."[38] If the Black party furnished types for
the grosser or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet's hell, the White
party surely were the originals of that picture of stupid and cowardly
selfishness, in the miserable crowd who moan and are buffeted in the
vestibule of the Pit, mingled with the angels who dared neither to rebel
nor be faithful, but "were for themselves"; and whoever it may be who is
singled out in the _setta dei cattivi_, for deeper and special
scorn--he,
"Che fece per vilta il gran rifinto,"[39]
the idea was derived from the Cerchi in Florence.
Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more than the general
character. He acted for a time in concert with the expelled party, when
they attempted to force their way back to Florence; he gave them up at
last in scorn and despair; but he never returned to Florence. And he
found no new home for the rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his
exile to his death, he was a wanderer. The character is stamped on his
writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or dim, do but
disclose him to us at different points, appearing here and there, we are
not told how or why. One old record, discovered by antiquarian industry,
shows him in a village church near Florence, planning with the Cerchi
and the White party an attack on the Black Guelfs. In another, he
appears in the Val di Magra, making peace between its small potentates;
in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The
traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with
a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the
recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy
form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of the
Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he
passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumor brings him to the
West--with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little
that is certain can be made out about the places where he was honored
and admired, and, it may be, not always a welcome guest, till we find
him sheltered, cherished, and then laid at last to rest, by the lords of
Ravenna. There he still rests, in a small, solitary chapel, built, not
by a Florentine, but a Venetian. Florence, "that mother of little love,"
asked for his bones, but rightly asked in vain. His place of repose is
better in those remote and forsaken streets "by the shore of the Adrian
Sea," hard by the last relics of the Roman Empire--the mausoleum of the
children of Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian--than among the
assembled dead of St. Croce, or amid the magnificence of Santa Maria del
Fiore.
The _Commedia_, at the first glance, shows the traces of its author's
life. It is the work of a wanderer. The very form in which it is cast is
that of a journey, difficult, toilsome, perilous, and full of change. It
is more than a working out of that touching phraseology of the Middle
Ages in which "the way" was the technical theological expression for
this mortal life; and "viator" meant man in his state of trial, as
"comprehensor" meant man made perfect, having attained to his heavenly
country. It is more than merely this. The writer's mind is full of the
recollections and definite images of his various journeys. The permanent
scenery of the _inferno_ and _purgatorio_, very variously and distinctly
marked, is that of travel. The descent down the sides of the Pit, and
the ascent of the Sacred Mountain, show one familiar with such
scenes--one who had climbed painfully in perilous passes, and grown
dizzy on the brink of narrow ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery
from the gorges of the Alps and Apennines, or the terraces and
precipices of the Riviera. Local reminiscences abound. The severed rocks
of the Adige Valley--the waterfall of St. Benedetto; the crags of
Pietra-pana and St. Leo, which overlook the plains of Lucca and Ravenna;
the "fair river" that flows among the poplars between Chiaveri and
Sestri; the marble quarries of Carrara; the "rough and desert ways
between Lerici and Turbia," and whose towery cliffs, going sheer into
the deep sea at Noli, which travellers on the Corniche road some thirty
years ago may yet remember with fear. Mountain experience furnished that
picture of the traveller caught in an Alpine mist and gradually climbing
above it; seeing the vapors grow thin, and the sun's orb appear faintly
through them; and issuing at last into sunshine on the mountain top,
while the light of sunset was lost already on the shores below:
"Ai raggi, morti gia' bassi lidi,"[40]
or that image of the cold dull shadow over the torrent, beneath
the Alpine fir:
"Un' ombra smorta
Qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri
Sovra suoi freddi rivi, l'Alpe porta;"[41]
or of the large snowflakes falling without wind among the mountains:
"d'un cader lento
Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde
Come di neve in Alpe senza vento."[42]
Of these years, then, of disappointment and exile the _Divina Commedia_
was the labor and fruit. A story in Boccaccio's life of Dante, told with
some detail, implies, indeed, that it was begun, and some progress made
in it, while Dante was yet in Florence--begun in Latin, and he quotes
three lines of it--continued afterward in Italian. This is not
impossible; indeed, the germ and presage of it may be traced in the
_Vita Nuova_. The idealized saint is there, in all the grace of her pure
and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul. She is
already in glory with Mary the Queen of Angels. She already beholds the
face of the Ever-blessed. And the _envoye_ of the _Vita Nuova_ is the
promise of the _Commedia_. "After this sonnet" (in which he describes
how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld a lady
receiving honor and dazzling by her glory the unaccustomed
spirit)--"After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in
which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak more of this
blessed one until such time as I should be able to indite more worthily
of her. And to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power, as she
truly knows. So that it shall be the pleasure of Him, by whom all things
live, that my life continue for some years, I hope to say of her that
which never hath been said of any woman. And afterward, may it please
him, who is the Lord of kindness, that my soul may go to behold the
glory of her lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously
gazes on the countenance of Him, _qui est per omnia secula benedictus_."
