Chapter V: Part 5

Eleven years after the above lines were written, there appeared in Madrid a study of Dante’s relations with Mohammedan Eschatology,[320] which may possibly prove to hold the key to some of the problems raised by the _Gospel of Barnabas._ The learned Spanish Professor of Arabic is by no means the first to explore the field of possible Oriental sources for the Divine Comedy. Since Ozanam wrote his _La Philosophie Chrétienne avant Dante_, a number of writers—D’Ancona, D’Ovidio and others in Italy, and Vossler in Germany—have busied themselves with this subject; and in 1901, M. Blochet[321] brought both the general idea of the Unearthly Pilgrimage and some of its details into what looks like a derivative relationship with the two great Oriental Ascension-myths: the very ancient Mazdean story of Arda-Viraf, of Persian origin, and the secondary legend of Mohammed’s one-night journey through the heavens, founded on a short and obscure passage in the _Koran_[322] and known as the _Miradj_. Together with other researchers in the same field, M. Blochet brings in also Sinbad the Sailor, the Voyage of St. Brendan, and all the family of the Quest of the Fortunate Isles; working up the pedigree right back to the Hesperides of the Hellenic myths—themselves descended from an ancestry more ancient still, and of origin further East. He suggests the many possible channels of transmission of oriental lore to Western Europe, and in particular to Ireland[323] by the more easterly “Amber Route” which archaeology shews to have passed from Mesopotamia over the Caucasus and through Russia to the Baltic. He points again to the openings made by the Crusades, and singles out the work of Dante’s Venetian contemporary, Marin Sanudo, _Liber secretorum fidelium crucis_,[324] as evincing such a mastery of the entire “Eastern Question” as would imply a very exact knowledge of the Moslem religion and its legends. He points also to Paget Toynbee’s demonstration of Dante’s indebtedness in no less than ten passages of the _Vita Nuova_ and _Convivio_, to the Moslem astronomer Djaafer-îbn-Mohammed-el-Balkhi, known to the mediaeval West by the less cumbrous name of Alfraganus.[325]

New ground has, however, undoubtedly been opened up by Dr. Asín. In his Inaugural Lecture he makes claims which, no doubt, will be fiercely combated, and in the end largely discounted. Dr. Parodi in his important notice of this book[326] points out that Asín’s contention is two-fold, and one half of it, at least, unprovable. The Spanish Orientalist claims to have proved (1) that the Western legends of the World Beyond are derived from Arab (and ultimately from Persian) sources, (2) that Dante was acquainted with specific Moslem sources, and used them freely.

For the first of these contentions, which was, in substance Blochet’s,[327] he has brought—so Parodi admits—fresh and varied evidence; and this part of the claim may now be regarded as largely substantiated. The second claim: that Dante actually knew, and drew from, the Moslem legend “is” says the Italian reviewer, “and will remain, I fear, incapable of demonstration.”[328] Yet he admits that the parallels adduced between the Moslem Hell and Dante’s Inferno, and still more between the _Miradj_ and the _Paradiso_, are such as to arouse perplexity and astonishment in a mind hostile to, or unconvinced by, the theory of the learned Spaniard. The parallels he interprets[329] as remarkable instances of the similar working of human imagination on similar topics, all over the world. Whether such a hypothesis meets all the facts may still be an open question. But there can be no question whatever that if Dante, who certainly owes the biggest debt to his “true precursor,” Virgil, be indebted also to the _Miradj_ or other Mohammedan legend,[330] he has more than repaid his debt in the splendid originality with which he has bent and transformed such material to his own higher purposes: a use which implies masterly assimilation and adaption, and amounts to creative work.

Yet we would venture to plead for an open mind, even on the subject of Asín’s second contention, and venture to ask whether the _Gospel of Barnabas_ does not contribute some little additional force to the Spanish professor’s argument? When all deductions have been made, has he not gone far towards proving that Dante was more definitely indebted to Moslem thought and legend than has been hitherto believed; and in particular that he may have drawn, directly or indirectly, from Mohammedan sources the architectonic idea of “Hell,” and other parts of his scheme of which the affinity with “Barnabas” has been noted in the preceding pages? If so, we may with some probability attribute to those same sources the occasional striking identity of phraseology which we have observed—regarding them as, in some sense, sources both for Dante and for “Barnabas”; though in some cases it is difficult to believe that the so-called “Barnabas” is not quoting Dante from memory.

The man who placed the Moslem Captain Saladin and the Moslem Philosophers Averroes and Avicenna in the same region of the other world as his own dear master Virgil[331]; who placed the condemned Averroist, Sigieri of Brabant, in the Fourth Heaven as companion of the recognised Doctors of the Church, and put an eulogy of him into the mouth of his opponent Thomas Aquinas,[332] would surely not be willing to borrow from Moslem sources ideas and materials for his mighty building—

al quale ha posta mano e cielo e terra.[333]

That suitable material was in existence (though in the Arabic language) has been abundantly proved. From the various mediaeval forms of the Mohammedan legend of the Prophet’s visit to the other world, Professor Asín draws numerous and striking parallels to the _Divina Commedia_. The topography of Hell, with its most infamous of sinners in the lowest pit, the scheme of the Heavens, which, like Dante’s, follows the Ptolemaic system of concentric spheres, and many more detailed analogies. He finds the closest affinity in a writer of the same century, Ibn Arabi, a Spanish thinker, who died twenty-five years before Dante was born. By this Arabi the legend—which may have formed the basis of much of the eschatology of “Barnabas”—was presented together with a mystical and allegorical interpretation, such as Dante himself suggests for his own work in the Epistle to Can Grande.[334] Dante’s noble contemporary, Raymond Lull, seems to have known this book of Arabi’s in the original. Dante was not, like Raymond, an Arabic scholar, but he may well have become, by oral means, acquainted with something of its substance.

