Chapter II: Part 2

The third characteristic of the age of Dante is its chivalry, which placed woman on the highest pedestal she had ever occupied. In literature that unique influence is seen in a new and an exalted conception of love. Love is now coupled with nobility of life. The troubadours had sung of love as a quality belonging to gentle folk, meaning by that phrase the nobility, and nobility had been defined by the Emperor Frederick II, patron of the troubadours, as a combination of ancestral wealth and fine manners. In the Banquet (bk. IV) Dante rejects that definition and transfers nobility from the social to the moral order holding that "nobility exists where virtue dwells."

Love, the flowering of this nobility, may be found in the heart of him even lowest in the social scale provided that he is a virtuous man. It is not an affair solely of gentle blood. It has no pedigree of birth or richness. "In this sense the true lover need not be a _gentleman_ but he must be a _gentle man_, loving not by genteel code of caste but by gentle code of character." (J.B. Fletcher: Dante p. 27.)

Thus Dante makes Guido Guinicelli say: "Love and the gentle heart are one and the same thing." And Dante himself in one of his Canzoni writes:

"Let no man predicate
That aught the name of gentleman should have
Even in a king's estate
Except the heart there be a gentle man's."

Love, Then, Became In Literature Such A Refined Emotion That To Quote Dante: "It Makes Ill Thought To Perish, It Drives Into Foul Hearts A Deadly Chill" And On The Other Hand It Fills Indeed The Lover With Such Delicacy Of Sentiment For His Beloved That She Is His Inspiration To Virtue And The Muse Who Directs His Pen. In Harmony With "The Sweet New Style" Of Sincerity With Which Dante Treats Of Love, Thomas Bernart De Ventadorn Sings:

"It is no wonder if I sing better than any other singer, for my heart draws near to Love and I am a better man for Love's command."

Not in literature alone but in actual life did chivalry exalt "the eternal womanly." In Dante's age, to quote the author of Phases of Thought and Criticism, "Knights passed from land to land in search of adventure, vowed to protect and defend the widow and the orphan and the lonely woman at the hazard of their lives: they went about with a prayer on their lips and in their hearts the image of the lady-love whom they had chosen to serve and to whom they had pledged loyalty and fidelity: they strove to be chaste in body and soul and as a tower of strength for the protection of this spirit of chastity, they were taught to venerate the Virgin Mother Mary and cultivate toward her a tender devotion as the purest and holiest ideal of womanhood. This spirit of chivalry is the ruling spirit of Dante's life and the inspiration of some of his sublimest flights."

All these high achievements of Dante's century are all the more notable in view of the fact that war with its horror and destruction was never absent from those times. Every European country was involved often in war and Asia and Africa were not free from its devastation.

In such stirring times, Dante was born at Florence. A city of flowers and gay festivities, the home of a cultured pleasure-loving people, it was the frequent scene of feuds and factions handed down from sire to son. The hatred they engendered and the desolation they caused may be understood from the reading of Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy whose scene is laid in Verona in the year 1303 and to the families concerned in which Dante makes allusion in the sixth canto of his Purgatorio. But Verona and Florence were not the only cities involved by the militarism of the age. Especially in northern Italy were strife and bloodshed common. Province, city, town, hamlet and even households were torn by internal dissensions, which only complicated the main conflict of that day, viz., the world struggle for supremacy of pope and emperor.

The imperial party called Ghibellines, composed mainly of aristocrats and their followers, aimed to break down the barriers which kept the German Emperor out of Italy, their object being to have him subjugate the whole country, even the states of the Pope. The papal or popular party, known as Guelfs, had as its purpose the independence of Italy--the freedom and alliance of the great cities of the north of Italy and dependence of the center and southern parts on the Roman See. A few months after Dante's death, the Ghibellines, the imperial party, suffered a defeat by the overthrow of King Manfred from which they never recovered. But in Florence for many years they maintained their struggle.

To add to the confusion of the Florentines whose sympathy was mostly Guelf--i.e. favorable to the papal or popular cause--the Guelf party of Florence was divided into two factions, the Bianchi and the Neri, the history of whose tumults often leading to blood and mischief may be known by the frequent allusions of our poet. Embroiled by those feuds, Dante is found not only as a prior among the ruling Bianchi but as a soldier under arms at the battle of Campaldino and at the siege of Caprona. Later when the Neri were restored to power, Dante was banished and never again beheld his beloved city. In exile Dante transferred his allegiance to the Ghibellines though he upheld the Guelf view as to the primacy of the Church. Subsequently he tried, but in vain, to form a party independent of Guelf, Ghibelline, Bianchi or Neri.

May I conclude this chapter by giving you another view of Dante's environment? To point out the degeneracy of Florence, Dante becomes a _laudator acti temporis_ in a picture of the earlier Florence that has never been equalled.

"Florence was abiding in peace, sober and modest. She had not necklace or coronal or women with ornamented shoes or girdle which was more to be looked at than the person. Nor yet did the daughter at her birth give fear to her father, for the time and dowry did not outrun measure on this or that side. She had not houses empty of families. I saw Bellencion Berti go girt with leather and bone and his lady come from the mirror with unpainted face. I saw him of the Nerlo and him of the Vecchio satisfied with unlined skin and their ladies with the spindle and the distaff. O! fortunate women, each was sure of her burial place" (Paradiso IV, 97).

