Chapter XV: Part 15

It is very difficult to determine with exactness the order and the place of Dante's wanderings. Many cities and castles in Italy have claimed the honour of giving him shelter, or of being for a time the home of his inspired muse. He certainly spent some time with Count Guido Salvatico in the Casentino near the sources of the Arno, probably in the castle of Porciano, and with Uguccione in the castle of Faggiuola in the mountains of Urbino. After this he is said to have visited the university of Bologna; and in August 1306 we find him at Padua. Cardinal Napoleon Orsini, the legate of the French pope Clement V., had put Bologna under a ban, dissolved the university and driven the professors to the northern city. In May or June 1307 the same cardinal collected the Whites at Arezzo and tried to induce the Florentines to recall them. The name of Dante is found attached to a document signed by the Whites in the church of St Gaudenzio in the Mugello. This enterprise came to nothing. Dante retired to the castle of Moroello Malespina in the Lunigiana, where the marble ridges of the mountains of Carrara descend in precipitous slopes to the Gulf of Spezzia. From this time till the arrival of the emperor Henry VII. in Italy, October 1310, all is uncertain. His old enemy Corso Donati had at last allied himself with Uguccione della Faggiuola, the leader of the Ghibellines. Dante thought it possible that this might lead to his return. But in 1308 Corso was declared a traitor, attacked in his house, put to flight and killed. Dante lost his last hope. He left Tuscany, and went to Can Grande della Scala at Verona. From this place it is thought that he visited the university of Paris (1309), studied in the rue du Fouarre and went on into the Low Countries. That he ever crossed the Channel or went to Oxford, or himself saw where the heart of Henry, son of Richard, earl of Cornwall, murdered by his cousin Guy of Montfort in 1271, was "still venerated on the Thames," may safely be disbelieved. The only evidence for it is in the _Commentary_ of John of Serravalle, bishop of Fermo, who lived a century later, had no special opportunity of knowing, and was writing for the benefit of two English bishops. The election in 1308 of Henry of Luxemburg as emperor stirred again his hopes of a deliverer. At the end of 1310, in a letter to the princes and people of Italy, he proclaimed the coming of the saviour; at Milan he did personal homage to his sovereign. The Florentines made every preparation to resist the emperor. Dante wrote from the Casentino a letter dated the 31st of March 1311, in which he rebuked them for their stubbornness and obstinacy. Henry still lingered in Lombardy at the siege of Cremona, when Dante, on the 16th of April 1311, in a celebrated epistle, upbraided his delay, argued that the crown of Italy was to be won on the Arno rather than on the Po, and urged the tarrying emperor to hew the rebellious Florentines like Agag in pieces before the Lord. Henry was as deaf to this exhortation as the Florentines themselves. After reducing Lombardy he passed from Genoa to Pisa, and on the 29th of June 1312 was crowned by some cardinals in the church of St John Lateran at Rome; the Vatican being in the hands of his adversary King Robert of Naples. Then at length he moved towards Tuscany by way of Umbria. Leaving Cortona and Arezzo, he reached Florence on the 19th of September. He did not dare to attack it, but returned in November to Pisa. In the summer of the following year he prepared to invade the kingdom of Naples; but in the neighbourhood of Siena he caught a fever and died at the monastery of Buonconvento, on the 24th of August 1313. He lies in the Campo Santo of Pisa; and the hopes of Dante and his party were buried in his grave.

Old age and death.

