Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

There high-born dames, he says, still plied the distaff and the loom; still rocked the cradle with the words which their own mothers had used; or working with their maidens, told them old tales of the forefathers of the city, "of the Trojans, of Fiesole, and of Rome." Villani still finds this rudeness within forty years of the end of the century, almost within the limits of his own and Dante's life; and speaks of that "old first people," _il primo Popolo Vecchio_, with their coarse food and expenditure, their leather jerkins, and plain close gowns, their small dowries and late marriages, as if they were the first founders of the city, and not a generation which had lasted on into his own.[22] Twenty years later, his story is of the gaiety, the riches, the profuse munificence, the brilliant festivities, the careless and joyous life, which attracted foreigners to Florence as the city of pleasure; of companies of a thousand or more, all clad in white robes, under a lord, styled "of Love," passing their time in sports and dances; of ladies and knights, "going through the city with trumpets and other instruments, with joy and gladness," and meeting together in banquets evening and morning; entertaining illustrious strangers, and honourably escorting them on horseback in their passage through the city; tempting by their liberality, courtiers, and wits, and minstrels, and jesters, to add to the amusements of Florence.[23] Nor were these the boisterous triumphs of unrefined and coarse merriment. How variety of character was drawn out, how its more delicate elements were elicited and tempered, how nicely it was observed, and how finely drawn, let the racy and open-eyed story-tellers of Florence testify.

[Footnote 22: G. Vill. vi. 69 (1259).]

[Footnote 23: G. Vill. vii. 89 (1283).]

Not perhaps in these troops of revellers, but amid music and song, and in the pleasant places of social and private life, belonging to the Florence of arts and poetry, not to the Florence of factions and strife, should we expect to find the friend of the sweet singer, Casella, and of the reserved and bold speculator, Guido Cavalcanti; the mystic poet of the _Vita Nuova_, so sensitive and delicate, trembling at a gaze or a touch, recording visions, painting angels, composing Canzoni and commenting on them; finally devoting himself to the austere consolations of deep study. To superadd to such a character that of a democratic politician of the middle ages, seems an incongruous and harsh combination. Yet it was a real one in this instance. The scholar's life is, in our idea of it, far separated from the practical and the political; we have been taught by our experience to disjoin enthusiasm in love, in art, in what is abstract or imaginative, from keen interest and successful interference in the affairs and conflicts of life. The practical man may sometimes be also a _dilettante_; but the dreamer or the thinker, wisely or indolently, keeps out of the rough ways where real passions and characters meet and jostle, or if he ventures, seldom gains honour there. The separation, though a natural one, grows wider as society becomes more vast and manifold, as its ends, functions, and pursuits are disentangled, while they multiply. But in Dante's time, and in an Italian city, it was not such a strange thing that the most refined and tender interpreter of feeling, the popular poet, whose verses touched all hearts, and were in every mouth, should be also at once the ardent follower of all abstruse and difficult learning, and a prominent character among those who administered the State. In that narrow sphere of action, in that period of dawning powers and circumscribed knowledge, it seemed no unreasonable hope or unwise ambition to attempt the compassing of all science, and to make it subserve and illustrate the praise of active citizenship.[24] Dante, like other literary celebrities of the time, was not less from the custom of the day, than from his own purpose, a public man. He took his place among his fellow-citizens; he went out to war with them; he fought, it is said, among the skirmishers at the great Guelf victory of Campaldino; to qualify himself for office in the democracy, he enrolled himself in one of the Guilds of the people, and was matriculated in the "Art" of the Apothecaries; he served the State as its agent abroad; he went on important missions to the cities and courts of Italy--according to a Florentine tradition, which enumerates fourteen distinct embassies, even to Hungary and France. In the memorable year of Jubilee, 1300, he was one of the Priors of the Republic. There is no shrinking from fellowship and co-operation and conflict with the keen or bold men of the market-place and council-hall, in that mind of exquisite and, as drawn by itself, exaggerated sensibility. The doings and characters of men, the workings of society, the fortunes of Italy, were watched and thought of with as deep an interest as the courses of the stars, and read in the real spectacle of life with as profound emotion as in the miraculous page of Virgil; and no scholar ever read Virgil with such feeling--no astronomer ever watched the stars with more eager inquisitiveness. The whole man opens to the world around him; all affections and powers, soul and sense, diligently and thoughtfully directed and trained, with free and concurrent and equal energy, with distinct yet harmonious purposes, seek out their respective and appropriate objects, moral, intellectual, natural, spiritual, in that admirable scene and hard field where man is placed to labour and love, to be exercised, proved, and judged.

[Footnote 24: _Vide_ the opening of the _De Monarchia_.]

In a fresco in the chapel of the old palace of the Podestà[25] at Florence is a portrait of Dante, said to be by the hand of his contemporary Giotto. It was discovered in 1841 under the whitewash, and a tracing made by Mr. Seymour Kirkup has been reproduced in fac-simile by the Arundel Society. The fresco was afterwards restored or repainted with no happy success. He is represented as he might have been in the year of Campaldino (1289). The countenance is youthful yet manly, more manly than it appears in the engravings of the picture; but it only suggests the strong deep features of the well-known traditional face. He is drawn with much of the softness, and melancholy pensive sweetness, and with something also of the quaint stiffness of the _Vita Nuova_--with his flower and his book. With him is drawn his master, Brunetto Latini,[26] and Corso Donati. We do not know what occasion led Giotto thus to associate him with the great "Baron." Dante was, indeed, closely connected with the Donati. The dwelling of his family was near theirs, in the "Quarter of Scandal," the Ward of the Porta S. Piero. He married a daughter of their house, Madonna Gemma. None of his friends are commemorated with more affection than the companion of his light and wayward days, remembered not without a shade of anxious sadness, yet with love and hope, Corso's brother, Forese.[27] No sweeter spirit sings and smiles in the illumined spheres of Paradise, than she whom Forese remembers as on earth one,

Che tra bella e buona
Non so qual fosse più--[28]

and who, from the depth of her heavenly joy, teaches the poet that in the lowest place among the blessed there can be no envy[29]--the sister of Forese and Corso, Piccarda. The _Commedia_, though it speaks, as if in prophecy, of Corso's miserable death, avoids the mention of his name.[30] Its silence is so remarkable as to seem significant. But though history does not group together Corso and Dante, the picture represents the truth--their fortunes were linked together. They were actors in the same scene--at this distance of time two of the most prominent; though a scene very different from that calm and grave assembly, which Giotto's placid pencil has drawn on the old chapel wall.