But time changed all that. With her population vastly increased in Dante's day and her commerce on all seas and on every road and her banking system controlling the markets of Europe and the East, Florence had become such a mighty city that Pope Boniface VIII could say to the Florentine embassy who came to Rome to take part in the Jubilee of 1300: "Florence is the greatest of cities. She feeds, clothes, governs us all. Indeed she appears to rule the world. She and her people are, in truth, the fifth element of the universe." (The Guilds of Florence, p. 562.)

Such greatness was attained according to Dante only at the loss of pristine simplicity and virtue. So he apostrophizes his native city: "Rejoice O Florence, since thou art so mighty that thou canst spread thy wings over sea and land and thy name is known throughout Hell." Notorious for crime Florence still kept a big place in her life for religion. There "religion was abused but its beneficial effects continued to be manifest--vice was flagrant but it never lost the sense of shame--men were cruel but their cruelty was followed by sincere regrets--misfortunes were frequent and signal but they were accepted with resignation or with the hope of retrieval or men gloried in them on account of the cause in which they suffered." (Brother Azarias.)

And, meanwhile, side by side with fierce and bloody struggles the creative forces of art and architecture were making marvelous progress before the very eyes of Dante. Niccolo Pisano had finished his Sienna pulpit and with his son was engaged on his immortal works of sculpture. Orcagna had made a wonderful tabernacle for the Florentine church of San Michele, Cimabue had painted the Madonna which is now in the Rucellai chapel. Giotto had completed his work at Assisi and Rome and would soon give to the world the Florentine Campanile. Fra Sisto and Fra Ristoro had built the church Santa Maria Novella at Florence and Arnolfo di Cambio, while Dante was writing sonnets, had begun the duomo or cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. The stout walls and lofty tower of the Bargello had sprung into beauteous being. Santa Croce destined to be the burial place of illustrious Italians, had been built and remains today one of Florence's greatest churches. St. John's Baptistry, _il mio bel Giovanni_, had received its external facing of marble, and in ten years after Dante's death would get its massive bronze doors which are unparalleled in the world.

The century closed with the opening of the great Jubilee at Rome. March twenty-fifth of the following year, 1300, Dante places as the time for his journey through the realms of the unseen--the story of which is told in the Divina Commedia. If sympathy with Dante and his work is not aroused already, perhaps these two quotations may quicken your interest.

Charles Elliot Norton writes: "There are few other works of man, perhaps there is no other, which affords such evidence as the Divine Comedy, of uninterrupted consistency of purpose, of sustained vigor of imagination, and of steady force of character controlling alike the vagaries of the poetic temperament, the wavering of human purpose, the fluctuation of human powers, the untowardness of circumstances. From the beginning to the end of his work of many years there is no flagging of energy, no indication of weakness. The shoulders burdened by a task almost too great for mortal strength, never tremble under their load."

And Dr. Frank Crane, a foremost writer of the syndicate press, says "I have put a good deal of hard labor digging into Dante and while I cannot say that I ever got from him any direct usable material, yet I no more regret my hours spent with him than I regret the beautiful landscapes I have seen, the great music I have heard, the wise and noble souls I have met, the wondrous dreams I have had. These are all a part of one's education, of one's equipment for life and perhaps the best part."

DANTE THE MAN

DANTE THE MAN

Fifty-five years ago when called on for a poem to celebrate the sixth hundredth anniversary of Dante's birth, Tennyson, feeling his own littleness before "this central man of all the world," wrote:

"King, that has reigned six hundred years and grown
In power and ever growest
I, wearing but the garland of a day,
Cast at thy feet one flower that fades away."

New tributes to the genius of Dante will be offered by our generation, for already great preparations are under way in all parts of Italy and the literary world to commemorate in 1921, the six hundredth anniversary of the death of the author of the greatest of all Christian poems. The question naturally suggests itself: Has not the world moved forward many centuries from Dante's viewpoint and lost interest in many things regarded as truths or at least as burning issues by Dante? Who is now concerned with the Ptolomaic system of astronomy, which is so often the subject of Dante's thought? Who is now interested in the tragic jealousies and injustices suffered by the people of Florence which led to the bitter feuds that helped to make Dante the great poet? Who, in this twentieth century so intent upon making the world safe for democracy, has sympathy with Dante's advocated scheme of a world-wide absolute monarchy as the cure for the ills of the society of his day? Is this generation which sees Italy united as a result of the overthrow of the Papal states, so universally concerned with Papal claims which were matters of vital importance to Dante and his generation? Is our era, which unfortunately looks upon religion as a negligible factor and not as the animating principle of life, interested in the golden age of faith of which Dante is the embodiment, and his message in which the eternal is the object?

Yet, Dante's following is today larger than ever before; his empire over minds and hearts is more extensive. The moving pictures feature his Inferno; the press issues, even in languages not his own, such a mass of books and articles concerning him that a specialist can hardly keep track of the output. In the universities, especially of Harvard, Cornell and Columbia, not to speak of those in other lands, the courses on Dante attract an unusually large number of students. Outside of the academic atmosphere there are thousands of readers who still find in his writings, a solace in grief, a strength in temptation, a deep sense of reality, permanent though unseen, of the love of God and of His justice. The reasons are not far away.