The court of Alfonso X of Seville, into which Dante’s Brunetto plunged in the abortive embassy of 1260, was a hive of Moslem learning and speculation. And though Brunetto’s visit was but short (and from this point Dr. Parodi does not fail to draw full capital), he was not the only Florentine who found his way to Seville.[335] Commercial relations between Tuscany and Seville were alive in Dante’s day; and the intercourse of trade brings with it a measure of intellectual commerce. The Papal Court to which the Poet paid his fatal visit as Florentine Ambassador must still have held fresh memories of St. Peter Pascual, who was conversant with the Mohammedan legends of Hell and Paradise; and in Ricoldo of Montecroce Dante had an illustrious fellow-townsman who was notably learned in Moslem lore,[336] though missionary travels kept the good Dominican away from Florence during the years of the Poet’s residence, and he only returned as Prior of Sta. Maria Novella in 1301, the year of Dante’s exile, and died the year before his death, in 1320.

Altogether, there seems good reason to believe that Mohammedan materials, if not actual Mohammedan sources, were accessible to Dante, and that with large-hearted tolerance he was content to use them, and so to give them an immortality which they could not otherwise have achieved.

Thus we may conjecture a definite relation between “Barnabas” and the _Divine Comedy_: not through a debt of either to other (unless it be of “Barnabas” to Dante), but through a measure of common ancestry.

VII

DANTE AND THE CASENTINO

Li ruscelletti che de’ verdi colli
Del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno.

—_Inf._ xxx. 64 _sq._

The “Apostle of Freedom” must needs be a patriot among his own people; and patriotism involves readiness to fight for the community. Dante’s temperament—like that of scores of our young poets and artists who have fought and fallen in the Great War—was not naturally at home in the practice of arms. Yet he took his place and “did his bit” as a valiant Guelf of Florence in the battle of Campaldino; and so the Casentino valley still speaks to us to-day of a thirteenth century “Student in Arms.” It speaks to us, again, of an exiled patriot, who went, “seeking freedom,” “through well-nigh all the regions in which” the Italian “tongue was spoken,”[337] and in the early days of his lifelong banishment found shelter from his foes with the hospitable Conti Guidi, and a comforting atmosphere of appreciation and respect as antidote to the _piaga della fortuna_ and the _dolorosa povertà_ of an outcast.

The Valley has also for us, as it had already for Dante, hallowed associations redolent of that “freedom of spirit” which comes to a simple and austere life lived for highest ideals. St. Francis, whose name still lingers in the Casentino, was, in a true sense, an “Apostle of Freedom” too. So perhaps no apology is needed for associating with the other essays in this volume a narrative of a visit paid to the scenes so familiar both to St. Francis and to Dante. Since the words above were written, Italy has herself officially set her seal upon the thought contained in them.

“This could be no ordinary centenary,” writes Lina Waterfield (of the Sexcentenary celebrations of Sept., 1921). “Italy had won the boundaries Dante desired her to possess, and in honouring him she celebrated her victory of complete liberation. The official visits ... to the castles of the Casentino ... and to the battlefield of Campaldino, where he fought for ‘Libertas’ in 1289, were all undertaken in the spirit of exalted patriotism. Sometimes the poet was forgotten, or rather merged in the spirit of ‘Italianità,’ when the rafters of the mediaeval banqueting hall of Poppi rang to the cries of ‘Viva Fiume’! September 16th was spent in the Casentino. Next day all Florence turned out to see the pageant of victorious Florentines returning from Campaldino, perhaps the most decisive battle ever fought in Tuscany, for it broke the power of the Ghibelline nobles. ‘Evviva la Libertà!’”

Meanwhile, at Ravenna, a great band of Franciscan Tertiaries had paid their homage at the Poet’s tomb.

And now for the record of a pre-war pilgrimage to the Casentino.

From Pontassieve, the third station on the railway line between Florence and Arezzo, a drive of some four hours will take you into the heart of the Casentino; into a country well worth a visit for its own wild and delicate beauty, but rendered immeasurably more interesting by its thronging memories of Dante.

The Casentino is the valley of the Upper Arno, whose course from its source on Monte Falterona is sketched by the poet in those strangely bitter lines put into the mouth of Rinier da Calboli in Purgatory,[338] while its trickling tributary streams, bathing the verdant slopes, are vividly described in a single _terzina_ by poor parched Adamo in Hell—

Li ruscelletti che de’ verdi colli
Del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno
Facendo i lor canali freddi e molli.[339]

We are in the country of the famous Conti Guidi, that stalwart family who so successfully maintained their feudal sway amid an environment of burgher republicanism; the clan of strong men who, for more than four centuries at least, were masters of this fertile district which stretches from the slopes of Falterona southward to the walls of Arezzo—that city of “curs” from which Arno “turns aside its nose in scorn.”[340]

The offspring of the romance[341] of Guido Vecchio and “la buona Gualdrada,”[342] this grim four-branched family—the Guidi of Porciano, of Romena, of Battifolle and of Dovandola—they have left their lasting mark upon the country. Three of their castles remain, castles in which Dante was harboured in the earlier years of his exile. Porciano—playfully referred to, surely, in the “brutti porci” of Riniero?[343]—and Romena both in picturesque ruin; Poppi (Arnolfo’s first draft, as it is said, for the similar Palazzo Vecchio at Florence) repaired throughout the centuries, since Count Francesco handed it over in 1440 to Neri Capponi, representative of the Florentine Republic.

