Chapter III: Part 3

I venture to think that there is a strain of playfulness underlying a good deal of the argument of this work; and that even if we can bring ourselves to believe Dante’s own solemnly elaborate interpretation of his love-songs to be quite serious in the main.

And apart from this, if we take the _Convivio_ with the utmost seriousness, we may remember for our comfort that πορίζεσθαι τὰ γέλοια[142] is one of the qualifications of Aristotle’s εὐτράπελος and the willingness to be laughed at another; and see in Dante (with all reverence) an example of those who, more or less unconsciously provide matter for amusement to posterity. Nay, we may treat him as he treats St. Gregory, and look upon him as laughing now at his own certitude about the ten heavens and the angelic hierarchy, from his place in the mystic rose—or are we to say on the terrace of Pride?

But to return to the _Convivio_. It is here, as we have already suggested, that Dante gives us his description of the ideal nature of Laughter. “Ridere,” he says, “è una corruscazione della dilettazione de l’ anima.”[143] On the Aristotelian principle of the Mean (though his actual reference is not to Aristotle, but to Pseudo-Seneca “On the Four Cardinal Virtues”), he urges that laughter should be moderate and modest, with no violent movement (such as convulses the pages, e.g. of Franco Sacchetti) and no “cackling” noise. Laughter is, in fact—like little children—“best seen and not heard.”

From each of the four extant treatises, quotations may be adduced which at any rate show the writer’s sympathy with that view of life which fastens on the incongruous and sees in it matter for genial irony or for bitter sarcasm, according to the moral context.

_Tratt. I._ Chapter xi. opens with a delicious satire on the “sheep-like opinion” of the multitude, which I have elsewhere compared to the charmingly nonsensical scene—“Less Bread, More Taxes!”—with which Lewis Carroll inaugurates his _Sylvie and Bruno_.

The “man in the street,” says Dante, is ready to follow any cry that is raised. Thus the populace will be found exclaiming “Viva la lor morte! Muoia la lor vita!—purchè alcuno cominci.” They are for all the world like sheep who follow their leader blindly over a high precipice or down a well. He goes on to rail at “a bad workman who blames his tools,” the many who “_sempre danno colpa alla materia dell’ arte apparecchiata, overo alo strumento; siccome lo mal fabro biasima ferro appresentato a lui_.”[144]

Nor can we fail to find in the next chapter (I, xii.) a touch of the drily humorous spirit; in the passage which Dr. Toynbee in his Anthology entitles _Of Silly Questions_.

“If flames were plainly to be seen issuing from the windows of a house, and a bystander were to enquire whether that house were on fire, and another man to reply that it was, I should find it difficult to decide which of the two was the more ridiculous.”[145]

What are we to say of the _Trattato II_? Here, if anywhere, Dante poses as the unconscious humorist; here, if anywhere, in his elaborately solemn disquisition upon arrangement of the heavens and their analogues in the _trivium_ and _quadrivium_, he is qualifying himself to play the _rôle_ of St. Gregory in the other world! But even here he finds leisure to cast occasionally a satirist’s eye on the contemporary world—

l’ aiuolo che ci fa tanto feroci;

and the naïveté of his references to it is delightful. They sometimes come in incidentally in the form of similes. In Chapter vii.,[146] for instance, is an illusion to the perennial banishments and sieges with which the factions of Guelf and Ghibelline, Black and White, harassed the cities of the peninsula: “When we speak of ‘the city,’” he says, “we are wont to mean those who are in possession of it, not those who are attacking it, albeit the one and the other be citizens.” Or again, in Chapter xi.,[147] a reference to the decline of good taste and culture is ingeniously worked into a question of etymology. “_Cortesia_” is equivalent to “_onestade_,” and “because in courts of old time virtuous and fair manners were in use (as now the contrary), this word was derived from courts, and ‘courtesy’ was as much as to say ‘after the usage of courts.’ If the word had been derived in modern days from the same origin, it could have signified nothing else than _turpezza_.”

In _Tratt. III_, as elsewhere, the playfulness is for the most part so spread out that it is difficult to quote. There is, however, a touch of real satire in such passages as that in which Dante twits the lawyers, physicians, and members of religious orders with their disqualification for the reputation of a true philosopher.[148]

“We are not to call him a real philosopher who is a friend of wisdom for profit’s sake, as are lawyers, physicians, and almost all the members of the religious orders, who do not study in order to know, but in order to get money or office; and if any one would give them that which it is their purpose to acquire, they would linger over their study no longer.”

_Trattato IV_ is more obviously fruitful. Here again he girds at the lawyers and doctors, suggesting that they might at least give _un_professional advice gratis, and, in another place, ventures timidly to assert that it may be possible “to be religious though married.”[149] Again, in Ch. xvi., if _nobile_ simply meant _notus_, then the Obelisk of St. Peter would be the noblest stone on earth, and Asdente the cobbler (of whom Salimbene gives us so lively a sketch) would be noblest among the citizens of Parma.[150]

Some arguments are so senseless, he says a little earlier, that they deserve to be answered not with a word, but with a knife. “Risponder si vorrebbe non colle parole ma col coltello a tanta bestialità.”[151]

Lastly, he has in this treatise the audacity to depict to us the sublimest sage, “il maestro di color che sanno,” as indulging in a burst of hypothetical laughter at the idea of a double origin of the human race. “Senza dubbio, forte riderebbe Aristotile”; and, he adds, “those who would divide mankind into two separate species like horses and asses are (with apologies to Aristotle) themselves the asses.”[152]

In the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_, as we have already hinted, the “idioma incomptum et ineptum” of various localities, alike on the right and on the left of the Apennines, gives play for pleasantry of which does Dante not fail to take advantage. It is with evident relish that he puts on record typical uncouth phrases of each dialect: the Roman _Mezzure quinto dici_, the _Chignamente_, _frate_, _sc-tate_ of the Marches of Ancona, the Milanese _Mes d’ ochiover_, the _Çes fastú_ which men of Aquileja and Istria “crudeliter accentuando, eructuant.” The feminine softness of the Romagna, and especially of Forlì, with its _corada mea_;[153] the more than masculine roughness of the men of Verona, Vicenza, Brescia—all those who say “Magara”; the _nof_ and _vif_ of Treviso.