"Our poet," says Grandgent "was a many sided genius who has a message for nearly everyone."

Dante's compelling renown among us, is due says Dr. Frank Crane both "to the intrinsic greatness of the man's personality and to the sheer beauty of his craftsmanship."

"The secret of Dante's power" writes James Russell Lowell "is not far to seek. Whoever can express _himself_ with the full force of unconscious sincerity will be found to have uttered something ideal and universal."

Whether one or all these reasons are the true explanation of the twentieth century's great interest in Dante, the fact remains, as Tennyson said, that far from being a waning classic, Dante "in power ever grows," and the interest he calls forth constitutes, as James Bryce observed in his Lowell Institute lectures "the literary phenomenon of England and America."

Now to Dante as the man let us turn. To know the fibre of his manhood will help us to appreciate the genius of his art. "It is needful to know Dante as man" wrote Charles Elliot Norton, "in order fully to appreciate him as poet." The thought is expressed in another way by James Russell Lowell: "The man behind the verse is far greater than the verse itself and Dante is not merely a great poet but an influence, part of the soul's resources in time of trouble. From him the soul learns that 'married to the truth she is a mistress but otherwise a slave shut out of all liberty'" (The Banquet). But that knowledge is dependent upon our intimacy with the life and spirit of Dante. In many other cases the knowledge of the life and personality of an author may not be essential to either our enjoyment or our understanding of his work. In the case of Dante "he faces his own mirror and so appears in the mid-foreground of his reflected word." Before looking into that mirror for Dante's picture, let us first recall some of the established facts in his life and then see what manner of man he appeared to those who were his contemporaries or who lived chronologically near him.

Dante was born in Florence in the year 1265. His father was a notary belonging to an old but decadent Guelph family, his mother, named Bella, was a daughter of Durante Abati, a Ghibelline noble. Whether his own family was regarded among the first families of nobility or not, it is certain that Dante enjoyed the honor of knowing that one of his forebears, Cacciaguida, had been knighted by Emperor Conrad II on the Second Crusade. Precocious Dante must have been, as a boy, with faculties and emotions extraordinarily developed, for in his ninth year, while attending a festal party, he fell in love with a little girl named Beatrice Portinari, eight years old. "Although still a child" to quote Boccaccio his earliest biographer "he received her image into his heart with such affection that from that day forward never so long as he lived, did it depart therefrom." She became the wife of Simone dei Bardi, and died in her twenty-fourth year, the subject of many sonnets from her mystic lover who, if he had never written anything else, would have been entitled, by his book of sonnets, his New Life, to rank as a poet of the first class.

Two years after the death of Beatrice, Dante married Gemma Donati, a member of an old aristocratic family of Florence and by her had four children. In the period between the death of Beatrice and his marriage he had seen military service, having borne arms as a Guelph at the battle of Campaldino (Purg. V, 91-129) in which the Florentines defeated the Ghibelline league of Arezzo and he took part at the siege of Caprona and was present at its surrender by the Pisans (Inf., XXI, 95.) When he was thirty years old he became a member of the Special Council of the Republic, consisting of eight of the best and most influential citizens and in 1300, at the age of thirty-five, midway in the journey of his life, he was elected one of the six Priors (chief magistrates of his city) for the months of June and July. Shortly after this Dante with three others went to Rome on an embassy to Pope Boniface VIII to get that pontiff's veto to the intervention of Charles de Valois, brother of Philip IV of France, in the affairs of Florence. But there was delay in the transaction of the business and that gave the stranger time to win the city by treachery. When the news reached Dante, he hurried homeward. At Sienna he learned that his house had been pillaged and burned and he himself had been accused of malfeasance in office. Without a trial he was condemned to a heavy fine and to perpetual banishment under penalty that if he returned he would be burned alive. Then began his twenty years' exile--years in which he went sometimes almost begging and at all times even when he was an honored guest in the home of nobility--knowing as only an exile can know "how bitter is the bread of dependence and how steep the stranger's stairs." It was during his exile that Dante completed his immortal Divina Commedia, the child of his thought "cradled into poetry by wrong." Dante never again saw Florence for which he yearned with all the intensity of the Hebrew captives weeping on the rivers of Babylon for a sight of Jerusalem. Death came to free his undaunted soul in the year 1321 while he was a guest at Ravenna of Guido Novello da Polenta, a nephew of Francesca da Rimini. At Ravenna the last seat of Roman arts and letters, in a sepulchre attached to the convent of the Franciscan monks, he was buried with the honors due to a saint and a sage. The inscription on his epitaph said to have been composed by him on his deathbed, is paraphrased by Lowell in the following words:

"The rights of Monarchy, the Heavens, the stream of Fire, the Pit
In vision seen, I sang as far as to the Fates seemed fit.
But since my soul, an alien here, hath flown to nobler wars,
And happier now, hath gone to seek its Maker with the stars,
Here am I, Dante, shut, exiled from the ancestral shore
Whom Florence, the fairest of all-least-loving mothers, bore."

Such is the brief outline of the outward life of him of whom Michelangelo declared:

"Ne'er walked the earth a greater man than he."