After the death of the emperor Henry (Bruni tells us) Dante passed the rest of his life as an exile, sojourning in various places throughout Lombardy, Tuscany and the Romagna, under the protection of various lords, until at length he retired to Ravenna, where he ended his life. Very little can be added to this meagre story. There is reason for supposing that he stayed at Gubbio with Bosone dei Rafaelli, and tradition assigns him a cell in the monastery of Sta Croce di Fonte Avellana in the same district, situated on the slopes of Catria, one of the highest peaks of the Apennines in that region. After the death of the French pope, Clement V., he addressed a letter, dated the 14th of July 1314, to the cardinals in conclave, urging them to elect an Italian pope. About this time he came to Lucca, then lately conquered by his friend Uguccione. Here he completed the last cantos of the _Purgatory_, which he dedicated to Uguccione, and here he must have become acquainted with Gentucca, whose name had been whispered to him by her countryman on the slopes of the Mountain of Purification (_Purg._ xxiv. 37). That the intimacy between the "world-worn" poet and the young married lady (who is thought to be identifiable with Gentucca Morla, wife of one Cosciorino Fondora) was other than blameless, is quite incredible. In August 1315 was fought the battle of Monte Catini, a day of humiliation and mourning for the Guelphs. Uguccione made but little use of his victory; and the Florentines marked their vengeance on his adviser by condemning Dante yet once again to death if he ever should come into their power. In the beginning of the following year Uguccione lost both his cities of Pisa and Lucca. At this time Dante was offered an opportunity of returning to Florence. The conditions given to the exiles were that they should pay a fine and walk in the dress of humiliation to the church of St John, and there do penance for their offences. Dante refused to tolerate this shame; and the letter is still extant in which he declines to enter Florence except with honour, secure that the means of life will not fail him, and that in any corner of the world he will be able to gaze at the sun and the stars, and meditate on the sweetest truths of philosophy. He preferred to take refuge with his most illustrious protector Can Grande della Scala of Verona, then a young man of twenty-five, rich, liberal and the favoured head of the Ghibelline party. His name has been immortalized by an eloquent panegyric in the seventeenth canto of the _Paradiso_. Whilst on a visit at the court of Verona he maintained, on the 20th of January 1320, the philosophical thesis _De aqua et terra_, on the levels of land and water, which is included in his minor works. The last three years of his life were spent at Ravenna, under the protection of Guido da Polenta. In his service Dante undertook an embassy to the Venetians. He failed in the object of his mission, and, returning disheartened and broken in spirit through the unhealthy lagoons, caught a fever and died in Ravenna on the 14th of September 1321. His bones still repose there. His doom of exile has been reversed by the union of Italy, which has made the city of his birth and the various cities of his wanderings component members of a common country. His son Piero, who wrote a commentary on the _Divina Commedia_, settled as a lawyer in Verona, and died in 1364. His daughter Beatrice lived as a nun in Ravenna, dying at some time between 1350 (when Boccaccio brought her a present of ten gold crowns from a Florentine gild) and 1370. His direct line became extinct in 1509.

Divina Commedia.

_Dante's Works._--Of Dante's works, that by which he is known to all the educated world, and in virtue of which he holds his place as one of the half-dozen greatest writers of all time, is of course the _Commedia_. (The epithet _divina_, it may be noted, was not given to the poem by its author, nor does it appear on a title-page until 1555, in the edition of Ludovico Dolce, printed by Giolito; though it is applied to the poet himself as early as 1512.) The poem is absolutely unique in literature; it may safely be said that at no other epoch of the world's history could such a work have been produced. Dante was steeped in all the learning, which in its way was considerable, of his time; he had read the _Summa Theologica_ of Aquinas, the _Tresor_ of his master Brunetto, and other encyclopaedic works available in that age; he was familiar with all that was then known of the Latin classical and post-classical authors. Further, he was a deep and original political thinker, who had himself borne a prominent part in practical politics. He was born into a generation in which almost every man of education habitually wrote verse, as indeed their predecessors had been doing for the last fifty years. Vernacular poetry had come late into Italy, and had hitherto, save for a few didactic or devotional treatises hitched into rough rhyme, been exclusively lyric in form. Amatory at first, later, chiefly in the hands of Guittone of Arezzo and Guido Cavalcanti, taking an ethical and metaphysical tone, it had never fully shaken off the Provencal influence under which it had started, and of which Dante himself shows considerable traces.

The age also was unique, though the two great events which made the 15th century a turning-point in the world's history--the invention of printing and the discovery of the new world (to which might perhaps be added the intrusion of Islam into Europe)--were still far in the future. But the age was essentially one of great men; of free thought and free speech; of brilliant and daring action, whether for good or evil. It is easy to understand how Dante's bitterest scorn is reserved for those "sorry souls who lived without infamy and without renown, displeasing to God and to His enemies."

The time was thus propitious for the production of a great imaginative work, and the man was ready who should produce it. It called for a prophet, and the prophet said, "Here am I." "Dante," says an acute writer, "is not, as Homer is, the father of poetry springing in the freshness and simplicity of childhood out of the arms of mother earth; he is rather, like Noah, the father of a second poetical world, to whom he pours forth his prophetic song fraught with the wisdom and the experience of the old world." Thus the _Commedia_, though often classed for want of a better description among epic poems, is totally different in method and construction from all other poems of that kind. Its "hero" is the narrator himself; the incidents do not modify the course of the story; the place of episodes is taken by theological or metaphysical disquisitions; the world through which the poet takes his readers is peopled, not with characters of heroic story, but with men and women known personally or by repute to him and those for whom he wrote. Its aim is not to delight, but to reprove, to rebuke, to exhort; to form men's characters by teaching them what courses of life will meet with reward, what with penalty, hereafter; "to put into verse," as the poet says, "things difficult to think." For such new matter a new vehicle was needed. We have Bembo's authority for believing that the _terza rima_, surpassed, if at all, only by the ancient hexameter, as a measure equally adaptable to sustained narrative, to debate, to fierce invective, to clear-cut picture and to trenchant epigram, was first employed by Dante.