It would be wantonly violating probability and the unity of a great life
to suppose that this purpose, though transformed, was ever forgotten or
laid aside. The poet knew not, indeed, what he was promising, what he
was pledging himself to--through what years of toil and anguish he would
have to seek the light and the power he had asked; in what form his high
venture should be realized.
But the _Commedia_ is the work of no light resolve, and we need not be
surprised at finding the resolve and the purpose at the outset of the
poet's life. We may freely accept the key supplied by the words of the
_Vita Nuova_. The spell of boyhood is never broken, through the ups and
downs of life. His course of thought advances, alters, deepens, but is
continuous. From youth to age, from the first glimpse to the perfect
work, the same idea abides with him, "even from the flower till the
grape was ripe." It may assume various changes--an image of beauty, a
figure of philosophy, a voice from the other world, a type of heavenly
wisdom and joy--but still it holds, in self-imposed and willing
thraldom, that creative and versatile and tenacious spirit. It was the
dream and hope of too deep and strong a mind to fade and come to
naught--to be other than the seed of the achievement and crown of life.
But with all faith in the star and the freedom of genius, we may doubt
whether the prosperous citizen would have done that which was done by
the man without a home. Beatrice's glory might have been sung in grand
though barbarous Latin to the _literati_ of the fourteenth century; or a
poem of new beauty might have fixed the language and opened the
literature of modern Italy; but it could hardly have been the
_Commedia_. That belongs, in its date and its greatness, to the time
when sorrow had become the poet's daily portion and the condition of his
life.
But such greatness had to endure its price and its counterpoise. Dante
was alone--except in his visionary world, solitary and companionless.
The blind Greek had his throng of listeners; the blind Englishman his
home and the voices of his daughters; Shakespeare had his free
associates of the stage; Goethe, his correspondents, a court, and all
Germany to applaud. Not so Dante. The friends of his youth are already
in the region of spirits, and meet him there--Casella, Forese; Guido
Cavalcanti will soon be with them. In this upper world he thinks and
writes as a friendless man--to whom all that he had held dearest was
either lost or imbittered; he thinks and writes for himself.
So comprehensive in interest is the _Commedia_. Any attempt to explain
it, by narrowing that interest to politics, philosophy, the moral life,
or theology itself, must prove inadequate. Theology strikes the
keynote; but history, natural and metaphysical science, poetry, and art,
each in their turn join in the harmony, independent, yet ministering to
the whole. If from the poem itself we could be for a single moment in
doubt of the reality and dominant place of religion in it, the
plain-spoken prose of the _Convito_ would show how he placed "the Divine
Science, full of all peace, and allowing no strife of opinions and
sophisms, for the excellent certainty of its subject, which is God," is
single perfection above all other sciences, "which are, as Solomon
speaks, but queens or concubines or maidens; but she is the 'Dove,' and
the 'perfect one'--'Dove,' because without stain of strife; 'perfect,'
because perfectly she makes us behold the truth, in which our soul
stills itself and is at rest." But the same passage shows likewise how
he viewed all human knowledge and human interests, as holding their due
place in the hierarchy of wisdom, and among the steps of man's
perfection. No account of the _Commedia_ will prove sufficient which
does not keep in view, first of all, the high moral purpose and deep
spirit of faith with which it was written, and then the wide liberty of
materials and means which the poet allowed himself in working out his
design.
Doubtless his writings have a political aspect. The "great Ghibelline
poet" is one of Dante's received synonymes; of his strong political
opinions, and the importance he attached to them, there can be no doubt.
And he meant his poem to be the vehicle of them, and the record to all
ages of the folly and selfishness with which he saw men governed. That
he should take the deepest interest in the goings-on of his time is part
of his greatness; to suppose that he stopped at them, or that he
subordinated to political objects or feelings all the other elements of
his poem, is to shrink up that greatness into very narrow limits. Yet
this has been done by men of mark and ability, by Italians, by men who
read the _Commedia_ in their own mother tongue. It has been maintained
as a satisfactory account of it--maintained with great labor and
pertinacious ingenuity--that Dante meant nothing more by his poem than
the conflicts and ideal triumphs of a political party. The hundred
cantos of that vision of the universe are but a manifesto of the
Ghibelline propaganda, designed, under the veil of historic images and
scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to announce; and Beatrice, in
all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of the jargon and slang
of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the
greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to
which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to
solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in
which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or
infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and
even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic
doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries
of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse
blindness.