It will help us to a better understanding of that man if his likeness is impressed upon our memory. The portrait made by his friend Giotto, shows him as a young man perhaps of twenty to twenty-five years, with a face noble, beardless, strong, intelligent and pensive--a face which would not lead one to suspect an appreciation of humor. Yet writers find two distinct forms of that quality--a playfulness in his eclogues and a grotesqueness in certain of his assignments to punishments in Hell. Contrasting with this picture of his early life is the face of his death mask and of the Naples bust, suggesting the lines

"How stern of lineament, how grim
The father was of Tuscan song."

Here we see him mature with strength of character in every feature and a seriousness of mien which shows a man with whom one might not take liberties. It was of Dante in mature life that Boccaccio wrote: "Our poet was of moderate height and after reaching maturity was accustomed to walk somewhat bowed with a slow and gentle pace, clad always in such sober dress as befitted his ripe years. His face was long, his nose aquiline and his eyes rather large than small. His jaws were large and his lower lip protruded beyond the upper. His complexion was dark and his expression very melancholy and thoughtful. His manners, whether in public or at home, were wonderful, composed and restrained, and in all ways he was more courteous and civil than any one else."

Bruni, on the other hand, who wrote a century later describes Dante as if he had in mind Giotto's fresco of the poet. This is Bruni's word-picture: "He was a man of great refinement, of medium height and a pleasant but deeply serious face. It was remarkable that although he studied incessantly, none would have supposed from his happy manner and youthful way of speaking that he had studied at all." However well these pictures may visualize the poet for us, I cannot help thinking that Dante himself, after the manner of great artists who paint their own pictures, gives us a far better portrait of himself. What we know of him from others is as nothing compared to the revelation he has made of himself in his writings. For, as Dr. Zahm, in his Great Inspirers, has said: "Dante, although the most concealing of men was, paradoxical as it may seem, the most self-revealing." The indirect recorder of his own life, he discloses to us an intimate view of his spiritual struggles, of the motives which actuated him, of the passions he experienced, not to speak of the judgments he formed upon all great questions. "So true is this that if it were possible to meet him, we should feel that he was an intimate friend who had never concealed anything from us--who had discoursed with us on all subjects; science, literature, philosophy, theology, love, poetry, happiness, the world to come and all that of which it most imports us to have accurate knowledge." Let us then see the man as reflected in his writings.

First of all he reveals himself as a man profoundly animated by religion. He is not a Huysmanns or a François Coppée, a Brunetiere, a Paul Bourget, forsaking the religious teachings of his youth only to embrace them in mature life. Never for a moment did he deflect from the Catholic doctrine, though his studies led him to the consideration of the most subtle arguments raised against it. He was indeed the defender and champion of faith, having no sympathy for a mind which would lose itself in seeking the solution of the incomprehensible mysteries of religion. So he has Virgil say:

"Insensate he who thinks with mortal ken
To pierce Infinitude which doth enfold
Three persons in one substance. Seek not, then,
O Mortal race, for reasons, but believe
And be content, for had all been seen
No need there was for Mary to conceive.
Men have ye known who thus desired in vain
And whose desires, that might at rest have been,
Now constitute a source of endless pain.
Plato, the Stagerite, and many more
I here allude to. Then his head he bent,
Was silent and a troubled aspect wore."
(Purg., III, 34.)

Guided by the wisdom he thus enunciated Dante from youth to death maintained a child-like faith that satisfied his intellect and animated his sentiments. His faith really grew into a passion. His fidelity to the truth of the doctrines of the Church or to the sacred offices of the papacy was never shaken either by the scandals of clerical life or the opposition of different popes to his political ideals. Frequently he raised his voice in protest yet, notwithstanding his censures against what he considered abuses in the external administration of the Church and the policy of her popes, on his part there was not the least suspicion of unsettled faith or revolutionary design. Strongly convinced of the divinity of the Church, his passionate nature could not help execrating the human element that would weaken her influence. "He teaches that the mystical Vine of the Church still grows and Peter and Paul who died for it, still live. He holds by that Church. He begs Christians not to be moved feather-like by every wind of doctrine. 'You have' he tells them 'the Old Testament and the New. The Pastor of the Church guides you, let this suffice for your salvation'" (Brother Azarias). In his devotional life Dante is just as ardent as he is firm in his adherence to dogma. While all Catholics are held to profess a common creed, each may follow the bent of his disposition and sympathy in pious practices, theologically called devotions. It seems to me that Dante had three such devotions which he practised intensely in his inner life.

First, devotion to the sacred Humanity of Christ. In eleven places does he speak at length of Christ's two-fold nature as God and Man; in ten places does he refer to Christ as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, and wherever Cristo occurs at the end of a line, Dante out of reverence for the Sacred Person does not rime with it, but repeats the name itself. The climax of the Purgatorio is the apparition of the Griffin, the symbol of Christ. Further, on the stellar white cross of red-glowing Mars the poet shows the figure of the Redeemer. In the Empyrean Christ is represented in the unveiled glory of His human and divine natures. So teaching the doctrine of the Incarnation most clearly and most ardently Dante seeks to promote this cultus as the soul of the Catholic religion.