The action of the _Commedia_ opens in the early morning of the Thursday before Easter, in the year 1300. The poet finds himself lost in a forest, escaping from which he has his way barred by a wolf, a lion and a leopard. All this, like the rest of the poem, is highly symbolical. This branch of the subject is too vast to be entered on at any length here; but so far as this passage is concerned it may be said that it seems to indicate that at this period of his life, about the age of thirty-five, Dante went through some experience akin to what is now called "conversion." Having led up till then the ordinary life of a cultivated Florentine of good family; taking his part in public affairs, military and civil, as an hereditary member of the predominant Guelph party; dallying in prose which with all its beauty and passion is full of the conceits familiar to the 13th century, and in verse which save for the excellence of its execution differs in no way from that of his predecessors, with the memory of his lost love; studying more seriously, perhaps, than most of his associates; possibly travelling a little,--gradually or suddenly he became convinced that all was not well with him, and that not by leading, however blamelessly, the "active" life could he save his soul. The strong vein of mysticism, found in so many of the deepest thinkers of that age, and conspicuous in Dante's mind, no doubt played its part. His efforts to free himself from the "forest" of worldly cares were impeded by the temptations of the world--cupidity (including ambition), the pride of life and the lusts of the flesh, symbolized by the three beasts. But a helper is at hand. Virgil appears and explains that he has a commission from three ladies on high to guide him. The ladies are the Blessed Virgin, St Lucy (whom for some reason never yet explained Dante seems to have regarded as in a special sense his protector) and Beatrice. In Virgil we are apparently intended to see the symbol of what Dante calls philosophy, what we should rather call natural religion; Beatrice standing for theology, or rather revealed religion. Under Virgil's escort Dante is led through the two lower realms of the next world, Hell and Purgatory; meeting on the way with many persons illustrious or notorious in recent or remoter times, as well as many well enough known then in Tuscany and the neighbouring states; but who, without the immortality, often unenviable, that the poet has conferred on them, would long ago have been forgotten. Popes, kings, emperors, poets and warriors, Florentine citizens of all degrees, are there found; some doomed to hopeless punishment, others expiating their offences in milder torments, and looking forward to deliverance in due time. It is remarkable to notice how rarely, if ever, Dante allows political sympathy or antagonism to influence him in his distribution of judgment. Hell is conceived as a vast conical hollow, reaching to the centre of the earth. It has three great divisions, corresponding to Aristotle's three classes of vices, incontinence, brutishness and malice. The first are outside the walls of the city of Dis; the second, among whom are included unbelievers, tyrants, suicides, unnatural offenders, usurers, are within; the first apparently on the same level as those without, the rest separated from them by a steep descent of broken rocks. (It should be said that many Dante scholars hold that Aristotle's "brutishness" has no place in Dante's scheme; but the symmetry of the arrangement, the special reference made to that division, and certain expressions used elsewhere by Dante, seem to make it probable that he would here, as in most other cases, have followed his master in philosophy.) The sinners by malice, which includes all forms of fraud or treachery, are divided from the last by a yet more formidable barrier. They lie at the bottom of a pit, the depth of which is not stated, with vertical sides, and accessible only by supernatural means; a monster named Geryon bearing the poets down on his back. The torments here are of a more terrible, often of a loathsome character. Ignominy is added to pain, and the nature of Dante's demeanour towards the sinners changes from pity to hatred. At the very bottom of the pit is Lucifer, immovably fixed in ice; climbing down his limbs they reach the centre of the earth, whence a cranny conducts them back to the surface, at the foot of the purgatorial mountain, which they reach as Easter Day is dawning. Before the actual Purgatory is attained they have to climb for the latter half of the day and rest at night. The occupants of this outer region are those who have delayed repentance till death was upon them. They include many of the most famous men of the last thirty years. In the morning the gate is opened, and Purgatory proper is entered. This is divided into seven terraces, corresponding to the seven deadly sins, which encircle the mountain and have to be reached by a series of steep climbs, compared by Dante in one instance to the path from Florence to Samminiato. The penalties are not degrading, but rather tests of patience or endurance; and in several cases Dante has to bear a share in them as he passes. On the summit is the Earthly Paradise. Here Beatrice appears, in a mystical pageant; Virgil departs, leaving Dante in her charge. By her he is led through the various spheres of which, according to both the astronomy and the theology of the time, Heaven is composed, to the supreme Heaven, or Empyrean, the seat of the Godhead. For one moment there is granted him the intuitive vision of the Deity, and the comprehension of all mysteries, which is the ultimate goal of mystical theology; his will is wholly blended with that of God, and the poem ends.