[Footnote 25: The Bargello, a prison (1850); a museum (1878). _V._ Vasari, p. 311.]

[Footnote 26: He died in 1294. G. Vill. viii. 10.]

[Footnote 27: _Purgat._ c. 23.]

[Footnote 28: _Ibid._ c. 24.

My sister, good and beautiful--which most I know not.--WRIGHT.]

[Footnote 29: _Parad._ c. 3.]

[Footnote 30: _Purg._ c. 24, 82-87.]

The outlines of this part of Dante's history are so well known that it is not necessary to dwell on them; and more than the outlines we know not. The family quarrels came to a head, issued in parties, and the parties took names; they borrowed them from two rival factions in a neighbouring town, Pistoia, whose feud was imported into Florence; and the Guelfs became divided into the Black Guelfs who were led by the Donati, and the White Guelfs who sided with the Cerchi.[31] It still professed to be but a family feud, confined to the great houses; but they were too powerful and Florence too small for it not to affect the whole Republic. The middle classes and the artisans looked on, and for a time not without satisfaction, at the strife of the great men; but it grew evident that one party must crush the other, and become dominant in Florence; and of the two, the Cerchi and their White adherents were less formidable to the democracy than the unscrupulous and overbearing Donati, with their military renown and lordly tastes; proud not merely of being nobles, but Guelf nobles; always loyal champions, once the martyrs, and now the hereditary assertors, of the great Guelf cause. The Cerchi with less character and less zeal, but rich, liberal, and showy, and with more of rough kindness and vulgar good-nature for the common people, were more popular in Guelf Florence than the "Parte Guelfa;" and, of course, the Ghibellines wished them well. Both the contemporary historians of Florence lead us to think that they might have been the governors and guides of the Republic--if they had chosen, and had known how; and both, though condemning the two parties equally, seemed to have thought that this would have been the best result for the State. But the accounts of both, though they are very different writers, agree in their scorn of the leaders of the White Guelfs. They were upstarts, purse-proud, vain, and coarse-minded; and they dared to aspire to an ambition which they were too dull and too cowardly to pursue, when the game was in their hands. They wished to rule; but when they might, they were afraid. The commons were on their side, the moderate men, the party of law, the lovers of republican government, and for the most part the magistrates; but they shrank from their fortune, "more from cowardice than from goodness, because they exceedingly feared their adversaries."[32] Boniface VIII. had no prepossessions in Florence, except for energy and an open hand; the side which was most popular he would have accepted and backed; but "he would not lose," he said, "the men for the women." "_Io non voglio perdere gli uomini per le femminelle._"[33] If the Black party furnished types for the grosser or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet's Hell, the White party surely were the originals of that picture of stupid and cowardly selfishness, in the miserable crowd who moan and are buffeted in the vestibule of the Pit, mingled with the angels who dared neither to rebel nor be faithful, but "_were for themselves_;" and whoever it may be who is singled out in the "setta dei cattivi," for deeper and special scorn--he,

Che fece per viltà il gran rifiuto--[34]

the idea was derived from the Cerchi in Florence.

[Footnote 31: In 1300. G. Villani, viii. 38, 39.]

[Footnote 32: _Dino Comp._ p. 45.]

[Footnote 33: _Ibid._ p. 62.]

[Footnote 34: _Inf._ c. 3, 60.]

A French prince was sent by the Pope to mediate and make peace in Florence. The Black Guelfs and Corso Donati came with him. The magistrates were overawed and perplexed. The White party were, step by step, amused, entrapped, led blindly into false plots, entangled in the elaborate subtleties, and exposed with all the zest and mockery, of Italian intrigue--finally chased out of their houses and from the city, condemned unheard, outlawed, ruined in name and property, by the Pope's French mediator. With them fell many citizens who had tried to hold the balance between the two parties: for the leaders of the Black Guelfs were guilty of no errors of weakness. In two extant lists of the proscribed--condemned by default, for corruption and various crimes, especially for hindering the entrance into Florence of Charles de Valois, to a heavy fine and banishment--then, two months after, for contumacy, to be burned alive if he ever fell into the hands of the Republic--appears the name of Dante Alighieri; and more than this, concerning the history of his expulsion, we know not.[35]

[Footnote 35: Pelli, _Memorie per servire alla vita di Dante._ Fir. 1823, pp. 105, 106.]

Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more than the general character. He acted for a time in concert with the expelled party, when they attempted to force their way back to Florence; he gave them up at last in scorn and despair: but he never returned to Florence. And he found no new home for the rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his exile to his death, he was a wanderer. The character is stamped on his writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or dim, do but disclose him to us at different points, appearing here and there, we are not told how or why. One old record, discovered by antiquarian industry, shows him in a village church near Florence, planning, with the Cerchi and the White party, an attack on the Black Guelfs. In another, he appears in the Val di Magra, making peace between its small potentates: in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for awhile, in the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumour brings him to the West--with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little certain can be made out about the places where he was an honoured and admired, but it may be, not always a welcome guest, till we find him sheltered, cherished, and then laid at last to rest, by the Lords of Ravenna. There he still rests, in a small, solitary chapel, built, not by a Florentine, but a Venetian. Florence, "that mother of little love," asked for his bones; but rightly asked in vain.[36] His place of repose is better in those remote and forsaken streets "by the shore of the Adrian Sea," hard by the last relics of the Roman Empire--the mausoleum of the children of Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian--than among the assembled dead of S. Croce, or amid the magnificence of S. Maria del Fiore.[37]

[Footnote 36: See Dr. Barlow's _Sixth Centenary Festivals of Dante_. (1866.)]

[Footnote 37: These notices have been carefully collected by _Pelli_, who seems to have left little to glean (_Memorie_, &c. Ed. 2da, 1823). A few additions have been made by _Gerini_ (_Mem. Stor. della Lunigiana_), and _Troya_ (_Veltro Allegorico_), but they are not of much importance. _Arrivabene_ (_Secolo di Dante_) has brought together a mass of illustration which is very useful, and would be more so, if he were more careful, and quoted his authorities. _Balbo_ arranges these materials with sense and good feeling; though, as a writer, he is below his subject. A few traits and anecdotes may be found in the novelists--as Sacchetti.]

The _Commedia_, at the first glance, shows the traces of its author's life. It is the work of a wanderer. The very form in which it is cast is that of a journey, difficult, toilsome, perilous, and full of change. It is more than a working out of that touching phraseology of the middle ages, in which "the way" was the technical theological expression for this mortal life; and "_viator_" meant man in his state of trial, as "_comprehensor_" meant man made perfect, having attained to his heavenly country. It is more than merely this. The writer's mind is full of the recollections and definite images of his various journeys. The permanent scenery of the _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_, very variously and distinctly marked, is that of travel. The descent down the sides of the Pit, and the ascent of the Sacred Mountain, show one familiar with such scenes--one who had climbed painfully in perilous passes, and grown dizzy on the brink of narrow ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery from the gorges of the Alps and Apennines, or the terraces and precipices of the Riviera. Local reminiscences abound:--the severed rocks of the Adige Valley--the waterfall of S. Benedetto--the crags of Pietra-pana and S. Leo, which overlook the plains of Lucca and Ravenna--the "fair river" that flows among the poplars between Chiaveri and Sestri--the marble quarries of Carrara--the "rough and desert ways between Lerici and Turbia," and those towery cliffs, going sheer into the deep sea at Noli, which travellers on the Corniche road some thirty years ago may yet remember with fear. Mountain experience furnished that picture of the traveller caught in an Alpine mist and gradually climbing above it; seeing the vapours grow thin, and the sun's orb appear faintly through them; and issuing at last into sunshine on the mountain top, while the light of sunset was lost already on the shores below:

Ai raggi, morti già nei bassi lidi:--_Purg._ 17.

or that image of the cold dull shadow over the torrent, beneath the Alpine fir--

Un'ombra smorta
Qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri
Sovra suoi freddi rivi, l'Alpe porta:--_Purg._ 33.[38]

or of the large snow-flakes falling without wind, among the mountains--

d'un cader lento
Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde
Come di neve in Alpe senza vento.--_Inferno_, 14.[39]

[Footnote 38:

A death-like shade--
Like that beneath black boughs and foliage green
O'er the cool streams in Alpine glens display'd.--WRIGHT.]

[Footnote 39:

O'er all the sandy desert falling slow,
Were shower'd dilated flakes of fire, like snow
On Alpine summits, when the wind is low.--IBID.]

He delights in a local name and local image--the boiling pitch, and the clang of the shipwrights in the arsenal of Venice--the sepulchral fields of Arles and Pola--the hot-spring of Viterbo--the hooded monks of Cologne--the dykes of Flanders and Padua--the Maremma, with its rough brushwood, its wild boars, its snakes, and fevers. He had listened to the south wind among the pine tops, in the forest by the sea, at Ravenna. He had watched under the Carisenda tower at Bologna, and seen the driving clouds "give away their motion" to it, and make it seem to be falling; and had noticed how at Rome the October sun sets between Corsica and Sardinia.[40] His images of the sea are numerous and definite--the ship backing out of the tier in harbour, the diver plunging after the fouled anchor, the mast rising, the ship going fast before the wind, the water closing in its wake, the arched backs of the porpoises the forerunners of a gale, the admiral watching everything from poop to prow, the oars stopping altogether at the sound of the whistle, the swelling sails becoming slack when the mast snaps and falls.[41] Nowhere could we find so many of the most characteristic and strange sensations of the traveller touched with such truth. Everyone knows the lines which speak of the voyager's sinking of heart on the first evening at sea, and of the longings wakened in the traveller at the beginning of his journey by the distant evening bell[42]; the traveller's _morning_ feelings are not less delicately noted--the strangeness on first waking in the open air with the sun high; morning thoughts, as day by day he wakes nearer home; the morning sight of the sea-beach quivering in the early light; the tarrying and lingering, before setting out in the morning[43]--

Noi eravam lunghesso 'l mare ancora,
Come gente che pensa al suo cammino,
Che va col cuore, e col corpo dimora.[44]

[Footnote 40: _Inf._ 31, 18.]

[Footnote 41: _Ibid._ 17, 16, 31; _Purg._ 24; _Par._ 2; _Inf._ 22; _Purg._ 30; _Par._ 25; _Inf._ 7.]

[Footnote 42: _Purg._ 8. "Era già l'ora," &c.]

[Footnote 43: _Purg._ 19, 27, 1, 2.]