Dante's second special devotion is to the Blessed Virgin. His Paradiso contains the best treatise on Mariology. The whole Divine Comedy indeed is the poet's loving testimonial of gratitude to the Madonna. It was through Mary that his visionary voyage to the other world was made possible. She rescued him when he was enslaved by sin and sent as his successive guides Virgil, Beatrice and St. Bernard. She of all creatures is proclaimed on every terrace of Purgatory first in virtue and highest in dignity and her example is exhibited as an unfailing source of inspiration to the Souls, to endure suffering cheerfully and to make themselves, like her, the exemplars of goodness in the highest degree. In Paradiso she is seen by the poet in all her unspeakable loveliness and beatitude and as Queen of Angels and of Saints her intercession is favorably invoked that Dante might enjoy the Vision of God himself. In the last canto of the poem her super-eminence and incomparable excellence are sung "with a sweetness of expression, a depth of philosophy and a tenderness of feeling that have never been surpassed in human language."

"Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son,
Humble and high beyond all other creatures,
The limit fixed of the eternal counsel;
Thou art the one who such nobility
To human nature gave that its Creator
Did not disdain to make Himself its creature.
Within thy womb rekindled was the love
By heat of which in the eternal peace,
After such wise, this flower was germinated.
Here unto us thou art a noonday torch
Of charity, and below there among mortals
Thou art the living fountainhead of hope.

Lady, thou art so great and so prevailing,
That he who wishes grace nor runs to thee,
His aspirations without wings would fly.
Not only thy benignity gives succor
To him who asketh it, but oftentimes
Forerunneth of its own accord the asking.
In thee compassion is, in thee is pity,
In thee magnificence; in thee unites
Whatever of goodness is in any creature."

The third private devotion of Dante is devotion to the Souls in Purgatory--a pious practice founded upon the scriptural words: "It is a holy and a wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins." Not only does Dante answer the objection raised as to the efficacy of prayer offered for the souls in Purgatory (VI, 28) but in many passages he promises his own prayers and works and seeks to arouse in others on earth a helpful sympathy for those souls. "Truly" he says, "we ought to help them to wash away their stains which they have borne hence, so that, pure and light, they may go forth to the starry spheres," (Purg. VI, 34.)

To sum up Dante's attachment to his religion we can truly say not only his life but his great poem radiates the spirit and doctrine of the Church. Hettinger says of Dante: "In truth he anticipated the most pregnant developments of Catholic doctrine, mastered its subtlest distinctions and treated its hardest problems with almost faultless accuracy. Were all the libraries in the world destroyed and the Sacred Scripture with them, the whole Catholic system of doctrine and morals might be almost reconstructed out of the Divina Commedia."

Intensity, indeed, is the characteristic of Dante's spiritual life. In bringing that quality to his faith and religious practice he was only manifesting the operation of the dominating quality which regulated his whole life and shaped all his mental and emotional habits. The realm of his thought and feeling was truly the land of the strenuous life. Having once set out to say of Beatrice what had never been said of any woman, Dante applied himself to his prodigious task with a consistency of purpose that was unmoved by persecution and unshaken by time. In all the years that he spent in the composition of the Divina Commedia there was no flagging of interest, no indication of weakness. No one ever applied himself with more complete absorption or with greater power of unfaltering concentration, just as no one ever felt more deeply the outrageous arrows of fortune or the transcendent supremacy of love. It is precisely because of this intensity that his thoughts and feelings affect us so profoundly six centuries later.

Intense in his own life Dante had no sympathy with slackers or the lukewarm whom he characterizes as never having been alive, i.e. of never having awakened to responsibility to take part in good or evil. As a consequence they never contributed anything to society. Because in this life they shifted from one side to another, they are now depicted running perpetually after an aimlessly dodging banner. Here is the description of the punishment of the lukewarm:

"Now sighs, cries, and shrill shrieks rang through the starless air: Whereat at first I began to weep, strange tongues, hurried speech, words of pain, accents of wrath, voices loud and weak, and the sound of hands accompanying them, made a tumult which revolves forever in that air endlessly dark, like sands blowing before a whirlwind. And I, whose head was hooded with horror, exclaimed: 'Master, what is it I hear? What kind of people is it that seems so vanquished by grief? And he replied: 'This is the miserable way followed by the sorry souls of those who lived without infamy and without glory. They are mingled with the mean choir of those angels who were not rebels and were not faithful to God, but were for themselves. Heaven cast them out lest its beauty should be spoiled; and deep Hell will not receive them, because the damned might derive some satisfaction from them.'

"'Master,' I said, 'what is so grievous to them which makes them complain so loud?' 'I shall tell thee right briefly' he answered. 'These people have no hope of death and their blind life's so vile that they are envious of any other lot. The world allows no report of them to last: mercy and justice disdain them. Let us not speak of them but look and pass by!' And I, looking, saw a banner which ran circling so swift that it seemed scornful of all rest: and after it there came trailing such a long train of people that I should never have thought death had undone so many. When I had made out one or two of them I saw and recognized the shade of him who, for cowardice, made the great refusal. Forthwith I understood and was convinced that this was the sect of poltroons, obnoxious both to God and to God's enemies. These luckless creatures who never had been really alive, were naked and badly stung by flies and wasps which were there. These insects streaked their faces with blood which, mixed with tears, was caught by disgusting worms at their feet--" (Inferno III, 33. Grandgent's translation.) In reading that description of the punishment of the lukewarm, one cannot fail to observe that not one is called by name. Because they "lived without infamy and without glory" their name deserves to be lost forever to the world.