We are in the country of Campaldino, the battle where Dante fought, and Corso Donati and Vieri de’ Cerchi, soon to be leaders of opposing factions in their native town, performed prodigies of valour side by side: the battle where on St. Barnabas’ Day in 1289 the Guelf party decisively reversed the humiliation of twenty-nine years before, and that under the very walls of the Convent of Certomondo, founded by the Guidi two years after Montaperti, in thanksgiving for that bloody victory—

Lo strazio e ’l grande scempio
Che fece l’ Arbia colorata in rosso.[344]

We are in the country of St. Francis of Assisi, Dante’s great religious ideal; for a morning’s drive or walk up the steep road from Bibbiena brings us right up to the foot of the “Rude crag betwixt Tiber and Arno”[345] which all Christendom reveres.

In taking the old road over the Consuma Pass from Pontassieve, we are following in the tracks of the Florentine host as it marched forth in June, 1289. After much discussion as to the best route, as Villani and Dino Campagni tell us,[346] they wisely decided to take this steeper and more perilous but shorter path. A short way beyond Pontassieve they would have left the Val d’ Arno, to strike the river again but a few miles from its source. They left it flowing north towards Florence; they would find it again running southwards in the direction of Arezzo.

As Dante rode up from the valley with his comrades, his eyes so quick to detect the characteristic features and moods of Nature would note the growing severity of the landscape—in his day perhaps less marked than now, when feckless generations of short-sighted inhabitants have denuded the hills of their timber. As the road wound up the steep he would glance now north, now south, and perhaps occasionally back to the west. Northwards he would see towering up the mass of Monte Morello, the bare heap of a mountain that rises above his native city. Besides it his eye would light upon the small but conspicuous wooded hill of Monte Senario, on which, nearly sixty years before, the sainted founders of the Servite Order had established themselves: Florentines all of good family, and one a scion of that famous house of the Amidei whose quarrel with the Buondelmonti in 1215 had already begun to bear fruit of internal discord in the city—the first drops of the storm that was to sweep poor Dante into exile. Westward, beyond the Arno, the hill of the “Incontro” would catch his eye, the traditional site of the meeting between Saint Francis and Saint Dominic which has provided an inspiring theme for so many artists; while on the south his view would be bounded by the thickly wooded ridge of Vallombrosa, where San Giovanni Gualberto had gathered more than two centuries before (in 1015) a band of followers for whom the discipline of San Miniato had grown too lax. Almost at the watershed of the Consuma range, he would observe the track upon the right—only a few years ago (1905) converted into a _strada carrozzabile_—by which one might pass on horseback or on foot from Vallombrosa to Consuma, and so into the Casentino. Halting, perhaps, for a few moments in the village of Consuma—probably not very different then from what it is to-day, a collection of charcoal-burners’ dwellings—then trotting down the other side, past the hamlet of Ponticelli, swerving to the right over the shoulder of a ridge, they passed the ancient little hostelry of Casaccia, and stopped, so tradition asserts, for rest and refreshment in the bleakly situated Badiola, which crouches in the midst of a windswept group of unhappy trees, on an outlying hillock to the left of the road, looking down on the Casentino itself.

Resuming their downward journey with lighter hearts, yet some of them no doubt a little fluttered already by the anticipation of an encounter (as Dante confesses to have been on the morning of the battle),[347] they would ride past the ill-omened mound which still gives to a neighbouring hamlet, the grim name of Ommorto or _Omo Morto_, the spot where Adamo of Brescia[348] was burned alive (as some think only a year before—1288) for counterfeiting the coinage of Florence at the instigation of the Conti Guidi of Romena. And but a little way further on that same Castle of Romena would burst upon their view—the fortress with the seven-fold circle of defensive walls which were to suggest to the poet, in his sojourn of some fourteen years later, the _nobile castello_[349] of Limbo, wherein the spirits of the just and illustrious pagans lived their dignified life—_senza martiri_,[350] but also _senza speme_.[351]

The ruins that can be visited to-day shew but the vague outlines of its former grandeur; yet one may see the green-carpeted _cortile_ where the great spirits walked to and fro _sopra il verde smalto_,[352] and fragments at least of the very walls within whose shelter the poet probably elaborated this and much else of the Inferno: and within the outer circle of defences, the famous Fonte Branda[353] whose cool waters were recalled to mind by poor Adamo in his torment—waters sipped to-day by the devout Dantist pilgrim almost as though it were indeed a holy well.[354]

We hear of no assault made upon the Castle in passing. Probably the place was too strong and the work before the Guelf Army needed haste. On the other hand the force within, thinned to strengthen the Ghibelline host below, was no doubt too weak to attempt an effective onslaught upon the cavalcade; though, as Dino implies, the Florentines were passing through awkward country, wherein “if they had been found of the foe, they had received no small damage.”[355]

The armies faced one another in the valley’s bottom, on that level stretch of alluvial land which lies to the north of the rock on which stands the Castle and the town of Poppi. North and south the field was commanded by a Guidi fortress; it stretched like a vast “lizza” or tilting-ground between Poppi and Romena.

The corn would be well advanced on that eleventh of June: not so rich a promise, perhaps as that on which the daughter of Ugolino della Gherardesca afterwards commented so bitingly to the daughter of Buonconte, when the ground had been fertilised with torrents of Ghibelline blood.[356] Perchance the approaching harvest may have been already ruined by the devastating march of the Aretines. But the general features of the country would have lost none of their charm. The graceful, whispering poplars and willows surely then as now lined Arno’s banks, recalling to some of the elder warriors the poplars of Montaperti, fringing the Biena, Malena and Arbia—the tall trees that still whisper shudderingly of the day when their three streams ran red.

The vine-festoons—if then as now, and as in the Medicean days, the valley was garlanded with vineyards—would still be in fresh verdure, and would form an effective setting for the gay colours of a mediaeval armament. Dante and his companions would indeed have as fair a scene to fight in as poet or artist turned soldier could wish; albeit the day was cloudy, presaging a night of storm.[357] Immediately behind the gaily decked arena stood the bold grey mass of Poppi, and beyond this again the more distant background of hills, flanked on the left by La Verna with its hallowed and inspiring memories.