[Footnote 44:

By ocean's shore we still prolonged our stay
Like men, who, thinking of a journey near,
Advance in thought, while yet their limbs delay.--WRIGHT.]

He has recorded equally the anxiety, the curiosity, the suspicion with which, in those times, stranger met and eyed stranger on the road; and a still more characteristic trait is to be found in those lines where he describes the pilgrim gazing around in the church of his vow, and thinking how he shall tell of it:

E quasi peregrin che si ricrea
Nel tempio del suo voto riguardando,
E spera già ridir com'ello stea:--_Parad._ 31.[45]

or again, in that description, so simple and touching, of his thoughts while waiting to see the relic for which he left his home:

Quale è colui che forse di Croazia
Viene a veder la Veronica nostra,
Che per l'antica fama non si sazia,
Ma dice nel pensier, fin che si mostra;
Signor mio Gesù Cristo, Dio verace,
Or fu sì fatta la sembianza vostra?--_Parad._ 31.[46]

[Footnote 45:

And like a pilgrim who with fond delight
Surveys the temple he has vow'd to see,
And hopes one day its wonders to recite.--IBID.]

[Footnote 46:

Like one who, from Croatia come to see
Our Veronica (image long adored),
Gazes, as though content he ne'er could be--
Thus musing, while the relic is pourtray'd--
"Jesus my God, my Saviour and my Lord,
O were thy features these I see display'd?"--WRIGHT.

Quella imagine benedetta la quale Gesù Cristo lasciò a noi
per esempio della sua bellissima figura.--_Vita Nuova_, p.
353.

He speaks of the pilgrims going to Rome to see it; compare also the sonnet to the pilgrims, p. 355:

Deh peregrini, che pensosi andate
Forse di cosa, che non v'è presente,
Venite voi di sì lontana gente,
Com'alla vista voi ne dimostrate.]

Of these years then of disappointment and exile the _Divina Commedia_ was the labour and fruit. A story in Boccaccio's life of Dante, told with some detail, implies indeed that it was begun, and some progress made in it, while Dante was yet in Florence--begun in Latin, and he quotes three lines of it--continued afterwards in Italian. This is not impossible; indeed the germ and presage of it may be traced in the _Vita Nuova_. The idealised saint is there, in all the grace of her pure and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul. She is already in glory with Mary the queen of angels. She already beholds the face of the Everblessed. And the _envoye_ of the _Vita Nuova_ is the promise of the _Commedia_. "After this sonnet," (in which he describes how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld a lady receiving honour, and dazzling by her glory the unaccustomed spirit)--"After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak more of this blessed one, until such time as I should be able to indite more worthily of her. And to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power, as she truly knows. So that, if it shall be the pleasure of Him, by whom all things live, that my life continue for some years, I hope to say of her that which never hath been said of any woman. And afterwards, may it please Him, who is the Lord of kindness, that my soul may go to behold the glory of her lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously gazes on the countenance of Him, _qui est per omnia secula benedictus_."[47] It would be wantonly violating probability and the unity of a great life, to suppose that this purpose, though transformed, was ever forgotten or laid aside. The poet knew not indeed what he was promising, what he was pledging himself to--through what years of toil and anguish he would have to seek the light and the power he had asked; in what form his high venture should be realised. But the _Commedia_ is the work of no light resolve, and we need not be surprised at finding the resolve and the purpose at the outset of the poet's life. We may freely accept the key supplied by the words of the _Vita Nuova_. The spell of boyhood is never broken, through the ups and downs of life. His course of thought advances, alters, deepens, but is continuous. From youth to age, from the first glimpse to the perfect work, the same idea abides with him, "even from the flower till the grape was ripe." It may assume various changes--an image of beauty, a figure of philosophy, a voice from the other world, a type of heavenly wisdom and joy--but still it holds, in self-imposed and willing thraldom, that creative and versatile and tenacious spirit. It was the dream and hope of too deep and strong a mind to fade and come to naught--to be other than the seed of the achievement and crown of life. But with all faith in the star and the freedom of genius, we may doubt whether the prosperous citizen would have done that which was done by the man without a home. Beatrice's glory might have been sung in grand though barbarous Latin to the literati of the fourteenth century; or a poem of new beauty might have fixed the language and opened the literature of modern Italy; but it could hardly have been the _Commedia_. That belongs, in its date and its greatness, to the time when sorrow had become the poet's daily portion, and the condition of his life.

[Footnote 47: _Vita Nuova_, last paragraph. See _Purg._ 30; _Parad._ 30, 6, 28-33.]