In Chapter xi. he has his knife into mediaeval Rome, the proud and corrupt. “Sicut ergo Romani se cunctis preponendos extimant, in hac eradicatione sive discerptione non immerito eos aliis preponamus, protestantes eosdem in nulla vulgaris eloquentie ratione fore tangendos.” The primacy which the Romans claim in all things may certainly be theirs in this. In our eliminating process they shall be first to be rejected from the candidature to furnish a classical vernacular for all Italy!

Their dialect (he goes on), like their morals, is the most degraded in the whole peninsula, and has spread its corrupting influence into neighbouring districts. It is indeed not worthy to be called a _vulgare_ (vernacular), but rather a depraved misuse of speech (_tristiloquium_), and is “italorum vulgarium omnium ... turpissimum.”[154]

At the end of Chapter xiii. he tilts at the Genoese Z—an ugly sound in itself, but one which, if lost or mislaid by defect of memory, would leave the poor people of Genoa without a means of transmitting their thoughts! The loss of this one letter would leave them dumb, or impose on them the necessity of inventing an entirely new mode of speech. “Si per oblivionem Ianuenses ammitterent _z_ litteram, vel mutire totaliter eos vel novam reperare oporteret loquelam: est enim _z_ maxima pars eorum locutionis: que quidem littera non sine multa rigiditate profertur.”[155]

On a different plane is Dante’s lamentation in Ch. xii. over the decay of literary culture in Sicily since the glorious days of Frederic and Manfred, which gave the title “Sicilianum” to the work of Dante’s predecessors in the vernacular: a passage (to me at least) somewhat obscure, in which Frederic II of Sicily, Charles II of Naples, Azzo Marquis of Este, and John Marquis of Montferrat are accused of blood-thirstiness, treachery and avarice: “Venite carnifices; venite attriplices; venite avaritiae sectatores....”[156]

Turning to Bk. II we find the same Azzo ironically praised in Chapter vi., in a “copy-book phrase” of which the incidental introduction gives point to the satire: “Laudabilis discretio marchionis Estensis et sua magnificentia preparata cunctis, cunctis illum facit esse dilectum.”

More delightful still is a sentence which closely follows, quoted solemnly like the former merely as an example of good phraseology appropriate to a lofty subject, in which Charles of Valois plays the _rôle_ of a “second Totila,” and his calamitous dealings with Florence (including, presumably, Dante’s own banishment) are adduced as a fitting prelude to his futile descent upon Sicily. “Ejecta maxima parte florum de sinu tuo, Florentia, nequicquam Trinacriam Totila secundus adivit.”[157]

Earlier in the book there is another humorous touch with which we may conclude our list, at the risk, perchance, of an anti-climax. A passage near the end of Chapter i. recalls, in a curious way, a line from the _Epistles_ of Horace.

Dante, having premised that every one should adorn (_exornare_) his verses as far as possible, goes on to point out that there are limits beyond which adornment becomes incongruous and absurd. “We do not speak of an ox caparisoned like a horse or a belted pig as _ornatus_; we laugh at them, and would rather apply the word _deturpatus_.” This _bos ephippiatus_ most aptly typifies incongruity of adornment. In Horace’s well-known line—

Optat ephippia bos piger, optat arare caballus,[158]

the point of the satire is different. It is the Roman poet’s favourite theme of universal discontent—each envying another’s lot.

In Dante’s phrase we may perhaps detect an unconscious or semi-conscious adoption or adaptation of a classical image: parallel, in a humble way, with those splendid thefts from Virgil and Ovid with which he has enriched the _Divina Commedia_: conceptions too unquestionably original in their new form to be classed as mere plagiarisms.

“Cicero hath observed,” says the _Spectator_ of Nov. 5, 1714,[159] “that a jest is never uttered with a better grace than when it is accompanied with a serious countenance.”

If this be true, our quest may perhaps modestly congratulate itself on the avoidance of undue levity. Nor need we take it seriously to heart if we have failed to vindicate for Dante the character of a humorist in the modern sense, and of the American type. The most that our investigation can be said to have proved is that Dante, embittered as he was by his exile, and emaciated by long and serious study, was not devoid of that sense of humour whereby man is able to wring matter for cheerfulness and mirth out of the most unlikely material, and, going through this vale of misery—“questo aspro disorto”—to “use it for a well.” But neither is he the cold abstraction, both less and more than human, which tradition, of a sort, has handed down to us. His works display, for those who care to look for them, a breadth of sympathy, a capacity for observation and discernment, a keenness of interest, an eye for the incongruous, a richness and sureness of self-expression that are guarantees of the possession of the sense of humour.[160] The manifold play of the forces of one of the most picturesque ages of human history found a sympathetic response in Dante’s genius, though the sublimity and the restraint of his work has obscured this. This side of his genius is well summed up by Sannia.[161]

“La coscienza lucidissima di sè stesso, l’ attitudine all’ analisi psicologica, la febbrile curiosità del mondo esterno, naturale ed umano, lo spirito d’ osservazione, il senso più squisito dell’ arte, la divina serenità, la multiforme impressionabilità dell’ artista, il senso del tenero, la pietà umana, il pessimismo furono note spiccatissime, eminenti del suo genio.”