Of the renown of Dante's own name our poet has no misgivings. He reveals himself as a man having supreme confidence in his own powers. Boccaccio represents him as saying when he was with his party at the head of the government of the republic of Florence, and when there was question of sending him on an embassy to Rome, "If I go, who stays? And if I stay, who goes?" "As if he alone," is the comment of Boccaccio, "was worth among them all, and as if the others were nothing worth except through him." It is certain that Dante put a high valuation upon his genius, an estimate due, perhaps, to the belief he held, like Napoleon, in the potency of his star. He was born under the constellation of the Gemini and to them in gratitude for his self-recognized talent he gives praise:

"O glorious stars, O light impregnated
With mighty virtue, from which I acknowledge
All of my genius whatso'er it be,
With you was born, and hid himself with you,
He who is father of all mortal life,
When first I tasted of the Tuscan air."
(Par. XXII, 112)

Certain it is that Dante acted on the counsel which, addressed to himself, he puts into the mouth of his beloved teacher, Brunetto Latini, "Follow thy star and thou cans't not miss the glorious port." (Inf., XV, 55.) In Purgatorio Dante says: "My name as yet marks no great sound," but he boasts that he will surpass in fame the Guidos, writers of verse: "Perchance some one is already born who will drive both from out the nest." He is so sure that posterity will confer immortality upon his work that he does not hesitate to make himself sixth among the greatest writers of the world. This passage occurs when he enters Limbus accompanied by Virgil to whom a group of spirits, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, make salutation. (Inf., IV, 76.) Posterity has bestowed greater renown on Dante's name than even he presumed to hope, for it has placed him in the Court of Letters with only one of the writers of antiquity, Homer, and with two subsequent writers, Cervantes and Shakespeare.

Naturally we think that a writer who was so positively confident and boastful of his powers must have been given to pride and Dante indeed plainly indicates to us that he was guilty of this. But it was pride, we think, that was honorable and not a vice, a pride of which a lesser light, Lacordaire says, "By the grace of God, I abhor mediocrity." In the dark wood Dante represents the Lion (Pride) as preventing him from ascending the mountain--"He seemed to be coming to me with head upreared and with such raging hunger, that the air appeared to be in fear of him." (Inf., I, 43.)

And that the poet's trepidation was justified he later makes known (Purg. XI, 136) when he expresses the fear that for pride he may be eternally punished. Perhaps it was because Dante recognized the pride of his learning, of his ancestry, of his associations with distinguished personages as his besetting sin that he exercised his skill as a master in showing us profound imagery representing the characteristics of pride. Carved out of the mountain in the first circle of a terrace of Purgatory are scenes illustrative of humility. While looking on these scenes, which seem to live and speak in their beautiful and compelling reality, the poet turns and sees approaching the forms of the proud. On earth they had exalted themselves as if they had the weight of the world on their shoulders, so now they are seen bent under huge burdens of stone, crumpled up in postures of agonizing discomfort. The poet, to let us know that he shares in their punishment, says:

"With equal pace as oxen in the yoke,
I, with that laden spirit, journey'd on
Long as the mild instructor suffer'd me."
(Purg. XII, 1)

He apostrophizes them, but the words are really an upbraiding of himself for pride.

"O ye proud Christians, wretched weary ones,
Who in the vision of the mind infirm,
Confidence have in your backsliding steps,
Do ye not comprehend that we are worms
Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly
That flieth unto judgment without screen?
Who floats aloft your spirit high in air?
Like are ye unto insects undeveloped
Even as the worm in whom formation fails!
As to sustain a ceiling or a roof
In place of corbel, sometimes a figure
Is seen to join unto its knees its breast
Which makes of the unreal, real anguish
Arise in him who sees it: fashioned thus
Beheld I these, when I had ta'en good heed
True is it, they were more or less bent down
According as they were more or less laden
And he who had most patience on his looks
Weeping did seem to say I can no more."
(Purg. X, 121)

Like all great men of undoubted sincerity Dante was intellectually big enough to change his mind when a new view presented itself in condemnation of an earlier judgment. So his "Vernacular Composition" retracts a statement he had made in the New Life where he had held that as amatory poems were addressed to ladies ignorant of Latin, Love should be the only subject the poet ought to present in the vernacular. He learned later and published his new view that there is good precedent for treating in the vulgar tongue not only Love but also Righteousness and War.

Other examples of his honesty of mind are furnished in the Paradise where he expresses through the mouths of his disembodied teachers views opposed to those he had already advanced in his other works. Thus his theory of the spots on the moon, his statement as to the respective rank of the angelic orders, his assumption that Hebrew was the language of Adam and Eve--all yield to a maturer conception in contradiction to his original views. He is, it is true, sometimes blinded by partisanship or lacking in the historical perspective necessary for a true judgment of his contemporaries--but Dante is naturally so sincere a man that he is eager to be just to every one. Perhaps there is no better instance of the exercise of this quality than in his assigning to the heaven of Jupiter, Constantine, to whose supposed donation of vast territories, then regarded as genuine, Dante ascribes the corruption of the Church.