Dante was not a Ghibelline, though he longed for the interposition of an
imperial power. Historically he did not belong to the Ghibelline party.
It is true that he forsook the Guelfs, with whom he had been brought up,
and that the White Guelfs, with whom he was expelled from Florence, were
at length merged and lost in the Ghibelline party; and he acted with
them for a time. But no words can be stronger than those in which he
disjoins himself from that "evil and foolish company," and claims his
independence--
"A te fia bello
Averti fatto parte per te stesso."[43]
Dante, by the _Divina Commedia_, was the restorer of seriousness in
literature. He was so by the magnitude and pretensions of his work, and
by the earnestness of its spirit. He first broke through the
prescription which had confined great works to the Latin, and the
faithless prejudices which, in the language of society, could see powers
fitted for no higher task than that of expressing, in curiously
diversified forms, its most ordinary feelings. But he did much more.
Literature was going astray in its tone, while growing in importance;
the _Commedia_ checked it. The Provençal and Italian poetry was, with
the exception of some pieces of political satire, almost exclusively
amatory, in the most fantastic and affected fashion. In expression, it
had not even the merit of being natural; in purpose, it was trifling;
in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless it
brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased
at a high price, by intellectual distortion and moral insensibility. But
this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick II, for such it was,
was deeply mined by religious unbelief. However strange this charge
first sounds against the thirteenth century, no one can look at all
closely into its history, at least in Italy, without seeing that the
idea of infidelity--not heresy, but infidelity--was quite a familiar
one; and that, side by side with the theology of Aquinas and
Bonaventura, there was working among those who influenced fashion and
opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom learning was a
profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost monstrous for
its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's refined and
enlightened court. The genius of the great doctors might have kept in
safety the Latin schools, but not the free and home thoughts which found
utterance in the language of the people, if the solemn beauty of the
Italian _Commedia_ had not seized on all minds. It would have been an
evil thing for Italian, perhaps for European, literature if the siren
tales of the _Decameron_ had not been the first to occupy the ears with
the charms of a new language.
Dante's all-surveying, all-embracing mind was worthy to open the grand
procession of modern poets. He had chosen his subject in a region remote
from popular thought--too awful for it, too abstruse. He had accepted
frankly the dogmatic limits of the Church, and thrown himself with even
enthusiastic faith into her reasonings, at once so bold and so
undoubting--her spirit of certainty, and her deep contemplations on the
unseen and infinite. And in literature, he had taken as guides and
models, above all criticism and all appeal, the classical writers. But
with his mind full of the deep and intricate questions of metaphysics
and theology, and his poetical taste always owing allegiance to Vergil,
Ovid, and Statius--keen and subtle as a schoolman--as much an idolater
of old heathen art and grandeur as the men of the Renaissance--his eye
is yet as open to the delicacies of character, to the variety of
external nature, to the wonders of the physical world--his interest in
them as diversified and fresh, his impressions as sharp and distinct,
his rendering of them as free and true and forcible, as little weakened
or confused by imitation or by conventional words, his language as
elastic and as completely under his command, his choice of poetic
materials as unrestricted and original, as if he had been born in days
which claim as their own such freedom and such keen discriminative sense
of what is real in feeling and image--as if he had never felt the
attractions of a crabbed problem of scholastic logic, or bowed before
the mellow grace of the Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time
was not yet come when the classics could be really understood and
appreciated; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. But admiring them with
a kind of devotion, and showing not seldom that he had caught their
spirit, he never attempts to copy them. His poetry in form and material
is all his own. He asserted the poet's claim to borrow from all science,
and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he
wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose
their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality.
THIRD ESTATE JOINS IN THE GOVERNMENT
OF FRANCE
A.D. 1302
HENRI MARTIN[44]
At the commencement of the fourteenth century, when the
power of Philip IV of France (surnamed the "Fair") was at
its height, contentions arose between him and Pope Boniface
VIII over the taxation of the clergy, and the right of
nomination to vacant bishoprics and benefices within the
dominions of the French King.
Affairs reached a crisis when Philip laid claim to the
county of Melgueil, which the Bishop of Maguelonne held in
fief from the holy see. Boniface provoked Philip by a
chiding bull, and added to the provocation by sending to the
King, as negotiator in their differences, Bernard de
Saisset, whom the Pope, in spite of the King, had created
Bishop of Pamiers.