IV

DANTE AND MEDIAEVAL THOUGHT

Vidi ’l maestro di color che sanno
Seder tra filosofica famiglia.
Tutti lo miran, tutti onor li fanno.

—_Inf._ iv. 131-3.

Those who were privileged to listen to Mr. Trevelyan’s lecture on “Italy’s Part in the War,” and to see the wonderful slides presented to him by the _Comando Supremo_, will remember the thrill contributed by the last picture—the great statue of Dante at Trento, with the fugitive Austrian soldiers at its base, fleeing, as it were, before his face. Dante, we felt, has at last come to his own; the Trentino is at last indefeasibly—

Suso in Italia bella,

and the “alps above Tiralli” effectively “bar out” the Teuton![162]

Dante’s inspiration has indeed brooded over the heroic efforts and struggles of Italy’s twentieth century patriots, even as over their forefathers of the Risorgimento. And this living influence of the Divine Poet’s genius has been brought before our readers in the first two Essays of this collection.

Perhaps it may not be amiss to follow up those former articles with a complementary study of the Poet—no longer as the inspirer of nineteenth and twentieth century ideals, but as the supreme representative of the thought and feeling of his own century, the thirteenth. Like Shakespeare, Dante never grows old. There is a quality of universality about his genius, and a broad and deep human appeal in his writing which renders it the proper heritage of every generation. And, haughty and aloof as was his spirit during life, with an aloofness intensified by bitter exile and by the sickness of ever-deferred hope, he was not one of those great ones who are entirely out of touch with their contemporaries, living in an age not yet born. Scarcely had he passed from mortal sight when a chorus of appreciation made itself heard, which, though it has waned in ages of waning taste, has never ceased to sound.

In a very true sense, Dante sums up in himself all that is best in mediaeval thought.

So Mr. Henry Osborne Taylor, in his formidable study of _The Mediaeval Mind_, significantly heads the forty-third and last chapter “The Mediaeval Synthesis: Dante.” “There is unity,” he affirms, “throughout the diversity of mediaeval life; and Dante is the proof of it.”[163] It is pre-eminently as a religious thinker that Dante holds this place, and supplies this synthesis.

Theology as conceived in the thirteenth century was not only the “Queen of Sciences”; the religious conception of knowledge embraced and included all else. To Dante, the theologian-poet, as to Thomas Aquinas, the theologian-philosopher, all knowledge whatsoever was ultimately _one_; its end and purpose, its ground and justification, its key and explanation were to be found in the mystery of the Blessed Trinity-in-Unity.

Theology was not one among many departments of knowledge; it was the sum of knowledge, the key to all problems of the universe. Some of us retain, deep down in our nature, a conviction that, in this point at least, the scholastic theologians were right. While thankfully accepting the results of the scientific “division of labour,” the marvellous practical and theoretical fruits of a free and systematic investigation of phenomena which have transformed our very conception of knowledge and the knowable, we are apt to feel sometimes that the thirteenth century thinkers, with their complete mastery and mapping-out of the comparatively narrow field of the “scibile,” were not so liable as ourselves to lose sight of the wood by reason of the multitude of the trees, to lose the idea of an universe in the absorbing interest of its details.

At any rate, it may be accepted as beyond discussion that to the great mediaeval thinkers—to Peter Lombard, to Abelard, to St. Bernard, to St. Bonaventura and Albertus Magnus, to Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus; above all, perhaps, to St. Thomas Aquinas and to Dante, all knowledge is ultimately religious knowledge: just because God is conceived and realised as being the beginning and end and groundwork of all things. This truth underlies the beautiful language of the first canto of _Paradiso_—

La gloria di colui che tutto move
Per l’ universo penetra e risplende
In una parte più e meno altrove.

and again—

... Le cose tutte quante
Hanno ordine tra loro, e questo è forma
Che ’l universo a Dio fa simigliante.[164]

It also underlies the description of the damned as those who have lost “the Good of the intellect.”[165]

Noi siam venuti al luogo ove io t’ ho detto
Che tu vedrai le genti dolorose
Ch’ hanno perduto il ben de l’ intelletto.

This tendency to subsume all knowledge under religious knowledge is indeed one of the most important ways in which Dante is representative of his time. To that we shall revert later on. Now let us turn to consider for a moment some of the elements and sources of mediaeval knowledge as Dante knew and mastered it.

Holy Scripture, the Patristic writings, ancient classical lore, the Graeco-Arabian philosophy and science of which the groundwork was Aristotle—these are the main antecedents of the mediaeval system of knowledge, and they are blended together in characteristic ways, and dissolved, as it were, in a fluid composed of romantic chivalry and other elements of preponderatingly Teutonic and Celtic origin.

(1) The groundwork of all is, of course, Holy Scripture: known and studied exclusively in the Latin Vulgate text, a rather degenerate and corrupt representative of the (in its way) masterly and excellent translation from the Hebrew and Greek made by St. Jerome in the fifth century.

The Bible, as we know quite well to-day,—even those of us who are more than ever convinced of its inspiration—is not a manual of natural science or philosophy, nor even an absolutely infallible guide in matters of history and chronology. Its scientific standpoint is that of the age in which each part was composed, however eternal be the significance and application of its fundamental religious principles.

To the mediaeval mind, however, Scripture was a universal text-book of science. So that countless questions were regarded as foreclosed because the Bible appeared to have pronounced upon them. The scientific mind of the Middle Ages felt itself committed at a hundred points to the rather crude conceptions of the ancient Hebrews, and to a literal interpretation, very often, of figurative and highly poetical expressions.

The disadvantages of this state of things are obvious to us: we must not forget, however, that they were largely modified by the fact that while all knowledge was regarded as ultimately religious knowledge, it is just in its religious principles that the Bible is supreme, and is permanently true.