Convito.

The _Convito_, or _Banquet_, also called _Convivio_ (Bembo uses the first form, Trissino the other), is the work of Dante's manhood, as the _Vita Nuova_ is the work of his youth. It consists, in the form in which it has come down to us, of an introduction and three treatises, each forming an elaborate commentary in a long canzone. It was intended, if completed, to have comprised commentaries on eleven more canzoni, making fourteen in all, and in this shape would have formed a _tesoro_ or handbook of universal knowledge, such as Brunetto Latini and others have left to us. It is perhaps the least well known of Dante's Italian works, but crabbed and unattractive as it is in many parts, it is well worth reading, and contains many passages of great beauty and elevation. Indeed a knowledge of it is quite indispensable to the full understanding of the _Divina Commedia_ and the _De Monarchia_. The time of its composition is uncertain. As it stands it has very much the look of being the contents of note-books partially arranged. Dante mentions princes as living who died in 1309; he does not mention Henry VII. as emperor, who succeeded in 1310. There are some passages which seem to have been inserted at a later date. The canzoni upon which the commentary is written were probably composed between 1292 and 1300, when he was seeking in philosophy consolation for the loss of Beatrice. The _Convito_ was first printed in Florence by Buonaccorsi in 1490. It has never been adequately edited.

Vita Nuova.

The _Vita Nuova_ (_Young Life_ or _New Life_, for both significations seem to be intended) contains the history of his love for Beatrice. He describes how he met Beatrice as a child, himself a child, how he often sought her glance, how she once greeted him in the street, how he feigned a false love to hide his true love, how he fell ill and saw in a dream the death and transfiguration of his beloved, how she died, and how his health failed from sorrow, how the tender compassion of another lady nearly won his heart from its first affection, how Beatrice appeared to him in a vision and reclaimed his heart, and how at last he saw a vision which induced him to devote himself to study that he might be more fit to glorify her who gazes on the face of God for ever. This simple story is interspersed with sonnets, ballads and canzoni, arranged with a remarkable symmetry, to which Professor Charles Eliot Norton was the first to draw attention, chiefly written at the time to emphasize some mood of his changing passion. After each of these, in nearly every case, follows an explanation in prose, which is intended to make the thought and argument intelligible to those to whom the language of poetry was not familiar. The whole has a somewhat artificial air, in spite of its undoubted beauty; showing that Dante was still under the influence of the _Dugentisti_, many of whose conceits he reproduces. The book was probably completed by 1300. It was first printed by Sermartelli in Florence, 1576.

Canzoniere.

Besides the smaller poems contained in the _Vita Nuova_ and _Convito_ there are a considerable number of canzoni, ballate and sonnetti bearing the poet's name. Of these many undoubtedly are genuine, others as undoubtedly spurious. Some which have been preserved under the name of Dante belong to Dante de Maiano, a poet of a harsher style; others which bear the name of Aldighiero are referable to Dante's sons Jacopo or Pietro, or to his grandsons; others may be ascribed to Dante's contemporaries and predecessors Cino da Pistoia and others. Those which are genuine secure Dante a place among lyrical poets scarcely if at all inferior to that of Petrarch. Most of these were printed in _Sonetti e canzoni_ (Giunta, 1527). The best edition of the _Canzoniere_ of Dante is that by Fraticelli published by Barbera at Florence. His collection includes seventy-eight genuine poems, eight doubtful and fifty-four spurious. To these are added an Italian paraphrase of the seven penitential psalms in _terza rima_, and a similar paraphrase of the Credo, the seven sacraments, the ten commandments, the Lord's Prayer and the Ave Maria.

De monarchia.

The Latin treatise _De monarchia_, in three books, contains the mature statement of Dante's political ideas. In it he propounds the theory that the supremacy of the emperor is derived from the supremacy of the Roman people over the world, which was given to them direct from God. As the emperor is intended to assure their earthly happiness, so does their spiritual welfare depend upon the pope, to whom the emperor is to do honour as to the first-born of the Father. The date of its publication is almost universally admitted to be the time of the descent of Henry VII. into Italy, between 1310 and 1313, although its composition may have been in hand from a much earlier period. The book was first printed by Oporinus at Basel in 1559, and placed on the Index of forbidden books.

De vulgari eloquentia.