And what a glorious prospect of the whole field of battle had the ladies of the Guidi household from the casements of that castle whose walls are still adorned with fragments of _affreschi_, which Dante’s eyes must have seen! All the pomp and pageantry of the war visible from a place of security, a veritable eagle’s nest. And beyond the battle a clear view across to Romena, Falterona and the sources of Arno; with a peep, perhaps, of the castle of Porciano—the northernmost stronghold of the clan since the practical demolition, after Montaperti, of the neighbouring Castel Castagnajo.

Here in their own country they would have every confidence of success. They would rejoice in the brave show of chivalry, the gorgeous armour caparisons and banners—a spectacle of the meeting of the two best-appointed hosts that the countryside had ever witnessed.[358] They would watch with triumph the first irresistible charge of the Aretine cavalry, which drove Dante and his fellows back in confusion upon their infantry, and they would feel the victory already won.

They would mark with wonder and horror the unaccountable retreat of Count Guido Novello, who was to have delivered a flank attack with his hundred and fifty horse, remembering perchance with scorn that it was his untimely flight which, twenty-three years before, had brought to a premature end the Ghibelline domination in Florence.[359]

They would note the sudden move of Corso Donati and his Pistojesi, whose charge upon the Aretine flank was the beginning of the end. Then came the wholesale slaughter and pursuit, wherein unnerved warriors, forgetful of everything but the fear of death, streamed in flight past Poppi and down the valley towards Bibbiena. One of these hunted knights they may have observed in the earlier stages of his flight; for the name and figure of Buonconte di Montefeltro[360] would be well known to them. But if their eyes were sharp and keen enough to catch a glimpse of him as he passed, it was but a glimpse. His end none saw or knew till Dante met the dead count’s spirit in Purgatory; though the scene of it, as there described, may well be the faithful reminiscence of the Poet’s own impression as he galloped with the pursuers towards Bibbiena.

The spot where Arno and Archiano meet is dear to every student of Dante, though comparatively few are privileged to see it with their eyes. And when you see it, it is just a confluence of two mountain-streams, flanked by heaps of grey water-worn stones, and fringed by tall poplars and brushwood—this in the flat bottom of a fertile and well cultivated valley. But the rushing water has a voice unlike the sound of ordinary streams: the grey piles of pebbles and boulders, the tall whispering poplars and the bushes at their feet casting a dark line of shade along the river’s brim—these have something pathetic, tragic, funereal in their aspect.

One seems to see Buonconte[361] staggering to the brink, bursting his way blindly through the hedge of trees and bushes, while his life-blood ebbs out from the wounded throat, and leaves a crimson track upon the plain—see him fall senseless, with just an instinctive crossing of the arms and an inaudible invocation of the name of Mary, that was to baulk the fiend of his prey. Then night falls, and the mountain tops “from Pratomagno to the main ridge” of Apennine, and all the valley between, are swathed in storm-clouds, and the _fossati_ are filled with drenching rain. The Archiano dashes down its steep course from “above the hermitage” of Camaldoli (whose founder, St. Romoald, has his place with St. Benedict in Paradise),[362] a roaring, foaming torrent, and swirls the corpse down the stream of Arno, unlocking the arms by force from that cross upon the breast which had served the soul so well—

Sciolse al mio petto la croce
Ch’ i’ fe’ di me quando ’l doler mi vinse,[363]

and engulfs the body, soon to be covered with spoils of the river-bed.

It is but a short walk down the steep lane from Bibbiena and through the meadows to the _imboccatura_, and the inhabitants of the hill-town may well have witnessed from their walls many a like tragedy on that day, as breathless Ghibellines at their last gasp found themselves caught in the trap—pulled up suddenly by Arno or Archiano, and overtaken ere their bewildered brains could decide what course to follow.

Far different memories from those of the northward plain cling to that bold wooded peak which rises on the east of Bibbiena. The pilgrimage to La Verna from that town is one of the most delightful that can be imagined. After the first steep descent—for Bibbiena stands on the top of a hill almost precipitous on every side—one mounts again, passing through groves of tender spring green, the beautiful green of young oaks, with rich, yellow-red soil as a foil to it; and then down a second time past Campi into the fair valley of the Corsalone, with its long rows of poplars like these of Campaldino and Montaperti. After that it is all one long ascent, and for the most part a steep one. The lane winds up through sparse woods again, mainly of small oaks, and is bordered, in spring, by garlands of primroses and violets. For a time one loses sight of the goal (which had been visible from Bibbiena, and again from above Campi), though the view opens out wonderfully upon the left, up the Arno valley past Poppi to Falterona. Then at last, after an hour or so of steady climbing, the bold wooded cliff heaves in sight again, and one distinguishes the buildings of the monastery perched high up on the edge of a vast precipice. Another hour will bring us to its foot. As he toils up to this sanctuary even the most devoted Dantist cannot but have in mind, besides the eleventh Canto of _Paradiso_, certain passages also of the _Fioretti_.