The _Commedia_ is a novel and startling apparition in literature. Probably it has been felt by some, who have approached it with the reverence due to a work of such renown, that the world has been generous in placing it so high. It seems so abnormal, so lawless, so reckless of all ordinary proprieties and canons of feeling, taste, and composition. It is rough and abrupt; obscure in phrase and allusion, doubly obscure in purpose. It is a medley of all subjects usually kept distinct: scandal of the day and transcendental science, politics and confessions, coarse satire and angelic joy, private wrongs, with the mysteries of the faith, local names and habitations of earth, with visions of hell and heaven. It is hard to keep up with the ever-changing current of feeling, to pass as the poet passes, without effort or scruple, from tenderness to ridicule, from hope to bitter scorn or querulous complaint, from high-raised devotion to the calmness of prosaic subtleties or grotesque detail. Each separate element and vein of thought has its precedent, but not their amalgamation. Many had written visions of the unseen world, but they had not blended with them their personal fortunes. S. Augustine had taught the soul to contemplate its own history, and had traced its progress from darkness to light;[48] but he had not interwoven with it the history of Italy, and the consummation of all earthly destinies. Satire was no new thing; Juvenal had given it a moral, some of the Provençal poets a political turn; S. Jerome had kindled into it fiercely and bitterly even while expounding the Prophets; but here it streams forth in all its violence, within the precincts of the eternal world, and alternates with the hymns of the blessed. Lucretius had drawn forth the poetry of nature and its laws; Virgil and Livy had unfolded the poetry of the Roman empire; S. Augustine, the still grander poetry of the history of the City of God; but none had yet ventured to weave into one the three wonderful threads. And yet the scope of the Italian poet, vast and comprehensive as the issue of all things, universal as the government which directs nature and intelligence, forbids him not to stoop to the lowest caitiff he has ever despised, the minutest fact in nature that has ever struck his eye, the merest personal association which hangs pleasantly in his memory. Writing for all time, he scruples not to mix with all that is august and permanent in history and prophecy, incidents the most transient, and names the most obscure; to waste an immortality of shame or praise on those about whom his own generation were to inquire in vain. Scripture history runs into profane; Pagan legends teach their lesson side by side with Scripture scenes and miracles; heroes and poets of heathenism, separated from their old classic world, have their place in the world of faith, discourse with Christians of Christian dogmas, and even mingle with the Saints; Virgil guides the poet through his fear and his penitence to the gates of Paradise.

[Footnote 48: See _Convito_, 1, 2.]

This feeling of harsh and extravagant incongruity, of causeless and unpardonable darkness, is perhaps the first impression of many readers of the _Commedia_. But probably as they read on, there will mingle with this a sense of strange and unusual grandeur, arising not alone from the hardihood of the attempt, and the mystery of the subject, but from the power and the character of the poet. It will strike them that words cut deeper than is their wont; that from that wild uncongenial imagery, thoughts emerge of singular truth and beauty. Their dissatisfaction will be chequered, even disturbed--for we can often bring ourselves to sacrifice much for the sake of a clear and consistent view--by the appearance, amid much that repels them, of proofs undeniable and accumulating of genius as mighty as it is strange. Their perplexity and disappointment may grow into distinct condemnation, or it may pass into admiration and delight; but no one has ever come to the end of the _Commedia_ without feeling that if it has given him a new view and specimen of the wildness and unaccountable waywardness of the human mind, it has also added, as few other books have, to his knowledge of its feelings, its capabilities, and its grasp, and suggested larger and more serious thoughts, for which he may be grateful, concerning that unseen world of which he is even here a member.

Dante would not have thanked his admirers for becoming apologists. Those in whom the sense of imperfection and strangeness overpowers sympathy for grandeur, and enthusiasm for nobleness, and joy in beauty, he certainly would have left to themselves. But neither would he teach any that he was leading them along a smooth and easy road. The _Commedia_ will always be a hard and trying book; nor did the writer much care that it should be otherwise. Much of this is no doubt to be set down to its age; much of its roughness and extravagance, as well as of its beauty--its allegorical spirit, its frame and scenery. The idea of a visionary voyage through the worlds of pain and bliss is no invention of the poet--it was one of the commonest and most familiar medieval vehicles of censure or warning; and those who love to trace the growth and often strange fortunes of popular ideas, or whose taste leads them to disbelieve in genius, and track the parentage of great inventions to the foolish and obscure, may find abundant materials in the literature of legends.[49] But his own age--the age which received the _Commedia_ with mingled enthusiasm and wonder, and called it the Divine, was as much perplexed as we are, though probably rather pleased thereby than offended. That within a century after its composition, in the more famous cities and universities of Italy, Florence, Venice, Bologna, and Pisa, chairs should have been founded, and illustrious men engaged to lecture on it, is a strange homage to its power, even in that time of quick feeling; but as strange and great a proof of its obscurity. What is dark and forbidding in it was scarcely more clear to the poet's contemporaries. And he, whose last object was amusement, invites no audience but a patient and confiding one.

O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,
Desiderosi di ascoltar, seguiti
Dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,

Tornate a riveder li vostri liti:
Non vi mettete in pelago, chè forse
Perdendo me rimarreste smarriti.

L'acqua ch'io prendo giammai non si corse:
Minerva spira, e conducemi Apollo,
E nuove muse mi dimostran l'Orse.

Voi altri pochi, che drizzaste 'l collo
Per tempo al pan degli angeli, del quale
Vivesi qui, ma non si vien satollo,

Metter potete ben per l'alto sale
Vostro navigio, servando mio solco
Dinanzi all'acqua che ritorna eguale.

Que gloriosi che passaro a Colco,
Non s'ammiraron, come voi farete,
Quando Jason vider fatto bifolco.--_Parad._ 2.[50]

[Footnote 49: _Vide_ Ozanam, _Dante_, pp. 535, _sqq._ Ed.]

[Footnote 50:

O ye who fain would listen to my song,
Following in little bark full eagerly
My venturous ship, that chanting hies along,

Turn back unto your native shores again;
Tempt not the deep, lest haply losing me,
In unknown paths bewildered ye remain.

I am the first this voyage to essay;
Minerva breathes--Apollo is my guide;
And new-born muses do the Bears display.

Ye other few, who have look'd up on high
For angels' food betimes, e'en here supplied
Largely, but not enough to satisfy,--

Mid the deep ocean ye your course may take,
My track pursuing the pure waters through,
Ere reunites the quickly-closing wake.

Those glorious ones, who drove of yore their prow
To Colchos, wonder'd not as ye will do,
When they saw Jason working at the plough.

WRIGHT'S _Dante_.]

