_I. AS A CITIZEN OF FLORENCE_
There are probably few competent judges who would hesitate to give
Dante a place of honour in the triad of the world's greatest poets; and
amongst these three Dante occupies a position wholly his own, peerless
and unapproached in history.
For Homer and Shakespeare reflect the ages in which they lived, in all
their fullness and variety of life and motive, largely sinking their
own individuality in the intensity and breadth of their sympathies.
They are great teachers doubtless, and fail not to lash what they
regard as the growing vices or follies of the day, and to impress upon
their hearers the solemn lessons of those inevitable facts of life
which they epitomise and vivify. But their teaching is chiefly
incidental or indirect, it is largely unconscious, and is often almost
as difficult to unravel from their works as it is from the life and
nature they so faithfully reflect.
With Dante it is far otherwise. Aglow with a prophet's passionate
conviction, an apostle's undying zeal, he is guided by a philosopher's
breadth and clearness of principle, a poet's unfailing sense of beauty
and command of emotions, to a social reformer's definite and practical
aims and a mystic's peace of religious communion. And though his works
abound in dramatic touches of startling power and variety, and
delineations of character unsurpassed in delicacy, yet with all the
depth and scope of his sympathies he never for a moment loses himself
or forgets his purpose.
As a philosopher and statesman, he had analysed with keen precision the
social institutions, the political forces, and the historical
antecedents by which he found his time and country dominated; as a
moralist, a theologian, and a man, he had grasped with a firmness that
nothing could relax the essential conditions of human blessedness here
and hereafter, and with an intensity and fixity of definite
self-conscious purpose almost without parallel he threw the passionate
energy of his nature into the task of preaching the eternal truth to
his countrymen, and through them to the world, and thwarting and
crushing the powers and institutions which he regarded as hostile to
the well-being of mankind. He strove to teach his brothers that their
true bliss lay in the exercise of virtue here, and the blessed vision
of God hereafter. And as a step towards this, and an essential part of
its realisation, he strove to make Italy one in heart and tongue, to
raise her out of the sea of petty jealousies and intrigues in which she
was plunged; in a word, to erect her into a free, united country, with
a noble mother tongue. These two purposes were one; and, supported and
supplemented by a never-dying zeal for truth, a never-failing sense of
beauty, they inspired the life and works of Dante Alighieri.
It is often held and taught, that a strong and definite didactic
purpose must inevitably be fatal to the highest forms of art, must clip
the wings of poetic imagination, distort the symmetry of poetic
sympathy, and substitute hard and angular contrasts for the melting
grace of those curved lines of beauty which pass one into the other.
Had Dante never lived, I know not where we should turn for the decisive
refutation of this thought; but in Dante it is the very combination
said to be impossible that inspires and enthrals us. A perfect artist,
guided in the exercise of his art by an unflagging intensity of moral
purpose; a prophet, submitting his inspirations to the keenest
philosophical analysis, pouring them into the most finished artistic
moulds, yet bringing them into ever fresher and fuller contact with
their living source; a moralist and philosopher whose thoughts are fed
by a prophet's directness of vision and a poet's tender grace of love,
a poet's might and subtlety of imagination--Philosopher, Prophet, Poet,
supreme as each, unique as a combination of them all--such was Dante
Alighieri! And his voice will never be drowned or forgotten as long as
man is dragged downward by passion and struggles upward towards God, as
long as he that sows to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption,
and he that sows to the spirit reaps of the spirit life everlasting, as
long as the heart of man can glow responsive to a holy indignation
with wrong, or can feel the sweetness of the harmonies of peace.
It is little that I can hope to do, and yet I would fain do something,
towards opening to one here and there some glimpse into that mighty
temple, instinct with the very presence of the Eternal, raised by the
master hand, nay rather wrought out of the mighty heart of Dante; but
before we can even attempt to gather up a few fragments of the 'Divine
Comedy,' as landmarks to guide us, in our turn, through Hell and
Purgatory up to Heaven, it is needful for us to have some conception
who Dante Alighieri was, and what were his fortunes in this mortal
life.
And here I must once for all utter a warning, and thereby discharge
myself of a special duty. The Old Testament itself has not been more
ruthlessly allegorised than have Dante's works and even his very life.