Every holy spot, almost, is marked by a chapel, wherein man’s handiwork obscures—and dare we say mars?—while it exalts, the memories of the past. It is all so unlike what Saint Francis saw when he rode up on his donkey from the other side to take possession of Orlando’s gift of the ‘divoto monte.’ Yet one cannot stand without emotion before the commonplace chapel that marks the spot where the little birds came to welcome him: “con cantare e con battere l’ ali,” making “grandissima festa e allegrezza,” settling on his head and shoulders and arms and in his bosom.[364] And when one has entered the portal, one is fain to see not only the Chapel of the Stigmata, with the very spot marked out for honour where in 1221 the Saint—

Da Cristo preso l’ ultimo sigillo
Che le sue membra due anni portarno,[365]

and the “_sasso spicco_”—that weird rent in the rocks concerning which Saint Francis believed himself to have divine revelation, that it was the result of the earthquake at the crucifixion: “quando, secondo che dice il Vangelista, le pietre si spezzarono.”[366] This, too, is an inevitable object of the Dantist’s pilgrimage, for he regards it as extremely probable that the idea of the cloven rocks in the twelfth of _Inferno_[367] came to Dante from La Verna and Franciscan lore. But there are other spots untouched by Dante, yet hallowed by memories of the “poverello di Cristo.” Such is the hollow _grembo_ in the cliff-side where the rock received the Saint into her maternal bosom, yielding “like molten wax” to the impress of his form,[368] when the fiend would have hurled him down the precipice. Such, again, is the grotto where his hermit-bed is shewn,[369] wherein he passed the first Lent of his sojourn at La Verna; and such, too, is the stone, self-consecrate, and so used without further benediction as an altar top, whereon, so legend says, the Redeemer often-times stood and conversed familiarly with his poor servant “face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend.”[370]

Dante rests under the shadow of Saint Francis—not at La Verna, indeed, but at Ravenna. The Campanile of the Franciscan church stands sentry over his tomb. It is known that he was buried in the Franciscan habit: and it has been justly conjectured that his association with the Order was no mere thing of sentiment. One of the earliest commentators on the _Divina Commedia_[371] asserts that for a time he actually joined the Order, to whose girdle of cord he seems to refer,[372] as worn formerly by him as a safeguard against youthful lusts—

Io avea una corda intorno cinta
E con essa pensai alcuna volta
Prender la lonza a la pelle dipinta.

And a living Dantist has recently put forth the suggestion that this connection with the Franciscans began with his boyish studies. Between his ninth and his eighteenth year, when, according to the _Vita Nuova_, a something unnamed kept him apart from the lady of his heart, he was, so it is thought, living under strict rule, studying as a pupil under the good friars of Santa Croce,[373] and laying the foundations at once of that theological lore which amazes us to-day, and of that lofty ideal of virtue of which he sings—

... già m’ avea trafitto
Prima ch’ io fuor di puerizia fosse.[374]

But apart from all conjecture, ancient or modern, the Poet’s admiration of Saint Francis is so obvious and his appreciation of him so just and true, that none can read the eleventh canto of _Paradiso_ without feeling that a Dantist’s pilgrimage to the Casentino culminates not in the memories of Campaldino or of the meeting of the waters; not even in the personal reminiscences of the Poet’s exile suggested by the modern tablet on the ruined walls of Romena, but rather at La Verna—

Nel crudo sasso intra Tevere ed Arno

where the re-discoverer of Christ for the Middle Ages—

Da Cristo preso l’ ultimo sigillo
Che le sue membra due anni portarno.[375]
...

Valour, and sincerity, and simplicity. The Casentino of Dante and St. Francis recalls to us the golden principles which alone make life worth living now. Patriotism, keen and fervid as that whose echoes rang just now thro’ the ancient hall at Poppi: but “Patriotism is not enough.”

Readiness to lay down one’s life for a Cause: that is the temper which has saved civilisation from utter shipwreck: but is it securely saved?

Purity of purpose, sincerity in speech and conduct—_sancta simplicitas_—ready to cast away earthly privilege, to face joyfully the call to “low living and high thinking,” and to find freedom in fewness of material possessions and richness of moral and spiritual endowment—that is the temper eagerly embraced by Francis and his followers, loyally accepted by Dante, exile and pilgrim; and it is the only temper which can adapt itself to live happily in a denuded world: the temper which, when saturated with the passion of loving service as was that of “Christ’s Poor Man” may hope, Franciscan-wise, to heal the world’s wounds, to assuage its quarrels, and to build up better and more strongly that which has been broken down.

BEATI MITES; QUONIAM IPSI POSSIDEBUNT TERRAM.

BEATI PACIFICI: QUONIAM FILII DEI VOCABUNTUR.

VIII

THE LAST CRUSADE

Pero ch’ me venia “Resurgi e Vinci.”

—_Par._ xiv. 125.

It is a far cry from Dante Alighieri to Torquato Tasso: from thirteenth-century Florence to seventeenth-century Ferrara. Yet Tasso is, poetically, a direct descendant of the great Florentine, down the line of Petrarca and Ariosto. His Italian represents the utmost legitimate development of Dante’s language, beyond which lies decadence. The purity, if not the exuberance, of his style and the grandeur of his epic treatment flows direct from the fountain-head of _Italianità_—the _Divine Comedy_; and the great poem has left its clear impress now and again upon the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, in haunting phrases.

Thus the “fierce Circassian,” in Canto x. 56 of the _Gerusalemme_, assumes the attitude of Sordello in _Purg._ vi. 66—

A guisa di leon quando si posa;

and two Cantos further on (x. 59) we have a reminiscence of _Purg._ iii. 9, the dignity of Virgil’s sensitive conscience, when Armida’s dupes stand abashed before Gottofredo—

Vergognando tenean basse le fronti
Ch’ era al cor piccol fallo amaro morso.

Dante and Tasso alike wrote for all time, and wrote in circumstances of personal straitness and distress: each gave to the world his best, out of the treasure of a bleeding heart; and if Tasso’s work cannot compare for grandeur of conception with Dante’s immortal epic of the spiritual liberty of Man, yet it too has Liberty for its theme, and a background ideal and spiritual.

Contemporary critics dealt with Tasso more cruelly than ever any dared to deal with Dante; yet Tasso has outlived his critics. And the sympathy and admiration bestowed on him by his English contemporaries, and notably by Edmund Spencer, was well bestowed, and forms a link in that long chain of intellectual sympathy between England and Italy which we trust to see strengthened year by year.

Tasso’s great poem may therefore not inappropriately supply an epilogue to those studies of his greater predecessor which are associated in different ways with the horrors and splendours of the great World War.