The treatise _De vulgari eloquentia_, in two books, also in Latin, is mentioned in the _Convito_. Its object was first to establish the Italian language as a literary tongue, and to distinguish the noble or "courtly" speech which might become the property of the whole nation, at once a bond of internal unity and a line of demarcation against external nations, from the local dialects peculiar to different districts; and secondly, to lay down rules for poetical composition in the language so established. The work was intended to be in four books, but only two are extant. The first of these deals with the language, the second with the style and with the composition of the canzone. The third was probably intended to continue this subject, and the fourth was destined to the laws of the ballata and sonetto. It contains much acute criticism of poetry and poetic diction. This work was first published in the Italian translation of Trissino at Vicenza in 1529. The original Latin was not published till 1577 at Paris by Jacopo Corbinelli, one of the Italians who were brought from Florence by Catherine de' Medici, from a MS. now preserved at Grenoble. The work was probably left unfinished in consequence of Dante's death.

Eclogues.

Boccaccio mentions in his life of Dante that he wrote two eclogues in Latin in answer to Johannes de Virgilio, who invited him to come from Ravenna to Bologna and compose a great work in the Latin language. The most interesting passage in the work is that in the first poem, where he expresses his hope that when he has finished the three parts of his great poem his grey hairs may be crowned with laurel on the banks of the Arno. Although the Latin of these poems is superior to that of his prose works, we may feel thankful that Dante composed the great work of his life in his own vernacular. The versification, however, is good, and there are pleasant touches of gentle humour. The _Eclogues_ have been edited by Messrs Wicksteed and Gardiner (_Dante and Giovanni del Virgilio_, London, 1902).

De aqua et terra.

A treatise _De aqua et terra_ has come down to us, which Dante tells us was delivered at Mantua in January 1320 (perhaps 1321) as a solution of the question which was being at that time much discussed--whether in any place on the earth's surface water is higher than the earth. It was first published at Venice in 1508, by an ecclesiastic named Moncetti, from a MS. which he alleged to be in his possession, but which no one seems to have seen. Its genuineness is accordingly very doubtful; but Dr Moore has from internal evidence made out a very strong case for it.

Letters.

The _Letters_ of Dante are among the most important materials for his biography. Giovanni Villani mentions three as specially remarkable--one to the government of Florence, in which he complains of undeserved exile; another to the emperor Henry VII., when he lingered too long at the siege of Brescia; and a third to the Italian cardinals to urge them to the election of an Italian pope after the death of Clement V. The first of these letters has not come down to us, the two last are extant. Besides these we have one addressed to the cardinal da Prato, one to a Florentine friend refusing the base conditions of return from exile, one to the princes and lords of Italy to prepare them for the coming of Henry of Luxembourg, another to the Florentines reproaching them with the rejection of the emperor, and a long letter to Can Grande della Scala, containing directions for interpreting the _Divina Commedia_, with especial reference to the _Paradiso_. Of less importance are the letters to the nephews of Count Alessandro da Romena, to the marquis Moroello Malespina, to Cino da Pistoia and to Guido da Polenta. The genuineness of all the letters has at one time or another been impugned; but the more important are now generally accepted. They have been translated by Mr C. S. Latham, ed. by Mr G. R. Carpenter (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1891).

Dante's reputation has passed through many vicissitudes, and much trouble has been spent by critics in comparing him with other poets of established fame. Read and commented upon with more admiration than intelligence in the Italian universities in the generation immediately succeeding his death, his name became obscured as the sun of the Renaissance rose higher towards its meridian. In the 16th century he was held inferior to Petrarch; in the 17th and first half of the 18th he was almost universally neglected. His fame is now fully vindicated. Translations and commentaries issue from every press in Europe and America, and many studies for separate points are appearing every year.

AUTHORITIES.--It would be impossible here to give anything like a
complete account even of the editions of Dante's works; still more of
the books which have been written to elucidate the _Commedia_ as a
whole, or particular points in it. The section "Dante" in the British
Museum catalogue down to 1887 occupies twenty-nine folio pages; the
supplement, to 1900, as many more. The catalogue of the Fiske
collection, in Cornell University library, is in two quarto volumes
and covers 606 pages. A few of the more important editions and of the
more valuable commentaries and aids may, however, be recorded.