The lack of trustworthy materials, in any great abundance, for an
account of the poet's outward lot, the difficulty of fixing with
certainty when he is himself relating actual events and when his
apparent narratives are merely allegorical, the obscurity,
incompleteness, and even apparent inconsistency of some of the data he
supplies, the uncertainty as to the exact time at which his different
works were composed and the precise relation in which they stand to
each other, and the doubts which have been thrown upon the authenticity
of some of the minor documents upon which the poet's biographers
generally rely, have all combined to involve almost every step of his
life in deep obscurity. Here, then, is a field upon which laborious
research, ingenious conjecture, and wild speculation can find unending
employment, and consequently every branch of the study has quite a
literature of its own.
Now into this mass of controversial and speculative writings on Dante,
I do not make the smallest pretensions to have penetrated a single
step. I am far from wishing to disparage such studies, or to put
forward in my own defence that stale and foolish plea, the refuge of
pretentious ignorance in every region of inquiry, that a mind coming
fresh to the study has the advantage over those that are already well
versed in it; but surely the students who are making the elucidation of
Dante their life work would not ask or wish, that until their endless
task is completed all those whose souls have been touched by the direct
utterance of the great poet should hold their peace until qualified to
speak by half a life of study.
With no further apology, then, for seeming to venture too rashly on the
task, we may go on to a brief sketch of Dante's life and principles.
The main lines which I shall follow are in most cases traced distinctly
enough by Dante's own hand, and to the best of my belief they represent
a fair average of the present or recent conclusions of scholars; but,
on the other hand, there have always been some who would unhesitatingly
treat as allegory much of what I shall present to you as fact, who for
instance would treat all Dante's love for Beatrice, and indeed
Beatrice's very existence, as purely allegorical; and, again, where the
allegory is admitted on all hands, there is a ceaseless shifting and
endless variety in the special interpretations adopted and rejected by
the experts.
* * * * *
Dante, or properly Durante, Alighieri was born in Florence of an
ancient and noble family, in the year 1265. We may note that his life
falls in a period which we used to be taught to regard as an age of
intellectual stagnation and social barbarism, in which Christianity had
degenerated into a jumbled chaos of puerile and immoral superstitions!
We may note also that in the early years of his life the poet was a
contemporary of some of the noblest representatives of the
feudo-Catholic civilisation, that is to say of mediaeval philosophy,
theology, and chivalry, while his manhood was joined in loving
friendship with the first supremely great mediaeval artist, and before
he died one of the great precursors and heralds of the revival of
learning was growing up to manhood and another had already left his
cradle. To speak of Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, and St. Louis, as
living when Dante was born, of Giotto as his companion and friend, of
Petrarch and Boccaccio as already living when he died, is to indicate
more clearly than could be done by any more elaborate statement, the
position he occupies at the very turning point of the Middle Ages when
the forces of modern life had begun to rise, but the supremacy of
mediaeval faith and discipline was as yet unbroken. Accordingly Dante,
in whom the truest spirit of his age is, as it were, 'made flesh,' may
be variously regarded as the great morning star of modern
enlightenment, freedom, and culture, or as the very type of mediaeval
discipline, faith, and chivalry. To me, I confess, this latter aspect
of Dante's life is altogether predominant. To me he is the very
incarnation of Catholicism, not in its shame, but in its glory. Yet the
future is always contained in the present when rightly understood, and
just because Dante was the perfect representative of his own age, he
became the herald and the prophecy of the ages to come, not, as we
often vainly imagine them, rebelling against and escaping from the
overshadowing solemnity of the ages past, but growing out of them as
their natural and necessary result.