(2) The interpretation of Scripture in the Middle Ages is largely based on patristic exegesis; on the writings of the really great minds of the third, fourth and fifth centuries, when men like Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, Basil and the Gregories, Chrysostom, Jerome and Augustine, laid the foundations of systematic Christian thought; men steeped in the Holy Scriptures, and bringing to them an intellect furnished with ideas and categories inherited in part from the classical world—from Graeco-Roman literature and philosophy. The most influential of them all, perhaps, upon mediaeval thought were Jerome (through his translation of the Bible) and Augustine, the deepest and most original thinker (with the exception of Origen) among all the “Fathers.”

Holy Scripture then, patristically interpreted, is the first and most important element in mediaeval knowledge; and the place it holds in Dante may be roughly estimated by the calculations of Dr. Moore in his _Dante Studies_ (Vol. I), where he shows that in his extant works the Poet quotes the Vulgate more than five hundred times.

Dante is representative of the Middle Ages in his reverence for and his use of Holy Scripture, interpreted for the most part by traditions derived from the Christian Fathers.

Scripture itself was mediaevally supplemented by hagiology—the lives and legends of the Saints—nor is this element lacking in Dante.[166]

(3) But the place of honour, next to Scripture, in Dante, must be assigned, surely, to classical lore—to the mythology and literature of the ancient Graeco-Roman civilisation for which the mediaeval mind had so profound a reverence. Greek philosophy, as represented by Aristotle—

il maestro di color che sanno[167]

is a category by itself, to which we shall turn our attention in a moment. But classical lore in general, as represented by such writers as Virgil (quoted 200 times), Ovid (100), Cicero (50), Lucan (50), Horace (15?), Livy (15?), finds very definite recognition in Dante’s works.

The old Roman Empire was viewed by Dante with a truly religious veneration, as is clear not only from many a passage in the _Divina Commedia_ (e.g. _Par._ vi), but from the whole argument of the _De Monarchia_.[168] This veneration, which shed lustre and dignity upon a “Holy Roman Empire” which even in Dante’s day had become actually, though not technically, German, is characteristic especially of the Italian mind; and Dante was Italian as well as mediaeval. The Italians even of to-day are proud to regard themselves as the direct successors of the old Romans of the Republic and of the Caesars: in Dante’s time they were prepared to trace their ancestry to the divinely guided companions of Aeneas of Troy.

Rome looms large in the providential ordering of human history: Dante’s conception of her sovereign place is drawn from the author of the princely _Aeneid_, whose function in the _Divine Comedy_ is guarantee of the affectionate reverence which Dante bore to him.

But it is not only Roman history, but classical mythology that weaves itself into the texture of Dante’s religious thought. If he quotes Virgil some two hundred times, he quotes Ovid about one hundred.

The tendency to mingle together examples from Scripture and from pagan mythology is characteristically mediaeval. In Dante it is a well known feature, most typically represented perhaps in the sculptures, visions and voices of the Purgatorio.

He who is bold enough in _Purg._ xxx. to blend together the Scriptural _Benedictus qui venis_ with Virgil’s _Manibus o date lilia plenis_ is not afraid to invoke the Muses and Apollo (mystically interpreted) as he begins a new _cantica_.[169] He does not hesitate to apostrophise the Saviour of the world in terms which blend the Christian with the antique pagan tradition—[170]

... O Sommo Giove,
Che fosti in terra per noi crucifisso!

This is well explained by Mr. Taylor. “With Dante,” he says,[171] “the pagan antique represented much that was philosophically true, if not veritably divine. In his mind, apparently, the heathen good stood for the Christian good, and the conflict of the heathen deities with Titan monsters[172] symbolised, if indeed it did not continue to make part of, the Christian struggle against the power of sin.”

This principle may be regarded as being, in a way, the mediaeval analogue of our broad modern conceptions derived from a comparative study of religions.

(4) But supreme among the influences derived by the Middle Ages from classical antiquity is the philosophy of Aristotle, which holds the next place to Scripture alike in the “Summa” of Thomas Aquinas, and in the _Divina Commedia_ of Dante.

Mediaeval Christianity drew its knowledge of Aristotelian philosophy from Mohammedan sources. The great Arab scientists and philosophers of mediaeval times, represented in the _Commedia_ by Avicenna and—

Averroìs che il gran comento feo[173]

(his commentary on Aristotle was translated into Latin about 1250), gave back, in a modified form, to Western Europe, the works of the Philosopher, of which the original Greek was not acquired by them till several centuries later.

This Graeco-Arabian philosophy forms the basis of those constantly recurring, and to many of us rather tiresome, astronomical excursions which form so characteristic a feature of the _Divine Comedy_.

This form of Aristotelianism plays an immense part in the scholastic philosophy; and his deference to it is among Dante’s chief claims to be representative of the religious thought and teaching of his day.

In countless other ways the Poet’s writings are representative of what was best and highest in contemporary thought: the wide grasp of innumerable topics and details, the encyclopaedic temper, quaintly obvious in the _Convivio_ but more worthily embodied in the _Divina Commedia_; the spiritualising of troubadour love, beautifully manifested in the promise of _Vita Nuova_ and _Canzoniere_, but more sublimely still in the Beatrice of the _Paradiso_; the blending of religious with political theory so conspicuous in the _Monarchia_ and _Commedia_; the realistic vividness of conception; the eye for contrast, which makes Dante’s great poem a mirror of the kaleidoscopic life of the Middle Ages.