_Editions._--The _Commedia_ was first printed by John Numeister at
Foligno, in April 1472. Two other editions followed in the same year:
one at Jesi (_Federicus Veronensis_), and Mantua (_Georgius et Paulus
Teutonici_). These, together with a Naples edition of about 1477
(Francesco del Tuppo), were included by Lord Vernon in _Le Prime
Quattro Edizioni_ (1858). Another Neapolitan edition, without
printer's name, is dated 1477, and in the same year Wendelin of Spires
published the first Venetian edition. Milan followed in 1478 with that
known from the name of its editor as the _Nidobeatine_. In 1481
appeared the first Florentine edition (_Nicolo and Lorenzo della
Magna_) with the commentary of Cristoforo Landino, and a series of
copper engravings ascribed to Baccio Baldini, varying in number in
different copies from two to twenty; a sumptuous and very carelessly
printed volume. Venice supplied most of the editions for many years to
come. Altogether twelve existed by the end of the century. In 1502
Aldus produced the first "pocket" edition in his new "italic" type,
probably cut from the handwriting of his friend Bembo. A second
edition of this is dated 1515. The firm of Giunta at Florence printed
the poem in a small volume with cuts, in 1506; and for the rest of the
16th century edition follows edition, to the number of about thirty in
all. The most noteworthy commentaries are those of Alessandro
Vellutello (Venice, 1544), and Bernardo Daniello (Venice, 1568), both
of Lucca. The Cruscan Academicians edited the text in 1595. The first
edition with woodcuts is that of Boninus de Boninis (Brescia, 1487).
Bernardino Benali followed at Venice in 1491, and from that time
onward few if any of the folio editions are without them. The 17th
century produced three (or perhaps four) small, shabby and inaccurate
editions. In 1716 a revival of interest in Dante had set in, and
before 1800 some score of editions had appeared, the best-known being
those of G. A. Volpi (Padua, 1727), Pompeo Venturi (Venice, 1739) and
Baldassare Lombardi (Rome, 1791).

_Commentaries._--The _Commedia_ began to be the subject of
commentaries as soon as, if not before, the author was in his grave.
One known as the _Anonimo_ until in 1881 Dr Moore identified its
writer as Graziole de' Bambaglioli, was in course of writing in 1324.
It was published by Lord Vernon, to whose munificence we owe the
accessibility of most of the earlier commentaries, in 1848. That of
Jacopo della Lana is thought to have been composed before 1340. It was
printed in the Venice and Milan editions of 1477, and 1478
respectively. The so-called _Ottimo Comento_ (Pisa, 1837) is of about
the same date. It embodies parts of Lana's, but is largely an
independent work. Witte ascribes it to Andrea della Lancia, a
Florentine notary. Dante's sons Pietro and Jacopo also commented on
their father's poem. Their works were published, again at Lord
Vernon's expense, in 1845 and 1848. Boccaccio's lectures on the
_Commedia_, cut short at _Inf._ xvii. 17 by his death in 1375, are
accessible in various forms. His work was achieved by his disciple
Benvenuto Rambaldi of Imola (d. c. 1390). Benvenuto's commentary,
written in Latin, genial in temper, and often acute, was popular from
the first. Extracts from it were used as notes in many MSS. Much of it
was printed by Muratori in his _Antiquitates Italicae_; but the entire
work was first published in 1887 by Mr William Warren Vernon, with the
aid of Sir James Lacaita. No greater boon has ever been offered to
students of Dante. Another early annotator who must not be overlooked
is Francesco da Buti of Pisa, who lectured in that city towards the
close of the same century. His commentary, which served as the basis
of Landino's already mentioned, was first printed in Pisa in 1858. One
more commentary deserves mention. During the council of Constance,
John of Serravalle, bishop of Fermo, fell in with the English bishops
Robert Hallam and Nicholas Bubwith, and at their request compiled a
voluminous exposition of the _Commedia_. This remained in MS. till
recently, when it was printed in a costly form.

_Translations._--Probably the first complete translation of Dante into
a modern language was the Castilian version of Villena (1428). In the
following year Andreu Febrer produced a rendering into Catalan verse.
In 1515 Villegas published the _Inferno_ in Spanish. The earliest
French version is that of B. Grangier (1597). Chaucer has rendered
several passages beautifully, and similar fragments are embedded in
Milton and others. But the first attempt to reproduce any considerable
portion of the poem was made by Rogers, who only completed the
_Inferno_ (1782). The entire poem appeared first in English in the
version of Henry Boyd (1802) in six-line stanzas; but the first
adequate rendering is the admirable blank verse of H. F. Cary (1814,
2nd ed. 1819), which has remained the standard translation, though
others of merit, notably those of Pollock (1854) and Longfellow (1867)
in blank verse, Plumptre (1887) and Haselfoot (1887) in _terza rima_;
J. A. Carlyle (_Inferno_ only, 1847). C. E. Norton (1891), and H. F.
Tozer (1904), in prose, have since appeared. The best in German are
those of "Philalethes" (the late King John of Saxony) and Witte, both
in blank verse.