Many readers, whose acquaintance with our poet does not extend beyond the Inferno, see in him only the incarnation of savagery and scorn. They fail to pay tribute to the wonderful power of his friendship or to recognize that his sufferings of adversity and injustice gave birth to deep passion. To them he seems only to place his few friends in Heaven and in Hell to roast all his enemies. It must be at once confessed that there are instances in the Divina Commedia which, taken by themselves, would lead one to so superficial an estimate of the man. In Canto VIII of the Inferno Dante with his guide, Virgil, enters a bark on the Styx and sails across the broad marsh. During the passage a spirit all covered with mud addresses Dante, who recognizes him as Filippo Argenti, a Florentine notorious for his arrogance and brutal violence. "Master," says Dante to Virgil, "I should be glad to see him dipped in this swill ere we quit the lake." And he to me, 'Before the shore comes to thy view thou shalt be satisfied.' A little while after this I saw the muddy people make such a rending of him that even now I praise and thank God for it. Such gloating over suffering surely seems to say to you: Here we have a man of a cruel vindictive nature.

Again, in the ice of Caina, the region where traitors are immersed up to their heads, Dante hits his foot violently against the face of Bocca degli Abati who betrayed the Florentines at the crucial battle of Montaperti. "Weeping it cried out to me: 'Why tramplest thou on me? If thou comest not to increase the vengeance for Montaperti, why dost thou molest me?' I said: 'What art thou who thus reproachest others?' 'Nay who art thou' he answered 'that through the Antenora goest, smiting the cheeks of others, so that if thou wert alive, it were too much.' 'I am alive' was my reply 'and if thou seekest fame, it may be precious to thee, that I put thy name among the other notes.' And he to me. 'The contrary is what I long for, take thyself away!' Then I seized him by the afterscalp and said: 'It will be necessary that thou name thyself or that not a hair remain upon thee here.' Whence he to me: 'Even if thou unhair me I will not tell thee who I am.' I already had his hair coiled on my hand and had plucked off more than one tuft of it, he barking and keeping down his eyes, when another cried, 'What ails thee Bocca?' Having thus learned the sinner's name, the poet releases him, saying: 'accursed traitor I do not want thee to speak, for to thy shame I will bear true tidings'" (Inf., XXXII, 97.) Some may say that it is to Dante's shame that he shows himself so devoid of pity.

Another example would seem to confirm this startling view of Dante's character. At the bottom of Hell, eager to learn the identity of a reprobate, a certain Friar Albergo, the poet promises him in return for the desired information to remove the ice from his eyes so that he may have "the poor consolation of grief unchecked."

"Remove the hard veils from my face that I may vent the grief which stuffs my heart, a little ere the weeping freeze again! Wherefore I said to him. 'If thou woulds't have me aid thee, tell me who thou art, and if I do not extricate thee, may I have to go to the bottom of the ice.'" The poet of course knows that he must go thither to continue his journey to Purgatory, but the reprobate soul is unaware of such a course, and believes that the visitor has fortified his promise with a true oath. Both his name and the damning story of his life are soon told by the poor wretch, who then asks Dante for the fulfillment of the promise--the removal of the ice so that sight may be restored even for a minute. "'Open my eyes' he said--but I opened them not, to be rude to him was courtesy" (Inf., XXXIII, 148.) Does not Dante by his own words show himself deep-dyed in hatred and cruelty?

"The case against him" says Dinsmore, "is not so bad as the first reading would indicate. Part of the explanation of his apparent cruelty undoubtedly lies in the fact that the poet would teach us that character is influenced by environment. In the circle of wrath, he is wrathful, in the pit of traitors he is false. Then we are to recall that Dante undoubtedly laid to heart Virgil's reproof, when he wept at the sad punishment of the soothsayers: 'Who is more wicked than he who feels compassion at the Divine Judgment.' Passionate love of God, Dante holds, implies passionate hatred of God's enemies. That is a thought expressed by the Psalmist. 'Lord, have I not hated them that hate thee and pined away because of thy enemies? I have hated them with a perfect hatred and they are become enemies to me' (CXXXVIII, 21). So it may be said that Dante has the spirit of the psalmist and seeks to love, as God loves, and to hate as God hates."

Whether that explanation satisfy my readers or not, there is another side to Dante's character that is most attractive. "Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn," he was a paradox,--gentle and tender. Failure to see this phase of Dante's nature led Frederick Schlegel to declare that Dante's "chief defect is the want of gentle feelings"--a statement that called forth this exclamation from Lord Byron: "Of gentle feelings. And Francesca of Rimini and the father's feelings in Ugolino and Beatrice and the Pia! Why there is a gentleness in Dante above all gentleness when he is tender!"

Let us see some examples of this tender quality in our poet. Only one endowed with gentleness and beauty of soul, could have conceived a Purgatory "not hot with sulphurous flames" remarks Dinsmore, "but healing the wounded spirit with the light of shimmering sea, the glories of morning, the perfume of flowers, the touch of angels, the living forms of art and the sweet strains of music."

Only a man of warm-heartedness and delicate susceptibility at the sight of a row of souls, temporarily blinded, would have been touched to such an extent that he would be filled with anxiety lest in looking upon them and silently passing them by who could not return his gaze, he would show them some discourtesy.