Among the qualities which made Dante what he was—and is—two would seem to be supreme. First his encyclopaedic knowledge, and secondly the unrivalled power of plastic visualisation, by which he was enabled “to use as a poet what he had acquired as a scholar.”[174]

Dante has been described by Eliot Norton as an instance of “the incredible diligence of the Middle Ages.” In days when there was no Funk and Wagnalls Company to minister encyclopaedic knowledge by cheap instalments—when everything must be painfully acquired from MSS. and the diligent student ran the risk not only of leanness[175] but of blindness[176] Dante appears, from his extant works, to have known all that was to be known. Dr. Moore’s investigations (in _Dante Studies_, Vol. I) go some way towards justifying—if anything can absolutely justify so dogmatic a statement—the perhaps over-enthusiastic words of A. G. Butler:

“Dante was born a student as he was born a poet, and had he never written a single poem, he would still have been famous as the most profound scholar of his time.”[177]

But if Dante had finished the _Convivio_, and written nothing else, his vast learning would have been as uninteresting to the average modern mind as is that of Albertus Magnus or Thomas Aquinas. Albertus Magnus with his incredible learning and his more than incredible fecundity and voluminousness is unknown to most of us. Thomas Aquinas, though the soundness of his judgment and the depth of his insight have given his writings a permanent place of honour, more especially in the Roman Communion, is little more than a name to the average student even of literature and philosophy.

Albert and Thomas were theologians: so was Dante, but he was a poet as well.[178] Dante is saturated with the entire knowledge of the Middle Ages; he has absorbed and assimilated it, and he gives it out again transfigured—alive! It becomes in his hands an original and immortal contribution to the intellectual, moral and aesthetic heritage of mankind.

From our present study the Divine Poet emerges once more as the “Apostle of Freedom.” He handles his subject-matter with the master-touch that makes it _live_, and with the independence of standpoint and sincerity of judgment that draws Catholics to claim him as a Catholic, and Protestants as a Protestant. As a matter of fact he is a loyal Catholic, as was rightly proclaimed by the late lamented Pope Benedict XV in his Encyclical of May, 1921.[179] A Catholic, but above all, a Christian. And, as the Pope also justly remarked, his work and his message are alive to-day—more living than that of many a present-day Poet—just because he is not dependent on mere pagan models and sources, however classical, but is saturated with Christian thought and feeling. For the future lies with Christianity.

In our next Essay we shall endeavour to show how the free spirit of the artist and the theologian merges into that of the Educationist: how the characteristic modern principles of freedom in the educational sphere underlie Dante’s thought and writing, and how, in particular, they dominate his scheme of the _Purgatorio_.

V

DANTE AND MODERN EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES

... Io sarò tua guida
E trarrotti di qui per loco eterno.

—_Inf._ i. 177 _sq._

In face of Benedetto Croce’s new Book,[180] wherein all the meticulous industry exerted by the typical Dantist upon side-issues of the _Divine Comedy_ is held up to scorn, and denounced, like Cromwell’s House of Lords, as “useless and dangerous,” one hardly dares to labour a point—even if it be so exalted a point as the principles and method of education. But it is the criticism of Dante’s Poesy that is Croce’s concern: his jealous anxiety is directed against any admixture in that criticism of any irrelevant considerations—allegorical, theological, philosophical, poetical. As we are not attempting a criticism of Dante’s Poesy (though none can approach the _Commedia_ without falling under the spell of its beauty and passion), we may perhaps hope to evade the fiery darts of the Poet’s latest critic.

Croce himself would be the last to deny Dante’s extraordinary versatility: only he pleads that if the author of the _Divine Comedy_ had not been, “as he is, _grandissimo poeta_,” the world would not have noted his other accomplishments.[181] We may therefore perhaps be pardoned if we indulge in something of that “sonorous but empty phraseology”[182] which he attributes to those who look for much more than Poetry in the great Poem; and come to the _Commedia_ as to a mine of varied treasures reflecting the versatile spirit of one who was not only a sublime poet, but also a man of many-sided knowledge and experience—theological, philosophical, political, practical—and who poured all the wealth of his knowledge and experience into the supreme effort of his genius:

Il poema sacro
Al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra.

Before Dante as a boy learnt his lessons of the good friars of Sta. Croce, and in the school of the great lord, Love blossomed out into verse under the sunshine of his “first friend’s” encouragement, pored over crabbed manuscripts under the inspiration of the learned Ser Brunetto, and grew up to be an unique exponent of mediaeval lore; that lore, which formed the material out of which he wrought the scheme of his immortal poem had very slowly and gradually come into being. The course of Christian Education had passed through rhythmic vicissitudes of advance and retrogression, of decadence and revival. Sown broadcast over the fields of the Graeco-Roman world by Apostolic hands[183] the seed fructified and gave forth foliage to delight and refresh mankind. In the golden age of the Greek Fathers, when Clement and Origen wrote and taught, when Basil and Gregory at the University of Athens drank in all that the old world had to teach, and transmuted it into something fresh and new by the fertilising power of the New Life that was in them, the Christian Church became, in Harnack’s phrase, “the great elementary schoolmistress of the Roman Empire.”

Then followed a decline. The barbarian invasions kept men fighting, and left no time to muse or think, or write. Dante’s hero, Boethius, stands out an almost solitary luminous figure in a world of growing intellectual darkness, of which Gregory of Tours despairingly exclaimed: “Periit studium litterarum.” By the middle of the eighth century the lamp was nearly extinguished. To our own Alcuin of York belongs the glory of having preserved the continuum of literary studies which made a Dante possible. His patient and persevering labours at the court of Charles the Great laid the foundations on which was ultimately built—of multifarious material, partly recovered through Arabic sources—the splendid structure of mediaeval scholasticism which forms much of Dante’s mental background.

After Dante’s death the same rhythmic alternation of advance and retrogression, of greater and less vitality, may, on the whole, be discerned in the course of educational history; and as our object is to unearth in the _Divine Comedy_ some educational principles vaunted as “peculiarly modern,” it may be best to dwell for a moment—if still all too superficially—on this second half of the story.