The character of the _Commedia_ belongs much more, in its excellence and its imperfections, to the poet himself and the nature of his work, than to his age. That cannot screen his faults; nor can it arrogate to itself, it must be content to share, his glory. His leading idea and line of thought was much more novel then than it is now, and belongs much more to the modern than the medieval world. The _Story of a Life_, the poetry of man's journey through the wilderness to his true country, is now in various and very different shapes as hackneyed a form of imagination, as an allegory, an epic, a legend of chivalry were in former times. Not, of course, that any time has been without its poetical feelings and ideas on the subject; and never were they deeper and more diversified, more touching and solemn, than in the ages that passed from S. Augustine and S. Gregory to S. Thomas and S. Bonaventura. But a philosophical poem, where they were not merely the colouring, but the subject, an _epos_ of the soul, placed for its trial in a fearful and wonderful world, with relations to time and matter, history and nature, good and evil, the beautiful, the intelligible, and the mysterious, sin and grace, the infinite and the eternal--and having in the company and under the influences of other intelligences, to make its choice, to struggle, to succeed or fail, to gain the light, or be lost--this was a new and unattempted theme. It has been often tried since, in faith or doubt, in egotism, in sorrow, in murmuring, in affectation, sometimes in joy--in various forms, in prose and verse, completed or fragmentary, in reality or fiction, in the direct or the shadowed story, in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, in Rousseau's _Confessions_, in _Wilhelm Meister_ and _Faust_, in the _Excursion_. It is common enough now for the poet, in the faith of human sympathy, and in the sense of the unexhausted vastness of his mysterious subject, to believe that his fellows will not see without interest and profit, glimpses of his own path and fortunes--hear from his lips the disclosure of his chief delights, his warnings, his fears--follow the many-coloured changes, the impressions and workings, of a character, at once the contrast and the counterpart to their own. But it was a new path then; and he needed to be, and was, a bold man, who first opened it--a path never trod without peril, usually with loss or failure.

And certainly no great man ever made less secret to himself of his own genius. He is at no pains to rein in or to dissemble his consciousness of power, which he has measured without partiality, and feels sure will not fail him. "Fidandomi di me più che di un altro"[51]--is a reason which he assigns without reserve. We look with the distrust and hesitation of modern days, yet, in spite of ourselves, not without admiration and regret, at such frank hardihood. It was more common once than now. When the world was young, it was more natural and allowable--it was often seemly and noble. Men knew not their difficulties as we know them--we, to whom time, which has taught so much wisdom, has brought so many disappointments--we who have seen how often the powerful have fallen short, and the noble gone astray, and the most admirable missed their perfection. It is becoming in us to distrust ourselves--to be shy if we cannot be modest; it is but a respectful tribute to human weakness and our brethren's failures. But there was a time when great men dared to claim their greatness--not in foolish self-complacency, but in unembarrassed and majestic simplicity, in magnanimity and truth, in the consciousness of a serious and noble purpose, and of strength to fulfil it. Without passion, without elation as without shrinking, the poet surveys his superiority and his high position, as something external to him; he has no doubts about it, and affects none. He would be a coward, if he shut his eyes to what he could do; as much a trifler in displaying reserve as ostentation. Nothing is more striking in the _Commedia_ than the serene and unhesitating confidence with which he announces himself the heir and reviver of the poetic power so long lost to the world--the heir and reviver of it in all its fulness. He doubts not of the judgment of posterity. One has arisen who shall throw into the shade all modern reputations, who shall bequeath to Christendom the glory of that name of Poet, "che più dura e più onora," hitherto the exclusive boast of heathenism, and claim the rare honours of the laurel:

Sì rade volte, padre, se ne coglie
Per trionfare o Cesare o poeta,
(Colpa e vergogna dell'umane voglie),
Che partorir letizia in su la lieta
Delfica deità dovrìa la fronda
Peneia quando alcun di sè asseta.--_Parad._ 1.[52]

[Footnote 51: _Convito_, 1, 10.]

[Footnote 52:

For now so rarely Poet gathers these,
Or Cæsar, winning an immortal praise
(Shame unto man's degraded energies),
That joy should to the Delphic God arise
When haply any one aspires to gain
The high reward of the Peneian prize.--WRIGHT.]

He has but to follow his star to be sure of the glorious port:[53] he is the master of language: he can give fame to the dead--no task or enterprise appals him, for whom spirits keep watch in heaven, and angels have visited the shades--"tal si partì dal cantar alleluia:"--who is Virgil's foster child and familiar friend. Virgil bids him lay aside the last vestige of fear. Virgil is to "crown him king and priest over himself,"[54] for a higher venture than heathen poetry had dared; in Virgil's company he takes his place without diffidence, and without vain-glory, among the great poets of old--a sister soul.[55]

[Footnote 53: Brunetto Latini's Prophecy, _Inf._ 15.]

[Footnote 54: See the grand ending of _Purg._ 27.

Tratto t'ho qui con ingegno e con arte;
Lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce:
Fuor se' dell'erte vie, fuor se' dell'arte.
Vedi il sole che 'n fronte ti riluce.
Vede l'erbetta, i fiori, e gli arboscelli
Che questa terra sol da sè produce.
Mentre che vegnon lieti gli occhi belli
Che lagrimando a te venir mi fenno,
Seder ti puoi e puoi andar tra elli.
Non aspettar mio dir più nè mio cenno;
Libero, dritto, sano è tuo arbitrio,
E fallo fora non fare a suo senno:
Perch'io te sopra te corono e mitrio.]

[Footnote 55: _Purg._ c. 21.]

Poichè la voce fu restata e queta,
Vidi quattro grand'ombre a noi venire:
Sembianza avean nè trista nè lieta:

* * * *

Così vidi adunar la bella scuola
Di quel signor dell'altissimo canto
Che sovra gli altri come aquila vola.
Da ch'ebber ragionato insieme alquanto
Volsersi a me con salutevol cenno
E 'l mio maestro sorrise di tanto.
E più d'onore ancora assai mi fenno:
Ch'essi mi fecer della loro schiera,
Sì ch'io fui sesto tra cotanto senno.--_Inf._ 4.[56]

[Footnote 56:

Ceased had the voice--when in composed array
Four mighty shades approaching I survey'd;--
Nor joy, nor sorrow did their looks betray.