_Modern Editions and Commentaries._--The first serious attempt to
establish an accurate text in recent times was made by Carl Witte,
whose edition (1862) has been subsequently used as the basis for the
text of the _Commedia_ in the Oxford edition of Dante's complete works
(1896 and later issues). Dr Toynbee's text (1900) follows the Oxford,
with some modifications. The notes of Cary, Longfellow, Witte and
"Philalethes," appended to their several translations, and Tozer's, in
an independent volume, are valuable. Scartazzini's commentary is the
most voluminous that has appeared since the 15th century. With a good
deal of superfluous, and some superficial, erudition, it cannot be
neglected by any one who wishes to study the poem thoroughly. An
edition by A.J. Butler contains a prose version and notes. Of modern
Italian editions, Bianchi's and Fraticelli's are still as good as any.

_Other Aids._--For beginners no introduction is equal to the essay on
Dante by the late Dean Church. Maria Rossetti's _Shadow of Dante_ is
also useful. _A Study of Dante_, by J. A. Symonds, is interesting.
More advanced students will find Dr Toynbee's _Dante Dictionary_
indispensable, and Dr E. Moore's _Studies in Dante_ of great service
in its discussion of difficult places. Two concordances, to the
_Commedia_ by Dr Fay (Cambridge, Mass., 1888), and to the minor works
by Messrs Sheldon and White (Oxford, 1905), are due to American
scholars. Mr W. W. Vernon's _Readings in Dante_ have profited many
students. Dante's minor works still lack thorough editing and
scholarly elucidation, with the exception of the _De vulgari
eloquentia_, which has been well handled by Professor Pio Rajna
(1896), and the _Vita Nuova_ by F. Beck (1896) and Barbi (1907). Good
translations of the latter by D. G. Rossetti and C. E. Norton, and of
the _De monarchia_ by F. C. Church and P. H. Wicksteed are in
existence. The best text is that of the Oxford _Dante_, though much
confessedly remains to be done. The dates of their original
publication have already been given.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The first attempt at a bibliography of editions of
Dante was made in Pasquali's edition of his collected works (Venice,
1739); but the first really adequate work on the subject is that of
the viscount Colomb de Batines (1846-1848). A supplement by Dr Guido
Biagi appeared in 1888. Julius Petzholdt had already covered some of
the same ground in _Bibliographia Dantea_, extending from 1865 to
1880. The period from 1891 to 1900 has been dealt with by SS.
Passerini and Mazzi in _Un Decennio di bibliografia Dantesca_ (1905).
The catalogues of the two libraries already named, and that of Harvard
University, are worth consulting. For the MSS. Dr E. Moore's _Textual
Criticism_ (1889) is the most complete guide. (A. J. B.*)

DANTON, GEORGE JACQUES (1759-1794), one of the most conspicuous actors in the decisive episodes of the French Revolution, was born at Arcis-sur-Aube on the 26th of October 1759. His family was of respectable quality, though of very moderate means. They contrived to give him a good education, and he was launched in the career of an advocate at the Paris bar. When the Revolution broke out, it found Danton following his profession with apparent success, leading a cheerful domestic life, and nourishing his intelligence on good books. He first appears in the revolutionary story as president of the popular club or assembly of the district in which he lived. This was the famous club of the Cordeliers, so called from the circumstance that its meetings were held in the old convent of the order of the Cordeliers, just as the Jacobins derived their name from the refectory of the convent of the Jacobin brothers. It is an odd coincidence that the old rivalries of Dominicans and Franciscans in the democratic movement inside the Catholic Church should be recalled by the names of the two factions in the democratic movement of a later century away from the church. The Cordeliers were from the first the centre of the popular principle in the French Revolution carried to its extreme point; they were the earliest to suspect the court of being irreconcilably hostile to freedom; and it was they who most vehemently proclaimed the need for root-and-branch measures. Danton's robust, energetic and impetuous temperament made him the natural leader in such a quarter. We find no traces of his activity in the two great insurrectionary events of 1789--the fall of the Bastille, and the forcible removal of the court from Versailles to the Tuileries. In the spring of 1790 we hear his voice urging the people to prevent the arrest of Marat. In the autumn we find him chosen to be the commander of the battalion of the national guard of his district. In the beginning of 1791 he was elected to the post of administrator of the department of Paris. This interval was for all France a barren period of doubt, fatigue, partial reaction and hoping against hope. It was not until 1792 that Danton came into the prominence of a great revolutionary chief.