When the impulse of Scholasticism had well-nigh spent itself—and with it the splendid revival at once of practical and of intellectual Christianity which came in with “The Coming of the Friars”—the dawn of the Renaissance was already gleaming in the Eastern sky, and the fall of Constantinople flooded Western Europe with a new interest in, and passion for, Hellenic culture. The birth-throes of the Reformation ushered into the world a “New Learning.” In a couple of centuries the fire of this impulse in turn died down, and (in England, at any rate) Education largely fell back, speaking generally—with smaller actions and reactions—into something like a mere mechanical routine. The Classics became an end, and not a means, and the study of them was divorced from citizenship and from life. The aim and method of the average schoolmaster would almost appear to have degenerated into a grinding of his pupils all alike in the same mill, or a feeding of their diverse digestions all on the same “iron rations”: the pedagogue himself innocent alike of an as yet undiscovered psychological method in teaching, and in many cases also failing to realise the paramount importance of the formation of character as the only result worth striving for.

Then came, with Rousseau, the first streaks of the dawn of the “New Teaching,” and there followed, in a brightening sky, Pestalozzi and Froebel abroad, and here in England Arnold and Thring and the rest. And this New Teaching, using the present-day opportunities of co-operation and tabulation of experimental results on a large scale, has, by dint of Conferences and Congresses, grown into something of a world-wide unity. Modern Science has thus leavened educational method both in general and in particular. In general, its spirit and principles have been employed to make available for all the investigations of each; in particular, the recent developments of psychology and psycho-physics have given a new impulse and a new direction to child-study, and made possible an elaboration of scientific method and of didactic apparatus such as was not available in any previous age. Here the instinctive methods employed unconsciously by the “born teachers” of all generations have been brought up to the level of consciousness, and systematised and made available, to a large extent, for those in whom the instinctive gift is not so great.

One of the prominent tendencies of the New Teaching is to revert to, and elaborate, that Direct Method in the teaching of Languages which was characteristic of the “New Learning” in the days of Erasmus and his fellow pioneers. This we shall see foreshadowed in Dante. It is a part of a tendency to make education “paido-centric”; to lay its emphasis on, and find its focus in, the child rather than in the instructor; to make it less of an imposition of the dominant teacher upon a submissive and receptive pupil. The New Teaching requires that “the relative activities of teacher and pupil” should be “reversed.” It recognises that pupils need to be “trained in initiative,” and “made increasingly responsible for their own education”; that the inertia of many pupils has to be met not by force or browbeating, but “by taking steps to reach indirectly the goal of stimulating their individual activity.”[184]

The watchword therefore of the modern teaching is _Liberty_. And this principle of Liberty—the recognition that all education is, at bottom, self-education; and that the teacher’s business is to liberate (or make possible the liberation of) the inherent evolutionary forces latent in the pupil—finds its climax in the doctrine of Dante’s compatriot and sincere admirer, Madame Montessori. She is also, in a sense, the most modern of the Modernists; for in her method is carried, probably to its highest point, the application of psycho-physical science to education. She represents in some ways—and especially on the individualistic side—the extreme advance of the modern movement; and it is with her system that we shall institute later on a somewhat detailed comparison of the educational principles underlying Dante’s _Purgatorio_.

Dante’s name is not popularly associated with those of the World’s Greatest Educators—with Aristotle and Quintilian, with Alcuin and Alfred, with Colet and Erasmus, with Pestalozzi and Froebel and Montessori. He is not claimed as the conscious originator of new didactic method. He has not left us any systematic treatise on Education. Yet many have found in him a mighty Teacher, “who being dead yet speaketh”; and to such it will bring no surprise to find great educational principles embodied in his work.

We may compare and contrast his opportunities with those of his great contemporary, Robert Grosseteste, who as “First Chancellor,” if we may call him so, of the University of Oxford, may rank in a sense as a professional Teacher. Such a comparison would surely demonstrate that the permanent influence of the illustrious Bishop of Lincoln upon subsequent generations bears no comparison with that of the Florentine Poet.

Grosseteste may claim a place among the world’s Educators not only in virtue of his general influence upon English education at a period when the Oxford Franciscans were about to take the lead in European culture, but also—and more especially—because, in an age when study had become largely a second-hand matter of commenting on someone else’s commentary, Robert called men back to a diligent first-hand study of originals; a principle of the utmost importance alike for Education and for Learning.[185]

Dante, too, was a keen, first-hand student; but his place in the history of Education is different from that of Grosseteste. He attained to no such commanding position in ecclesiastical or political life, with the power that official status gives of forcing one’s ideas on public notice. His brief tenure of the high office of Prior in his native city of Florence was followed immediately by those years of exile and ignominy in which his best work was done. His sole means of influencing his own and succeeding generations was by his writings. But these writings not only proclaimed him (as all the world admits) the very flower and crown of Mediaeval Education—its justifying product—but also earn him, we would contend, a place among the World’s Great Educators, and perhaps we may add, its Educationalists. But first of all we may remind ourselves of Dante’s position, as the finest and most typical product of Mediaeval Education. Benedetto Croce[186] is doubtless right in denying him the right to be called a _pioneer_ in metaphysics or ethics, in political theory or philological science: in such lines it is vain to attribute to him the same originality which is rightly his in the realm of Poetry. Yet his learning remains encyclopaedic.[187] His amazing erudition is displayed in his Minor Works; in the _Divine Comedy_ it is concealed with the most consummate art. In the _Convivio_, where he is, perhaps, most consciously and deliberately (if least successfully) the Teacher, he revels in erudition, and so too in the _Monarchia_. Perhaps the clearest and swiftest demonstration of the vast range of his learning is afforded by a glance through the pages—or even the index—of Dr. Moore’s _Studies in Dante_ (First Series).