In the year 1265, then, Dante was born in Florence, then one of the
most powerful and flourishing, but also, alas! one of the most factious
and turbulent of the cities of Europe. He was but nine years old when
he first met that Beatrice Portinari who became thenceforth the
loadstar of his life. As to this lady we have little to say. The
details which Dante's early biographers give us add but little to our
knowledge of her, and so far as they are not drawn from the poet's own
words, are merely such graceful commonplaces of laudatory description
as any imagination of ordinary capacity would spontaneously supply for
itself. When we have said that Beatrice was a beautiful, sweet, and
virtuous girl, we have said all that we know, and all that we need care
to know, of the daughter of Folco Portinari, who lived, was married,
and died in Florence at the end of the thirteenth century. All that she
is to us more than other Florentine maidens, she is to us through that
poet who, as he wept her untimely death, hoped with no vain hope 'to
write of her, what ne'er was writ of woman.'[1]
* * * * *
It puts no great strain on our powers of credence, to accept Dante's
own statement of the rush of almost stupefying emotions which
overwhelmed his childish heart when at the age of nine he went with his
father to Portinari's house, and was sent to play with other children,
amongst them the little Beatrice, a child of eight years old. The 'New
Life' waked within him from that moment, and its strength and purity
made him strong and pure.[2]
* * * * *
Nine more years have passed. Dante is now eighteen. He has made rapid
progress in all the intellectual and personal accomplishments which are
held to adorn the position of a Florentine gentleman. His teachers have
in some cases already discerned the greatness of his powers, and he has
become aware, probably by essays which never saw the light, that he has
not only a poet's passions and aspirations, but a poet's power of
moulding language into oneness with his thought. He and Beatrice know
each other by sight, as neighbours or fellow-citizens, but Dante has
never heard her voice address a word to him. Yet she is still the
centre of all his thoughts. She has never ceased to be to him the
perfect ideal of growing womanhood, and to his devout and fervid
imagination, just because she is the very flower of womanly courtesy,
grace, and virtue, she is an angel upon earth. Not in the hackneyed
phrase of complimentary commonplace, not in the exaggerated cant of
would-be poetical metaphor, but in the deep verity of his inmost life,
Dante Alighieri believes that Beatrice Portinari, the maiden whose
purity keeps him pure, whose grace and beauty are as guardian angels
watching over his life, has more of heaven than of earth about her and
claims kindred with God's more perfect family.
Beatrice is now seventeen, she is walking with two companions in a
public place, she meets Dante and allows herself to utter a few words
of graceful greeting. It is the first time she has spoken to him, and
Dante's soul is thrilled and fired to its very depths. Not many hours
afterwards, the poet began the first of his sonnets that we still
possess, perhaps the first he ever wrote.[3]
* * * * *
Let us pass over eight or nine years more. Dante, now about twenty-six,
is the very flower of chivalry and poetry. The foremost men of his own
and other cities--artists, musicians, poets, scholars, and
statesmen--are his friends. Somewhat hard of access and reserved, but
the most fascinating of companions and the faithfulest of friends to
those who have found a real place in his heart, Dante takes a rank of
acknowledged eminence amongst the poets of his day. His verses, chiefly
in praise of Beatrice, are written in a strain of tender sentiment,
that gives little sign of what is ultimately to come out of him, but
there is a nervous and concentrated power of diction, a purity and
elevation of conception in them, which may not have been obvious to his
companions as separating him from them, but which to eyes instructed by
the result is full of deepest meaning.
And what of Beatrice? She is dead. It was never given to Dante to call
her his. We know not so much as whether he even aspired to more than
that gracious salutation in which, to use his own expression, he seemed
to touch 'the very limits of beatitude.'[4]
Be this as it may, it is certain that Beatrice married a powerful
citizen of Florence several years before her death. But she was still
the guardian angel of the poet's life, she was still the very type of
womanhood to him; and there was not a word or thought of his towards
her but was full of utter courtesy and purity. And now, in the flower
of her loveliness she is cut down by death, and to Dante life has
become a wilderness.[5]
* * * * *
Yet eight or nine years more. Dante is now in what his philosophical
system regards as the very prime of life.[6] He is thirty-five. The
date is 1300. Since we left him weeping for the death of Beatrice, the
unity of his life has been shattered and he has lost his way, but only
for a time. Now his powers and purposes are richer, stronger, more
concentrated than ever.
In his first passion of grief for Beatrice's death he had been
profoundly touched by the pity of a gentle-eyed damsel whom a far from
groundless conjecture identifies with Gemma Donati, the lady whom he
married not long afterwards. With this Gemma he lived till his
banishment, and they had a numerous family. The internal evidence of
Dante's works, and the few circumstances really known to us, give
little support to the tradition that their marriage was an unhappy one.
Dante's friends had hoped that domestic peace might console him for his
irreparable loss, but he himself had rather sought for consolation in
the study of philosophy and theology; and it befell him, he tells us,
as one who in seeking silver strikes on gold--not, haply, without
guidance from on high;--for he began to see many things as in a dream,
and deemed that Dame Philosophy must needs be supreme![7]
But neither domestic nor literary cares and duties absorbed his
energies. In late years he had begun to take an active part in the
politics of his city, and was now fast rising to his true position as
the foremost man of Florence and of Italy.
Thus, we see new interests and new powers rising in his life, but for a
time the unity of that life was gone. While Beatrice lived Dante's
whole being was centred in her, and she was to him the visible token of
God's presence upon earth, the living proof of the reality and the
beauty of things Divine, born to fill the world with faith and
gentleness. But when she was gone, when other passions and pursuits
disputed with her memory the foremost place in Dante's heart, it was as
though he had lost the secret and the meaning of life, as though he had
lost the guidance of Heaven, and was whirled helplessly in the vortex
of moral, social, and political disorder which swept over his country.