* * * *

Assembled thus, was offered to my sight
The school of him, the Prince of poetry,
Who, eagle-like, o'er others takes his flight.
When they together had conversed awhile,
They turned to me with salutation bland,
Which from my master drew a friendly smile:
And greater glory still they bade me share,
Making me join their honourable band--
The sixth united to such genius rare.--WRIGHT.]

This sustained magnanimity and lofty self-reliance, which never betrays itself, is one of the main elements in the grandeur of the _Commedia_. It is an imposing spectacle to see such fearlessness, such freedom, and such success in an untried path, amid unprepared materials and rude instruments, models scanty and only half understood, powers of language still doubtful and suspected, the deepest and strongest thought still confined to unbending forms and the harshest phrase; exact and extensive knowledge, as yet far out of reach; with no help from time, which familiarises all things, and of which, manner, elaboration, judgment, and taste are the gifts and inheritance;--to see the poet, trusting to his eye "which saw everything"[57] and his searching and creative spirit, venture undauntedly into all regions of thought and feeling, to draw thence a picture of the government of the universe.

[Footnote 57: "Dante che tutto vedea."--_Sacchetti_, Nov. 114.]

But such greatness had to endure its price and its counterpoise. Dante was alone:--except in his visionary world, solitary and companionless. The blind Greek had his throng of listeners; the blind Englishman his home and the voices of his daughters; Shakspere had his free associates of the stage; Goethe, his correspondents, a court, and all Germany to applaud. Not so Dante. The friends of his youth are already in the region of spirits, and meet him there--Casella, Forese;--Guido Cavalcanti will soon be with them. In this upper world he thinks and writes as a friendless man--to whom all that he had held dearest was either lost or embittered; he thinks and writes for himself.

And so he is his own law; he owns no tribunal of opinion or standard of taste, except among the great dead. He hears them exhort him to "let the world talk on--to stand like a tower unshaken by the winds."[58] He fears to be "a timid friend to truth," "--to lose life among those who shall call this present time antiquity."[59] He belongs to no party. He is his own arbiter of the beautiful and the becoming; his own judge over right and injustice, innocence and guilt. He has no followers to secure, no school to humour, no public to satisfy; nothing to guide him, and nothing to consult, nothing to bind him, nothing to fear, out of himself. In full trust in heart and will, in his sense of truth, in his teeming brain, he gives himself free course. If men have idolised the worthless, and canonised the base, he reverses their award without mercy, and without apology; if they have forgotten the just because he was obscure, he remembers him: if "Monna Berta and Ser Martino,"[60] the wimpled and hooded gossips of the day, with their sage company, have settled it to their own satisfaction that Providence cannot swerve from their general rules, cannot save where they have doomed, or reject where they have approved--he both fears more and hopes more. Deeply reverent to the judgment of the ages past, reverent to the persons whom they have immortalised for good and even for evil, in his own day he cares for no man's person and no man's judgment. And he shrinks not from the auguries and forecastings of his mind about their career and fate. Men reasoned rapidly in those days on such subjects, and without much scruple; but not with such deliberate and discriminating sternness. The most popular and honoured names in Florence,

Farinata e 'l Tegghiaio, che fur sì degni,
Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, e 'l Mosca
E gli altri, ch'a ben far poser gl'ingegni;

have yet the damning brand: no reader of the _Inferno_ can have forgotten the shock of that terrible reply to the poet's questionings about their fate:

Ei son tra le anime più nere.[61]

[Footnote 58: _Purg._ 5.]

[Footnote 59:

La luce in che rideva il mio tesoro
Ch'io trovai lì, si fe' prima corrusca,
Quale a raggio di sole specchio d'oro;
Indi rispose: coscienza fusca
O della propria o dell'altrui vergogna
Pur sentirà la tua parola brusca;
Ma nondimen, rimossa ogni menzogna,
Tutta tua vision fa manifesta,
E lascia pur grattar dov'è la rogna:
Che se la voce tua sarà molesta
Nel primo gusto, vital nutrimento
Lascerà poi quando sarà digesta.
Questo tuo grido farà come vento
Che le più alte cime più percuote:
E ciò non fia d'onor poco argomento.
Però ti son mostrate, in queste ruote,
Nel monte, e nella valle dolorosa,
Pur l'anime che son di fama note.
Che l'animo di quel ch'ode non posa,
Nè ferma fede, per esemplo ch'aja
La sua radice incognito e nascosa,
Nè per altro argumento che non paja.--_Parad._ 17.]

[Footnote 60:

Non creda Monna Berta e Ser Martino
Per vedere un furare, altro offerere,
Vederli dentro al consiglio divino:
Chè quel può surger, e quel può cadere.--_Ibid._ 13.]

[Footnote 61: _Inf._ 6.]

If he is partial, it is no vulgar partiality: friendship and old affection do not venture to exempt from its fatal doom the sin of his famous master, Brunetto Latini;[62] nobleness and great deeds, a kindred character and common wrongs, are not enough to redeem Farinata; and he who could tell her story bowed to the eternal law, and dared not save Francesca. If he condemns by a severer rule than that of the world, he absolves with fuller faith in the possibilities of grace. Many names of whom history has recorded no good, are marked by him for bliss; yet not without full respect for justice. The penitent of the last hour is saved, but he suffers loss. Manfred's soul is rescued; mercy had accepted his tears, and forgiven his great sins; and the excommunication of his enemy did not bar his salvation:

Per lor maladizion sì non si perde
Che non possa tornar l'eterno amore
Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.--_Purg._ 3.