Dante was not a Greek scholar, like Grosseteste, but he had a thorough acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures in the Vulgate, and with a large part of the theological and mystical writings of the Middle Age. He was familiar with all the extant works of Aristotle in two Latin translations. He quotes also, and in some cases very frequently, from Classical and post-classical authors of repute. He has thoroughly mastered the Graeco-Arabian Astronomy of his day: so thoroughly, that, to the despair of some of his humbler votaries, he can toy with its ponderous intricacies as with a plaything! Nor must we forget that his studies were conducted in an age when printing had yet to be invented; so that all his reading must needs be done with rare, costly, cumbrous and eye-wearying manuscripts. Well may he, in the _Paradiso_, describe his labours as “emaciating,” and in the _Convivio_ allude to a temporary blindness caused by overstrain.[188]

It has been plausibly conjectured that he studied as a boy under the Franciscan Fathers of Sta Croce.[189] The idea that Brunetto Latini (or “Latino”), the author of the “Tesoro” (_Livre dou Tresor_), was the regular preceptor of his youth, however just an inference it may seem from the famous passage in the _Inferno_,[190] is disproved by the exigencies of chronology. And, in the end, he must have been largely self-taught, since his visit to the University of Paris, alleged by Boccaccio, is placed towards the end of his life, when most of his extant work was already done.

In his attitude Dante is a traditionalist, but not a blind one; his originality everywhere tends to modify his conservatism. A true son of the thirteenth century, he accepts loyally the traditional authority of Scripture and of Aristotle. He accepts the tradition of the old Roman culture: the “Seven Liberal Arts” of the Trivium and Quadrivium find a place in the scheme of his world and a symbolic significance therein. According to a well-known passage in the _Convivio_[191] these seven sciences correspond to the seven lowest Heavens.

The mythology of Greece and Rome, on which the minds of our Public School boys are still fed, are caught up into the scheme of the _Divine Comedy_ as “didactic material” side by side with scenes from history and from Holy Writ. The Ptolemaic system of the universe is accepted; but Dante uses his own genius freely in the handling of details, adorning the vast framework with a symbolism of his own, and spreading over it a network of intense human interest.[192]

So also in the sphere of Theology, he takes up traditional beliefs and makes them living and concrete, vitalising them by the force of his own originality. In his volume on _Dante and Aquinas_, Mr. Wicksteed has drawn out very strikingly the contrast between the two: between the “layman, poet, and prophet, and the ecclesiastic, theologian, and philosopher.” “Aquinas,” he says, “regards the whole range of human experiences and activities as the collecting ground for illustrations of Christian truth; Dante regards Christian truth as the interpreting and inspiring force that makes all human life live.”[193] This contrast comes out, as we shall see, with special emphasis in the conception of Purgatory, where Aquinas is thinking all along of the formal completion of the sacrament of Penance, while Dante, who, with most daring originality, makes his Mountain of Purgation the pedestal of the Earthly Paradise, is intent on the redressing of man’s inner psychological and spiritual balance. Eden itself is to be the immediate goal of penitence. Before this earthly life is superseded by the heavenly, man shall win his way to the primal Garden of Delight, and “experience the frank and full fruition of his nature, as God first made it.”[194] He shall have achieved inner balance and self-mastery. Says Virgil, on the threshold of Eden—

Free, sound and upright is thy will.... Wherefore over thyself
I invest thee with supreme control.[195]

Libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio,
...
Per ch’ io te sopra te corono e mitrio.

We may note then, in passing, that Dante, like all the best educators, has his eye on the “formation of character.”

Such erudition, originality, insight, give promise that we shall find in Dante a real teacher; and the promise is abundantly fulfilled to those who tread the spacious halls of his School, which is his Poem.

The very language in which the _Divina Commedia_ is written is a testimony to the Poet’s grasp of the fundamental condition of all teaching—that it should be intelligible! There is a saying of Alcuin’s great disciple, Rabanus Maurus, which expresses simply and well this obvious, but oft-forgotten principle. “Teach,” he says, “in words that teach; not in words that do not teach.” With this principle, surely, in mind—for his purpose in creating the great Poem was a practical one—the strangely haughty and aloof spirit of Dante girds itself to a humble use of the “Vulgar Tongue.” When we remember that this magnificent structure of his is the first big effort in the Italian vernacular, and that one of his reasons for calling it a “Comedy” is that “its method of speech is lax and humble, for it is the vernacular speech in which mere women communicate,”[196] we cannot but see in this pioneer work of Italian literature evidence of that discerning sympathy with the needs and capacities of the learner which marks the born teacher. Another mark of the true educator is his practical aim. Dante is not content to “teach the classics _in vacuo_,” as our English Public Schools once were: he does not divorce learning from life. In the famous Tenth Epistle he defines the “Moral Sense” of the Poem as “The conversion of the Soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace”; and, again, he describes “the end of the whole” thus: “To remove those living in this life from the state of misery and to lead them to the state of felicity.”[197] He has his eye upon life in the highest sense: “Come l’ uom s’eterna.” To this end he displays to us the unique means provided by Heaven for his own salvation, and allows us in his company to visit the three kingdoms of the Eternal World. He performs for us the office fulfilled by Virgil towards himself—

... I will be thy guide, and will conduct thee hence
through an eternal place.

... Io sarò tua guida
E trarrotti di qui per loco eterno.[198]

We must see with his eyes to what state of ineffable woe, not Divine Justice merely, but the sinner’s own choice will bring him. We must watch with him the Divine process of purgation, the eagerly-accepted suffering of those whose penitent love longs above all things to undo the ruin that sin has wrought—[199]

... Contented in the fire, for that they hope
In God’s good time to reach the blessed folk

... Contenti
Nel foco, perchè speran di venire,
Quando che sia, a le beate genti....

and finally he will take us up with him into the Blessed Place itself, to behold “the things which God has prepared for them that unfeignedly love Him.”