In a recent article in the _Anglo-Italian Review_,[376] an organ whose special aim has been to foster and develop that intellectual sympathy between England and Italy of which we have spoken above, Sir Sidney Lee draws our attention to the _Gerusalemme Liberata_.

“There is some special appropriateness,” he says, “at the moment in recalling attention to Tasso’s association with English poetry—with that manifestation of English genius whence Great Britain derives no inconspicuous part of her renown. For Tasso made his chief bid for immortality as the poetic chronicler of the First Crusade whereby the City of Jerusalem was first wrested from the Moslem sway and restored to Christian rule. The army which achieved the hardly won victory was drawn from the chivalry of all Western Europe; but the chief command was in French hands, and Godfrey of Bouillon, a nobleman of France, is the hero of Tasso’s epic. The Italian poet credits the French generalissimo with every moral and military virtue. His courage goes hand in hand with a dignified caution. He is pious, humane, far-seeing in counsel, resolute in action, modest in bearing. The stirring military adventures which Tasso narrates with abundance of romantic embellishment and magical episode end on a strikingly subdued note. The last stanza of the long poem shows Godfrey with his aides-de-camp, just after the last strenuous resistance of the enemy had been overcome, reverently walking in the light of the setting sun through the captured city. Without pausing to change their war-stained habiliments, Godfrey and his companions enter the Holy Sepulchre, and there, hanging up their arms, they offer on their knees humble prayer.”

General Allenby’s ever-memorable entry through the Golden Gate, on foot, into a Jerusalem freed from an even more blighting and desolating tyranny than that of the eleventh century, may well form a starting-point for a comparison of the great movement of the First Crusade with a still greater movement of to-day.

We might, indeed, concentrate our attention upon the history itself, rather than upon the Poet’s imaginative presentment of it at a distance of nearly five centuries; for Tasso was further removed from Godfrey and his contemporaries than we are from him. We might dwell on the fruitful analogies between the two Crusades—that earliest of all, and this last and greatest. We might note the curious resemblances and the curious differences, and see our own World-War prefigured in that old-time adventure which, like our own linked together representatives of almost all the European nations in one great league for an ideal, impelling them to give up all that the individual life holds dear, to forego all material hopes and prospects, for the sake of a Cause that offered as immediate guerdon little but danger and extreme discomfort, wounds and death, or worse than death.

We might point to striking coincidences in detail, as, for instance, the original costly and disastrous attempt upon Nicaea—like our tragedy of Gallipoli in the same region—and the part there played by the treachery of a Greek King, a perfidy which, even when the place was won, robbed the Crusaders of the fruits of their victory. We might adduce the importance of the help rendered in each case by the allied flotilla, and the timely aid given in Palestine of old, as in Europe to-day, by the “handyman” of the Marine forces. Or again we might consider the fruits and consequences of the old Crusades, and see the promise of them on a larger scale to-day; the first-fruits already harvested even in the midst of the struggle—the widening of insular minds, the growth of international comradeship, the manifold educational potencies of an experience that involves at once the intellectual stimulus of foreign travel, the moral inspiration of strenuous, exacting and self-reliant effort in entirely new conditions, the spiritual stimulus of a daily and hourly converse with Death.

If the Crusades did so much to educate Europe in olden days, what may not the World-War achieve, if followed by a “brotherly covenant” and a League of Peoples?

But our present aim is a rather different one; following the lead given by Sir Sidney Lee to try, so far as we may, to look at our own times through Tasso’s eyes; to search and see if the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ has not a direct word to speak to our own generation.

* * * * *

Does Tasso’s own generous use of fancy make such an attempt too fanciful? We are dealing with hard, stern facts—the hardest and sternest that any generation has ever had to face; Tasso’s theme had the mellowing light of intervening centuries playing upon it, and his treatment is frankly imaginative. He opens his Poem (i. 2) with an apology to the Muse for his fanciful embroidering of the historical material—

... Tu perdona
S’ intesso fregi al ver, s’ adorno in parte
D’ altri diletti, che de’ tuoi, le carte.

Sometimes his imagination works simply on a gorgeous description, as when he depicts for us the pageant of the rival armies: the Crusading host reviewed by Godfrey beneath the walls of Tortosa (i. 36 _sqq._), and the Egyptian army by the King of Egypt (xvii. 9 _sqq._) in the frontier town of Gaza, famous—as our own troops realised to their cost in the early stages of the Palestinian campaign—for its “Immensi solitudini d’ arena,” (xvii. 1).

Marvellous as are these descriptions, and more full of colour—be it conceded—than any modern massing of khaki-clad armed men, Tasso would have had greatly vaster, if not more varied, groups to depict on our Eastern-European front when the Russian army was still a factor, and vaster still in these last months on the West. And for picturesqueness and glamour, our Oriental battlefields and movements of troops offer scenes which would run even Tasso’s gorgeous pages very close. Take for instance the picture, drawn by the Australian official correspondent, of the entry of the allied troops into Damascus on the first days of October, 1918—

“Past applauding multitudes ... rode the dashing Australian
Light Horsemen, followed by brilliant cavalry from the
Indian Highlands, then by Yeomanry from the English Shires,
black-skinned French Colonials from North Africa on their barb
stallions, sturdy New Zealand machine-gunners and batteries
from England and Scotland.” These, with the “swarthy Hedjaz
Arabs beautifully mounted on black and white horses and on
camels ... formed a magnificent demonstration of the might of
the British and allied forces.”

How well this would look in Tasso’s sonorous verse!

But the characteristic products of Tasso’s fancy are more imaginative than these, outrageously imaginative, one might call them, though they have, withal, a dramatic appropriateness, since he is treading on Moslem soil, and his magicians and fair women, his bejewelled halls beneath the river-bed, his enchanted forest and spellbound island-mountain give us the true savour of the Arabian Nights.