For Italian politics at this period form a veritable chaos of shifting
combinations and entanglements, of plots and counterplots, of intrigue
and treachery and vacillation, though lightened ever and again by
gleams of noblest patriotism and devotion.
Yet Dante's soul was far too strong to be permanently overwhelmed.
Gradually his philosophical reflections began to take definite shape.
He felt the wants of his own life and of his country's life. He pierced
down to the fundamental conditions of political and social welfare; and
when human philosophy had begun to restore unity and concentration to
his powers, then the sweet image of the pure maiden who had first waked
his soul to love returned glorified and transfigured to guide him into
the very presence of God. She was the symbol of Divine philosophy. She,
and she only, could restore his shattered life to unity and strength,
and the love she never gave him as a woman, she could give him as the
protecting guardian of his life, as the vehicle of God's highest
revelation.[8]
* * * * *
With his life thus strengthened and enriched, with a firm heart and a
steady purpose, Dante Alighieri stood in the year 1300 at the helm of
the State of Florence. And here accordingly it becomes necessary for us
to dwell for a moment on some of the chief political forces with which
he had to deal.
The two great factions of the Guelfs and Ghibellines were tearing the
very heart of Italy; and without going into any detail, we must try to
point out the central ideas of each party. The Ghibellines, then,
appear to have represented an aristocratic principle of order,
constantly in danger of becoming oppressive, while the Guelfs
represented a democratic principle of progress, ever verging upon
chaotic and unbridled licence. The Ghibellines longed for a national
unity, resting on centralisation; the Guelfs aimed at a local
independence which tended to national disintegration. The Ghibellines,
regarding the German Empire as the heir and representative of the
Empire of Rome, and as the symbol of Italian unity, espoused the
Emperor's cause against the Pope, declared the temporal power
independent of the spiritual, and limited the sphere of the priests
entirely to the latter. The Guelfs found in the political action of the
Pope a counterpoise to the influence of the Emperor; the petty and
intriguing spirit of the politics of the Vatican made its ruler the
natural ally of the disintegrating Guelfs rather than the centralising
Ghibellines, and accordingly the Guelfs ardently espoused the cause of
the Pope's temporal power, and often sought in the royal house of
France a further support against Germany.
These broad lines, however, were constantly blurred and crossed by
personal intrigue or ambition, by family jealousies, feuds, and
rivalries, by unnatural alliances or by corruption and treachery.
Now Dante was by family tradition a Guelf. Florence too was nominally
the head quarters of Guelfism, and Dante had fought bravely in her
battles against the Ghibellines. But the more he reflected upon the
sources of the evils by which Italy was torn, the more profoundly he
came to distrust the unprincipled meddling of the greedy princes of the
house of France in Italian politics, and the more jealously did he
watch the temporal power of the Pope. Perhaps the political opinions he
afterwards held were not as yet fully consolidated, but his votes and
proposals--which we read with a strange interest in the city archives
of Florence nearly six hundred years after the ink has dried--show that
in 1300 he was at any rate on the highway to the conclusions he
ultimately reached. And we may therefore take this occasion of stating
what they were.
It appeared to Dante that Italy was sunk in moral, social, and
political chaos, for want of a firm hand to repress the turbulent
factions that rent her bosom; and that no hand except an Emperor's
could be firm enough. The Empire of Rome was to him the most imposing
and glorious spectacle offered by human history. God had guided Rome by
miracles and signs to the dominion of the world that the world might be
at peace.
And parallel with this temporal Empire founded by Julius Caesar, was the
spiritual Empire of the Church, founded by Jesus Christ. Both alike
were established by God for the guidance of mankind: to rebel against
either was to rebel against God. Brutus and Cassius, who slew Julius
Caesar, the embodiment of the Empire, are placed by Dante in the same
depth of Hell as Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus Christ, the
incarnation of the Church.[9] These three had done what in them lay to
reduce the world to civil and religious chaos, for they had compassed
the death of the ideal representatives of civil and religious order.
But both powers alike laid a mighty trust upon the human agents who
administered them; and as the Empire and the Church were the sublimest
and the holiest of ideal institutions, so a tyrannical Emperor and a
corrupt or recreant Pope were amongst the foulest of sinners, to be
rebuked and resisted with every power of body and soul.