Here again is the true teacher, adopting the story-telling method of the Teacher of Nazareth:[200] the method of which the usefulness—nay, the indispensableness—was never more appreciated than to-day.

Nor is it merely that the Poet narrates instead of preaching. What he does, he does with the most consummate art.[201] The story that he tells—the pilgrimage on which he goes—is one which both he and we really share; we become his fellow-pilgrims, his intimates, before whom, without the least touch of self-consciousness, he manifests his joy and his despondency, his courage and his cowardice, his native dignity and his occasional lapses therefrom.... The narrative reads like a truthful and vivid diary of his actual experiences from the night of Maundy Thursday till Easter Wednesday in the Year of Grace One Thousand and Three Hundred.

It may be claimed for Dante’s method of teaching in the _Divina Commedia_ that it is in a very real sense a “direct method,” and one in which teacher and pupil co-operate as fellow-learners.

The educational quality of the poem is at its highest in the _Purgatorio_, because it is in this realm that the conditions approach most nearly to those of our present life. Like the normal life of a faithful Christian here below, that of the souls in this “Second Realm” is a struggle, but a struggle upwards, inspired and sweetened by the “sure and certain hope.” It is a process of growing transformation into the Divine ideal, of gradual achievement of a perfect union of will with the Will of God, wrought out by means of a providentially ordered discipline eagerly embraced by the penitent.

All this may seem a little vague and elusive. Probably the quality claimed for Dante will be brought into higher relief if we concentrate our attention upon one or two definite points.

In the attempt to emphasise the “modern” character of Dante’s educational principles we shall be bold enough to confront him with the very latest of educational methods—that of Dr. Montessori, which originated but a few years ago in Dante’s native Italy.

The fundamental principle of Madame Montessori’s Method is that of Liberty. Education, she would say, must be a free organic process of development from within. This vital growth may be guarded, nourished, and (within limits) guided. The right kind of atmosphere and of external stimulus is of immense importance; but mechanical pressure, or domineering force, or inappropriate stimulus will only stunt and distort the growth, deaden the life that is calling out for free self-development. All this is not, of course, a new discovery. It was enunciated in other forms by Pestalozzi and by Froebel; it is implied in the words and works of all the greatest educators—of Vittorino da Feltre in the Renaissance, of Quintilian in the early Empire, and of Aristotle himself. But in Montessori the principle of individual freedom acquires a new prominence, and is given a larger scope than ever before; and the principle is coming to its own in many phases and many grades of our present-day education. It is interesting, therefore, to note what a fundamental position it holds in Dante’s _Purgatorio_, the central Cantica of what Professor Edmund Gardner rightly calls “The mystical Epos of the Freedom of Man’s Will.”

Liberty—that true liberty of soul which is found in perfect conformity to the Will of God—is the end and purpose of the Poet’s grim journey. _Libertà va cercando_—“he goes seeking freedom”—says Virgil to Cato at the foot of the Mountain:[202] the freedom which Dante himself, a little later, identifies with inward peace—“That peace which ... draws me on in pursuit from world to world.”[203]

... Quella pace
Che, dietro a’ piedi di sî fatta guida
Di mondo in mondo cercar mi si face.

It is to the entrance upon this peace and this freedom that Virgil refers in his words quoted above, where on the threshold of the Earthly Paradise he declares the pilgrim to be, at last, “King and Bishop of his own soul”—

Perch’ io te sovra te corono e mitrio.[204]

And, finally, in the heaven of heavens itself Dante pours out his thanks to Beatrice for liberty regained—“Thou has led me forth from bondage into liberty.”

Tu m’ hai di servo tratto a libertate.[205]

We have already spoken of the spontaneity of Dante’s Penitents; the eager gladness and alacrity with which they embrace the discipline appointed for them, “glad in the Fire”: a temper which finds its typical expression in the attitude of the souls who are purging the sin of Lust in literally burning flames. “Certain of them,” says the Poet, “made towards me, so far as they could, ever on their guard not to come forth beyond the range of the burning”—

Poi verso me, quanto potean farsi,
Certi si feron, sempre con riguardo
Di non uscir dove non fosser arsi.[206]

Or, again, on the Terrace of the Gluttonous, where Forese explains to Dante that the voluntary pain of the penitents (which is also their solace) is mystically identified with that of Christ upon the Cross—“For the same desire doth conduct us to the tree, which moved Christ to say with joy: ‘Eli,’ when by His blood He won our freedom.”

Che quella voglia a li albori ci mena
Che menò Cristo lieto a dire ‘Elì,’
Quando ne liberò con la sua vena.[207]

And this spontaneity on their part is matched and helped by the atmosphere and environment provided for them. Their movements and occupations are indeed, in one sense, unnatural; but this is because their purpose is the counteraction of that most unnatural of all things, Sin. Here, however, are no frequent warders and task-masters, like the grotesque fiends of the Inferno. The Angel guardians of each of the seven terraces where sins are purged are no more in evidence than is the Teacher in a Montessori School; an unobtrusive, ever-present, never-interfering inspiration to the pupil’s own spontaneous development. There is no external voice to bid a spirit move on when its purgation is done. So Statius explains to Dante when describing the impulse of his own upward movement. “Of the cleansing, the will alone gives proof, which fills the soul, all free to change her cloister, and avails her to will. She wills indeed before; but that desire permits it not which Divine justice sets, counter to will, toward the penalty, even as it was toward the sin”—

De la mondizia sol voler fa prova,
Che, tutto libero a mutar convento,
L’ alma sorprende, e di voler le giova.
Prima vuol ben, ma non lascia il talento
Che divina giustizia, contra voglia,
Come fu al peccar, pone al tormento.[208]

When the soul is ready for another task, it moves on, naturally and spontaneously,—like a Montessori child!