But was it ever so true as it is to-day that “truth is stranger than fiction?” Was ever enchanted forest more repellent in its horrors than some of those stricken woods on our Western Front? If it had fallen to Tasso to describe in his verse our modern air-fighting, would it not have afforded his genius far more scope than was offered even by the wonderful description of the journey of the enchanted boat in which the two paladins sail out along the coast of Africa and between the Pillars of Hercules into the great Ocean to rescue Rinaldo (xv. 6 _sqq._)? Or Ismeno’s magic car, mist-swathed, and leaving no track upon the sand? When, in his first Canto (i. 14, 15), he depicts the Angel Gabriel cutting his way through winds and clouds, hovering over Lebanon, and then swooping down upon Tortosa—

Pria sul Libano monte ei si ritenne
E si librò su l’ adeguate penne,
E ver le piazze di Tortosa poi
Drizzò precipitando il volo in giuso ...

might it not have been, almost, a literal description of a flight of his own compatriot and fellow-poet Gabriele d’ Annunzio?

Again, one of the most characteristic of the _fregi_ with which Tasso adorns the chroniclers’ story is found in the prominence of his heroines. Doubtless we owe this largely to the brilliant originality of the Italian ladies of the Renaissance, in which the House of Este, under his patron Alfonso, was _facile princeps_; just as the poet’s exuberance of fancy and occasionally melodramatic touch reflects the eager, playful, pleasure-loving, fanciful, and histrionic tone of his favourite Court of Ferrara. His heroines certainly stand forth in dazzling prominence. Clorinda, the fair Amazon, is a fighting man to all intents, with a man’s mien, a man’s directness, a man’s sense of fair play, added to the charm of a beautiful, high-born Lady. Armida, matchless in her witchery, is a doughty warrior too; but also, by turns, languishing lover and ruthless, Circe-like enchantress. Erminia, disinherited Princess, gracious, tender, shy and sensitive, is yet bold to face all things—even the sight and touch of blood—if so she may help and tend the man who, in the day of her calamity, saved her from shame.

Fanciful figures: yet Clorinda and Armida (in her warrior-rôle) have not been without their parallels on the Russian front. And the fair Erminia might stand for us as the prototype of the gently nurtured girl of our time who has found herself and her true _métier_ in the self-sacrificing toils of Red Cross work. Of the knowledge of healing herbs, says Tasso (vi. 67)—

Arte, che, per usanza, in quel paese
Nelle figlie de’ re par che si serbe;

And indeed the tendance of the wounded is essentially a royal task in any country; and one in which not a few royal princesses have shewn themselves versed in our day. Erminia, when at last she finds her love, tends him right royally (xix. 111 _sqq._), but her address to the exhausted Tancred evinces also something peculiarly modern. What could be more in the professional Red Cross style than her injunction: “You shall know all you ask in good time; now you must be obedient and hold your tongue, and try to get some sleep” (xix. 114)?—

Saprai, rispose, il tutto: or (tel comando
come medica tua), taci, e riposa.

But are Tasso’s heroines after all so wonderful? To-day is the day of Women. They have proved and established in National Service their claim to the National Franchise and to a place in the National Legislature, and, what is more, their claim to be man’s companion and competitor in countless fields of activity. For a large part of the last century we had a woman on the throne: the present century may yet see a woman actually leading the king’s government. It is their War as well as ours; and now the victory is won, their part in it—without which victory had been unattainable—shall have full recognition. Apart from the noble work of the Red Cross Sisters and helpers, from the valour of the girl-chauffeurs and others who have sought and found a place as near as possible to the firing line, we have thousands of maidens and young matrons ready to risk comeliness and health and their whole physical future in the pestilent atmosphere of munition shops; thousands more who have donned the King’s uniform as “Waac’s” and “Wrens” and “Penguins.” How few and far between, in comparison, are the Women in Tasso’s scheme! How sorely his imagination would have been taxed, yet withal how congenially, had it fallen to him to describe the manifold activities—and the undiminished charms—of our twentieth century girlhood! Erminia is in some ways more of a Victorian type; but, if the fight is recognised as being fought elsewhere than in the actual front line, Clorinda is with us everywhere; strengthening the hands and inspiring the hearts of her compatriots, striking the chill of fear into the foe, and the dart of cupid into the susceptible hero at her side.

Armida, in Tasso’s scheme, bridges the gap between the seen and the unseen, between women’s work and the work of the Angels—good Angels, and bad. This brings us to another of Tasso’s _fregi_, and one of his most imaginative “embroideries”: I mean his elaborate description of the part played in the drama of the Crusade by the heavenly hosts and the hosts of the infernal regions. To the latter, surely, and especially to the magnificent picture of Satan’s Council of War (iv. 1-19), Milton must probably owe more than we ordinarily recognise. Among the most splendid passages of the Poem are, on the other hand, the descriptions of the counter-activities of the heavenly armies: God’s sending forth of Gabriel (i. 7), the Court of the Most High (ix. 55 _sqq._), Michael’s scornful, single-handed rout of the massed battalions of Hell (ix. 63-5). But mythological as is the tone in which these events are narrated, and mythical as the whole conception might have seemed to a more materialistic generation than our own, we shall be ready to recognise that all this strain in the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ is, after all, based, in a sense, on hard fact. It is, in fact, the Poet’s recognition of the paramount spiritual impulse which drove those hordes of Crusaders across a dangerous Europe into a still more dangerous Asia: his consciousness that the war they were waging was, in our present-day phrase, a “Spiritual War.” Have we not too our still warm and throbbing legend of the “Angels at Mons” and of the “White Companion”? Have not our own soldiers each his Guardian Angel, his “Defensor celeste” (vii. 84)? Whether Angel forms were seen at Mons or not, those of us who believe in their existence at all, believe that they were there, and not there only; but their force is everywhere joined to ours as often as we are really fighting “for God and the Right.”