This tactless prelate made matters worse by an arrogant
attitude, and afterward spoke of the King, who received him
in sombre silence, as "that debaser of coinage, that proud
and dumb image that knows nothing but to stare at people
without saying anything."
Ignoring his ambassadorial privileges, Philip had him
arrested and imprisoned as a French subject, on a charge of
treason, heresy, and blasphemy, and sent his chancellor,
Peter Flotte, and William de Nogaret, to the Pope, to demand
the prelate's degradation and deprivation of his see.
The Pope, who meanwhile had launched his famous "Ausculta,
fili," bull, received Philip's ambassadors, but their
interview was marked by a violent scene: "My power!"
exclaimed the Pope, "the spiritual power embraces and
includes the temporal power!"
"So be it!" replied Flotte, "but your power is verbal; that
of the King, real."
To deliberate on the remedies for the abuses of which he
deemed the King guilty, the Pope summoned all the superior
clergy of France to an assembly at Rome.
Philip and his council resolved to fight the enemy with its own weapons,
to enlist public opinion on their side, and to shelter themselves behind
a great national manifestation; the three estates of France were
convoked at Notre Dame in Paris, the 10th of April, 1302, to take
cognizance of the differences between the King and the Pope. For the
first time since the establishment of the kingdom of France, the town
deputies were called to sit in a body in a national assembly, alongside
of prelates and barons; this great event was the official acknowledgment
of the middle class as the "Third Estate," and attested that henceforth
the villages, the towns, the communities formed a collective entity, a
political order.
It is a singular thing that the first states-general was freely convoked
by the most despotic of the kings of the Middle Ages, and that he had
the idea to seek in them moral power and support.
The attempt would seem foolhardy in a prince so little popular as Philip
the Fair; but Philip in reality risked nothing, and knew it; the
feudality did not possess sufficient union, the people did not have
enough force to profit on this occasion against the Crown. Besides, the
Pope was more unpopular than the King, and had been so for a much longer
time; the nobility, which, since the reign of St. Louis, had coalesced
to resist clerical jurisdiction, had not changed in sentiment; as to the
people, filled with the remembrance of St. Louis, they loved the King
still, better than the Pope, notwithstanding the oppressions of Philip,
and besides it was easy to foresee that the mayors, consuls, aldermen,
jurats or magistrates, who were to represent their cities in the great
assembly at Paris, dazzled with the unaccustomed _rôle_ to which they
were called, and desirous to please the King in their personal interest
or in that of their towns, would be under the control of the adroit
lawyers who were prepared to work on their minds and to direct the
debates. The bull, nevertheless, if its exact tenor had been known,
might well have produced in many respects a contrary effect to the
wishes of the King. The reproaches of Boniface touching the debasement
of the coinage and the royal exactions, reproaches which so irritated
Philip, might have met with other sentiments from the townsmen. The
chancellor, Peter Flotte, foresaw this; he distributed among the public,
instead of the original bull, a species of _résumé_ in which he had
assembled, in a few lines, in the crudest terms, the most exorbitant
pretensions of Boniface, at the same time suppressing everything which
touched on the troubles of the nation against the King.
"Boniface, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip, King of
the French; fear God and observe his commandments. We want you to know
that you are subject to us temporarily as well as spiritually; that the
collation of the benefices and the prebends--revenues attached to the
canonical positions--do not belong to you in any way; that if you have
care of the vacant benefices, it is to reserve their revenue for their
successors; that if you have misapplied any of these benefices, we
declare that collation invalid and revoke it, declaring as heretics all
those who think otherwise.
"Given in the Lateran in the month of December, etc."
At the same time they caused to be circulated a pretended answer to the
pretended bull:
"Philip, by the Grace of God, King of the French, to Boniface, who gives
out that he is sovereign pontiff, little or no salutations! May your
very great Fatuity know that we are subject to no one as regards
temporal power: that the collation of vacant churches and prebends
belongs to us by Royal Right; that the incomes belong to us; that the
collations made and to be made by us are valid in the past and in the
future, and that we will manfully protect their possessors toward and
against all. Those who think otherwise we take to be fools and insane."
This brutal letter was not destined to be sent to its address, but to
abase the pontifical dignity, or at least the person of the Pope, in the
eyes of the French public. The spirit of the people must have been
greatly changed if this end could be thus attained by a means which
formerly would have drawn universal indignation on the head of the
sacrilegious monarch.