"It were a wrong, methought, to pass and look
On others, yet myself, the while unseen,
To my sage counsel therefore did I turn."
(Purg. XIII,73)

Gentleness also reveals itself in lovely lines wherein the poet speaks of the relations of parent and child. He tells us, for instance, how

"An infant seeks his mother's breast
When fear and anguish vex his troubled heart."
(Purg. XXX.)

He recalls how he himself with child-like sorrow stood confessing his sins:

"As little children, dumb with shame's keen smart,
Will listening stand with eyes upon the ground
Owning their faults with penitential heart
So then stood I."
(Purg. XXXI, 66)

When overcome by the splendor of the heaven Saturn it is as a child he turns to Beatrice for assurance:

"Oppressed with stupor, I unto my guide
Turned like a little child who always runs
For refuge there where he confideth most,
And she, even as a mother who straightway
Gives comfort to her pale and breathless boy
With voice whose wont is to reassure him,
Said to me: 'Knowest thou not thou art in heaven?'"
(Par. XXII, I)

Again, it is the gentle heart of a fond father who speaks in the following lines:

"Awaking late, no little innocent
So sudden plunges towards its mother's breast
With face intent upon its nourishment
As I did bend."
(Par. XXX, 85, Grandgent's trans.)

Another figure of beautiful imagery makes us appreciate Dante's understanding of infantile emotion. He is eager to tell us how bright souls flame upward towards the Virgin Mother and here is the simile:

"And as a babe which stretches either arm
To reach its mother, after it is fed
Showing a heart with sweet affection warm,
Thus every flaming brightness reared its head
And higher, higher straining, by its act
The love it bore to Mary plainly said."
(Par. XXIII, 121 Grandgent's trans.)

Perhaps the most appealing example of Dante's kindly love for children springs from the fact that instead of following the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, who holds that in heaven the risen bodies of baby children will appear in the aspect of the prime of life, our poet discloses them with the charm of babyhood carrolling, as it were, the nursery songs of Heaven. Of those blessed infants he speaks:

"Their youth, those little faces plainly tell,
Their childish treble voices tell it, too,
If thou but use thine eyes and listen well."
(Par. XXXII, 46. Grandgent's trans.)

Seeing so many examples of Dante's love for motherhood and children, one naturally wonders why he makes no mention of his own wife and children. But we have only to remember that a nice sense of delicacy may have restrained him from speaking of the sacredness of his family life. In this matter he exhibited the wisdom of the gentleman-Saint, Francis de Sales, who used to say, "Without necessity never speak of yourself well or ill." It was indeed a principle of propriety with our poet that talking about one's self in public is to be avoided as unbecoming unless there is need of self vindication or edification of others. Only once in the Divine Comedy does he mention his own name and at once he apologizes for the intrusion. It is true that the poem is autobiographical but it is that in so far as it concerns matters of universal interest from which the poet may draw the moral that what God has done for him He will do for all men if they will but let Him. That being so it was not necessary for him to exploit his family affairs.

Out of the kindly heart of Dante sprang gratitude, one of the strongest virtues of his being. He never wearies in pouring forth thanks to his Maker for the gift of creation and His fatherly care of all beings in the universe. He is filled with unbounded gratitude to the Saviour for having become man and for having suffered and died for our salvation instead of taking an easier way of satisfying divine justice. In his works he mentions the name or the offices of the Holy Ghost eight times. To the Blessed Virgin, the saints and especially to Beatrice for their virtuous example and loving protection he is heartily grateful. His thankful affection is extended to those who showed him kindness particularly during the years of his homeless poverty. To them he offers the only thing he has to give--an undying tribute of praise. Tenderly he makes known his obligations to all those who taught him, both the teachers of his own day and the masters of past ages. But it is to Virgil, his ideal author, the guide whom he has chosen for his journey through Hell and Purgatory, that he offers his most touching tribute of gratitude. The occasion arises when he discovers his beloved Beatrice in the Garden of Eden and turns to Virgil to tell him of his overwhelming joy. But behold! his guide has vanished, his mission fulfilled. And all the joys of the earthly Paradise, originally forfeited by the sin of Eve, cannot compensate the disciple for the loss of his great master. In loneliness he weeps, staining again his face that had been washed clean with dew by Virgil when they emerged from Hell. Is there not genuine pathos in these lines?

"Virgil was gone! and we were all bereft!
Virgil my sweetest sire! Virgil who led
My soul to safety, when no hope was left.
Not all our ancient mother forfeited,
All Eden, could prevent my dew cleansed cheek
From changing whiteness to a tearful red."
(Purg. XXX, 45, Grandgent's trans.)

One quality is still necessary to complete the picture which our poet gives of himself. So far we see him as a man of strong faith, of abiding intensity--a man having supreme confidence in himself with resulting pride of life, a man big with splendid sincerity and dowered with deep passion, yet manifesting a gentle, gracious and grateful spirit. So composed, he is a combination of virtues that may inspire and traits that may attract many readers. But this is not the finished picture of the strangely fascinating man who has for six hundred years exercised an irresistible sway over hearts and minds. What feature is lacking? The one which has made him master over willing subjects who love and admire him whether they live in a monarchy or republic, a hovel or a palace, whether they are of his faith or alien to it. Because the world ever loves a lover, and because Dante is The Lover _par excellence_ whose love-story is one "to which heaven and earth have put their hand," he stands forth with a hold on humanity that is both enduring and supreme.