One further point, as regards angelic agency—this time the evil angels. Tasso, like Dante in his classic episode of Buonconte (_Purg._ v. 109 _sqq._), attributes to the fiends a certain control over the weather (vii. 115 _sqq._) Many of us would like to share this conviction with him when we think of the repeated occasions in which our well-planned offensives in the West have been wrecked by the sudden break-up of a fine spell. And to the intervention of St. Michael, on the contrary, we would blithely ascribe that most opportune change of wind in the early morning of the day when we first played with gas at Loos.

The spiritual motive of the Crusades is finely typified in the character of Godfrey, who like our own loved Lord Roberts, initiated every fresh plan with prayer; whose incorruptible soul saw nothing of the material openings that a Crusade might offer—openings that were the very _raison-d’-être_ of crusading to the shrewd merchants of Venice in later years—Godfrey, to whom was unthinkable the mere notion of such bargaining and traffic as Frederic of Swabia was to employ a century later. “We are not out for gain,” he says to Altamoro of Samarcand, “we are not traders, but Crusaders.”

Che della vita altrui prezzo non cerco;
Guerreggio an Asia, non cambio o merco.
...

We should like to picture Tasso weaving into his stately verse, descriptions of submarine warfare, of the advance of the tanks, of an artillery barrage on a fifty-mile front: and we could find in _Gerusalemme Liberata_ a starting-point for most of these. But space permits us only two more points.

The Hun-spirit, and the glory of our Boy-heroes, are both depicted in Tasso’s magic tapestry: the one succinctly and sternly, the other more diffusely and with all the glamour of his genius.

The brutal measures devised—some of them not put into practice—by the Sultan against the subject Christian population of Jerusalem, and all the other infidel horrors of oppression and cruelty which Tasso evidently puts forth as the _ne plus ultra_ of bygone barbarism, have been matched and exceeded by those wreaked upon Christian populations by the modern Turk with the connivance of his Teutonic ally; matched and exceeded by the votaries of the “good German God” themselves, upon defenceless civil populations of invaded districts, and equally defenceless prisoners of war. But the spirit of “Frightfulness” itself is sharply sketched with a single stroke of the pen in the description of one of the leaders of the Egyptian army (vii. 22): “no true knight, but a fierce, murderous robber.”

Albiazar ch’ è fiero
Omicida ladron, non cavaliero.

But now that victory is won, and those horrors (save for the deep wounds of Europe) seem an evil dream, we fain would forget the unforgettable, lest we retard the work of reconciliation.

Let us finish on a happier note, with Rinaldo—Rinaldo who, as Spenser says in his Prefatory Letter to the _Faëry Queen_, represents “the Vertues of a private man,” even as Godfrey those of a good governour.

Rinaldo’s very existence is, doubtless, largely due to “dynastic reasons”: to the necessity of flattering, that is, the House of Este; yet he concentrates in himself all the elements of the perfect knight, the pattern of chivalry, as conceived by Tasso. If the desire to please a patron, Alfonso d’ Este, brought Rinaldo into the world, did not a similar motive assist at the birth of Virgil’s _Pius Aeneas_? Both Aeneas and Rinaldo are strong enough to “stand on their own feet.”

Rinaldo is in many ways the true type of our modern Boy-heroes—yes, our heroes, and those of the other side—as well as of mediaeval chivalry. Unable to rest at home when war is raging across the world, he dashes off, while still under sixteen years of age, by paths known only to himself, and “joins up” in Palestine.

Allor (ne pur tre lustri avea forniti)
Fuggì soletto, e corse strade ignote,
Varcò l’ Egeo, passò di Greca i liti,
Giunse nel campo in region remote
Nobilissima fuga, e che l’ imiti
Ben degna alcun magnanima nipote.
Tre anni son ch’ è in guerra: e intempestiva
Molle piuma del mento appena usciva.

Many a lad of this generation has indeed imitated his “noble flight”; has seen three years of war—and what a war!—ere his face first felt the touch of the razor. They have sped forth from the fields, from the mines and mills, and from luxurious homes where too much softness was in danger of undermining their manhood. They have “climbed the steep ascent” of the Hill of Valour—they have, in fact, heard and responded to a call like that which came to Rinaldo after he had lain spell-bound in Armida’s Garden, (xvii. 61)—

Signor, non sotto l’ ombra in piaggia molle
Tra fonti e fior, tra ninfe e tra sirene
Ma in cima all’ erto e faticoso colle
Della virtù è riposto il nostro bene.

“They in a short time have fulfilled a long time.” For them the fruits of manhood have followed hard upon the bloom of youth. In them soft gentleness is conjoined with royalty of mien and soldierly bearing. In battle, Mars; in face, Eros; the cynosure of a world’s admiring eyes—Behold Rinaldo!

Dolcemente feroce alzar vedresti
La regal fronte, e in lui mirar sol tutti.
L’ età precorse, e la speranza; e presti
Pareano i fior, quando n’ uscirò i frutti:
Se ’l miri fulminar nell’ arme avvolto,
Marte lo stimi: Amor, se scopre il volto.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

ANTONIO MASCHIO AND THE CELEBRATION OF 1865

The Dante Celebrations of the last fifty-six years—the years that mark the duration of the Poet’s life—have always had about them, as was meet, a touch of fervid Italian patriotism. For Dante is in a true sense “Pater Patriae.” The sexcentenary of his birth in 1865 coincided with the new dignity of Florence as temporary capital of a largely united and independent Italy. It was celebrated by the unveiling of Dante’s statue by Victor Emmanuel, protagonist of the New Italy in the chief Piazza of his new Capital, and it was celebrated with military as well as civic honours.