[Footnote 62:

Che in la mente m'è fitta, ed or m'accuora,
_La cara buona imagine paterna._--_Inf._ 15.]

Yet his sin, though pardoned, was to keep him for long years from the perfection of heaven.[63] And with the same independence with which he assigns their fate, he selects his instances--instances which are to be the types of character and its issues. No man ever owned more unreservedly the fascination of greatness, its sway over the imagination and the heart; no one prized more the grand harmony and sense of fitness which there is, when the great man and the great office are joined in one, and reflect each other's greatness. The famous and great of all ages are gathered in the poet's vision; the great names even of fable--Geryon and the giants, the Minotaur and Centaurs, and the heroes of Thebes and Troy. But not the great and famous only: this is too narrow, too conventional a sphere; it is not real enough. He felt, what the modern world feels so keenly, that wonderful histories are latent in the inconspicuous paths of life, in the fugitive incidents of the hour, among the persons whose faces we have seen. The Church had from the first been witness to the deep interest of individual life. The rising taste for novels showed that society at large was beginning to be alive to it. And it is this feeling--that behind the veil there may be grades of greatness but nothing insignificant--that led Dante to refuse to restrict himself to the characters of fame. He will associate with them the living men who have stood round him; they are part of the same company with the greatest. That they have interested him, touched him, moved his indignation or pity, struck him as examples of great vicissitude or of a perfect life, have pleased him, loved him--this is enough why they should live in his poem as they have lived to him. He chooses at will; history, if it has been negligent at the time about those whom he thought worthy of renown, must be content with its loss. He tells their story, or touches them with a word like the most familiar names, according as he pleases. The obscure highway robber, the obscure betrayer of his sister's honour--Rinier da Corneto and Rinier Pazzo, and Caccianimico--are ranked, not according to their obscurity, but according to the greatness of their crimes, with the famous conquerors, and "scourges of God," and seducers of the heroic age, Pyrrhus and Attila, and the great Jason of "royal port, who sheds no tear in his torments."[64] He earns as high praise from Virgil, for his curse on the furious wrath of the old frantic Florentine burgher, as if he had cursed the disturber of the world's peace.[65] And so in the realms of joy, among the faithful accomplishers of the highest trusts, kings and teachers of the nations, founders of orders, sainted empresses, appear those whom, though the world had forgotten or misread them, the poet had enshrined in his familiar thoughts, for their sweetness, their gentle goodness, their nobility of soul; the penitent, the nun, the old crusading ancestor, the pilgrim who had deserted the greatness which he had created, the brave logician, who "syllogised unpalatable truths" in the Quartier Latin of Paris.[66]

[Footnote 63: Charles of Anjou, his Guelf conqueror, is placed above him, in the valley of the kings (_Purg._ 7), "Colui dal maschio naso"--notwithstanding the charges afterwards made against him (_Purg._ 20).]

[Footnote 64: See the magnificent picture, _Inf._ 18.]

[Footnote 65: _Ibid._ 8.]

[Footnote 66: Cunizza, Piccarda, Cacciaguida, Roméo. (_Parad._ 9, 3, 15, 6, 10.)

----La luce eterna di Sigieri
Che leggendo nel vico degli Strami
Sillogizzò invidiosi veri----

in company with S. Thomas Aquinas, in the sphere of the Sun. Ozanam gives a few particulars of this forgotten professor of the "Rue du Fouarre," pp. 320-23.]

There is small resemblance in all this--this arbitrary and imperious tone, this range of ideas, feelings, and images, this unshackled freedom, this harsh reality--to the dreamy gentleness of the _Vita Nuova_, or even the staid argumentation of the more mature _Convito_. The _Vita Nuova_ is all self-concentration--a brooding, not unpleased, over the varying tides of feeling, which are little influenced by the world without; where every fancy, every sensation, every superstition of the lover is detailed with the most whimsical subtlety. The _Commedia_, too, has its tenderness--and that more deep, more natural, more true, than the poet had before adapted to the traditionary formulæ of the "Courts of Love,"--the eyes of Beatrice are as bright, and the "conquering light of her smile;"[67] they still culminate, but they are not alone, in the poet's heaven. And the professed subject of the _Commedia_ is still Dante's own story and life; he still makes himself the central point. And steeled as he is by that high and hard experience of which his poem is the projection and type--"Ben tetragono ai colpi di ventura"--a stern and brief-spoken man, set on objects, and occupied with a theme, lofty and vast as can occupy man's thoughts, he still lets escape ever and anon some passing avowal of delicate sensitiveness,[68] lingers for a moment on some indulged self-consciousness, some recollection of his once quick and changeful mood--"io che son trasmutabil per tutte guise"[69]--or half playfully alludes to the whispered name of a lady,[70] whose pleasant courtesy has beguiled a few days of exile. But he is no longer spell-bound and entangled in fancies of his own weaving--absorbed in the unprofitable contemplation of his own internal sensations. The man is indeed the same, still a Florentine, still metaphysical, still a lover. He returns to the haunts and images of youth, to take among them his poet's crown; but "with other voice and other garb,"[71] a penitent and a prophet--with larger thoughts, wider sympathies, freer utterance; sterner and fiercer, yet nobler and more genuine in his tenderness--as one whom trial has made serious, and keen, and intolerant of evil, but not sceptical or callous; yet with the impressions and memories of a very different scene from his old day-dreams.

[Footnote 67: Vincendo me col lume d'un sorriso.--_Parad._ 18.]

[Footnote 68: For instance, his feeling of distress at gazing at the blind, who were not aware of his presence--