Dante could no more conceive of the spiritual life without the
authoritative guidance of the all-present, all-pervading Church, than
he could conceive of a well-ordered polity without the all-penetrating
force of law. But it appeared to him as monstrous for the Pope to seek
political influence and to use his spiritual powers for political ends
as he would have judged it for the Emperor to exercise spiritual
tyranny over the faith of Christians.[10]
There can have been little in the political life of Florence at this
time to attract one who held such views. But Dante of all men hated and
despised weak shrinking from responsibility. If there is one feature in
his stern character more awful than any other, it is his unutterable,
withering contempt for those who lived without praise or blame, those
wretches who never were alive. He saw them afterwards in the outer
circle of Hell, mingled with that caitiff herd of angels who were not
for God and yet were not for the rebels, but were only for themselves.
Heaven drove them forth, Heaven's beauty not to stain,
Nor would the deep Hell deign to have them there
For any glory that the damned might gain!
No fame of them survives upon the earth, Pity and Justice hold them in
disdain, their cries of passion and of woe are ever whirled through the
starless air, and their forgotten lot appears to them so base that they
envy the very torments of the damned. 'Let us not speak of them,' says
Virgil to Dante, 'but gaze and pass them by.'[11]
So Dante shrank not from his task when called to public office, but
laid his strong hand upon the helm of Florence. During a part of this
year 1300, he filled the supreme magistracy, and at that very time the
old disputes of Guelf and Ghibelline broke out in the city afresh under
a thin disguise. We have seen that Dante's sympathies were now almost
completely Ghibelline, but as the first Prior of Florence his duty was
firmly to suppress all factious attempts to disturb the city's peace
and introduce intestine discord. It was not by party broils that Italy
would be restored to peace and harmony. He behaved with a more than
Roman fortitude, for it is easier for a father to chastise a rebellious
son than for a true friend to override the claims of friendship.
Dante's dearest friend, Guido Cavalcanti, bound to him by every tie of
sympathy and fellowship which could unite two men in common purposes
and common hopes, was one of the leaders of the party with which Dante
himself sympathised; and yet, for the good of his country and in
obedience to his magisterial duty, he tore this friend from his side
though not from his heart, and pronounced on him the sentence of
banishment, the weight of which he must even then have known so well.
It speaks to the eternal honour of Guido, as well as Dante, that this
deed appears not to have thrown so much as a shadow upon the friendship
of the two men.[12]
Had Dante's successors in office dealt with firmness and integrity
equal to his own, all might have been well; but a vacillating and
equivocal policy soon opened the door to suspicions and recriminations,
Florence ceased to steer her own course and permitted foreign
interference with her affairs, while the Pope, with intentions that may
have been good but with a policy which proved utterly disastrous,
furthered the intervention of the French Prince Charles of Valois. It
was a critical moment. An embassy to the Papal Court was essential, and
a firm hand must meanwhile hold the reins at Florence. 'If I go, who
shall stay? If I stay, who shall go?' Dante is reported to have said;
and though the saying is probably apocryphal, yet it points out happily
enough the true position of affairs. Dante was now no longer the chief
magistrate of his city, but he was in fact, though not in name, the one
man of Florence, the one man of Italy.
Finally he resolved to go to Rome. But the blindness or corruption of
the Papal Court was invincible; and while Dante was still toiling at
his hopeless task, Charles of Valois entered Florence with his troops,
soon to realise the worst suspicions of those who had opposed his
intervention. Nominally a restorer of tranquillity, he stirred up all
the worst and most lawless passions of the Florentines; and while Dante
was serving his country at Rome, the unjust and cruel sentence of
banishment was launched against him, his property was confiscated and
seized, a few months afterwards he was sentenced to be burned to death
should he ever fall into the power of the Florentines, and, not content
with all this, his enemies heaped upon his name the foulest calumnies
of embezzlement and malversation--calumnies which I suppose no creature
from that hour to this has ever for one moment believed, but which
could not fail to make the envenomed wound strike deeper into Dante's
heart.
So now he must leave 'all things most dear--this the first arrow shot
from exile's bow,' in poverty and dependence his proud spirit must
learn 'how salt a taste cleaves to a patron's bread, how hard a path to
tread a patron's stair;' and, above all, his unsullied purity and
patriotism must find itself forced into constant association or even
alliance with selfish and personal ambition, or with tyranny,
meanness, and duplicity.[13] How that great soul bore itself amid all
these miseries, what it learnt from them, where it sought and found a
refuge from them, we shall see when we take up again the broken thread
which we must drop to-day.