In the spring of the previous year (1791) Mirabeau had died, and with him had passed away the only man who was at all likely to prove a wise guide to the court. In June of that year the king and queen made a disastrous attempt to flee from their capital and their people. They were brought back once more to the Tuileries, which from that time forth they rightly looked upon more as a prison than a palace or a home. The popular exasperation was intense, and the constitutional leaders, of whom the foremost was Lafayette, became alarmed and lost their judgment. A bloody dispersion of a popular gathering, known afterwards as the massacre of the Champ-de-Mars (July 1791), kindled a flame of resentment against the court and the constitutional party which was never extinguished. The Constituent Assembly completed its infertile labours in September 1791. Then the elections took place to its successor, the short-lived Legislative Assembly. Danton was not elected to it, and his party was at this time only strong enough to procure for him a very subordinate post in the government of the Parisian municipality. Events, however, rapidly prepared a situation in which his influence became of supreme weight. Between January and August 1792 the want of sympathy between the aims of the popular assembly and the spirit of the king and the queen became daily more flagrant and beyond power of disguise. In April war was declared against Austria, and to the confusion and distraction caused by the immense civil and political changes of the past two years was now added the ferment and agitation of war with an enemy on the frontier. The distrust felt by Paris for the court and its loyalty at length broke out in insurrection. On the memorable morning of the 10th of August 1792 the king and queen took refuge with the Legislative Assembly from the apprehended violence of the popular forces who were marching on the Tuileries. The share which Danton had in inspiring and directing this momentous rising is very obscure. Some look upon him as the head and centre of it. Apart from documents, support is given to this view by the fact that on the morrow of the fall of the monarchy Danton is found in the important post of minister of justice. This sudden rise from the subordinate office which he had held in the commune is a proof of the impression that his character had made on the insurrectionary party. To passionate fervour for the popular cause he added a certain broad steadfastness and an energetic practical judgment which are not always found in company with fervour. Even in those days, when so many men were so astonishing in their eloquence, Danton stands out as a master of commanding phrase. One of his fierce sayings has become a proverb. Against Brunswick and the invaders, "_il nous faut de l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace_,"--we must dare, and again dare, and for ever dare. The tones of his voice were loud and vibrant. As for his bodily presence, he had, to use his own account of it, the athletic shape and the stern physiognomy of the Liberty for which he was ready to die. Jove the Thunderer, the rebel Satan, a Titan, Sardanapalus, were names that friends or enemies borrowed to describe his mien and port. He was thought about as a coarser version of the great tribune of the Constituent Assembly; he was called the Mirabeau of the sansculottes, and Mirabeau of the markets.

In the executive government that was formed on the king's dethronement, this strong revolutionary figure found himself the colleague of the virtuous Roland and others of the Girondins. Their strength was speedily put to a terrible test. The alarming successes of the enemy on the frontier, and the surrender of two important fortresses, had engendered a natural panic in the capital. But in the breasts of some of the wild men whom the disorder of the time had brought to prominent place in the Paris commune this panic became murderously heated. Some hundreds of captives were barbarously murdered in the prisons. There has always been much dispute as to Danton's share in this dreadful transaction. At the time, it must be confessed, much odium on account of an imputed direction of the massacres fell to him. On the whole, however, he cannot be fairly convicted of any part in the plan. What he did was to make the best of the misdeed, with a kind of sombre acquiescence. He deserves credit for insisting against his colleagues that they should not flee from Paris, but should remain firm at their posts, doing what they could to rule the fierce storm that was raging around them.

The elections to the National Convention took place in September, when the Legislative Assembly surrendered its authority. The Convention ruled France until October 1795. Danton was a member; resigning the ministry of justice, he took a foremost part in the deliberations and proceedings of the Convention, until his execution in April 1794. This short period of nineteen months was practically the life of Danton, so far as the world is concerned with him.

He took his seat in the high and remote benches which gave the name of the Mountain to the thoroughgoing revolutionists who sat there. He found himself side by side with Marat, whose exaggerations he never countenanced; with Robespierre, whom he did not esteem very highly, but whose immediate aims were in many respects his own; with Camille Desmoulins and Phelippeaux, who were his close friends and constant partisans. The foes of the Mountain were the group of the Girondins,--eloquent, dazzling, patriotic, but unable to apprehend the fearful nature of the crisis, too full of vanity and exclusive party-spirit, and too fastidious to strike hands with the vigorous and stormy Danton. The Girondins dreaded the people who had sent Danton to the Convention; and they insisted on seeing on his hands the blood of the prison massacres of September. Yet in fact Danton saw much more clearly than they saw how urgent it was to soothe the insurrectionary spirit, after it had done the work of abolition which to him, as to them too, seemed necessary and indispensable. Danton discerned what the Girondins lacked the political genius to see, that this control of Paris could only be wisely effected by men who sympathized with the vehemence and energy of Paris, and understood that this vehemence and energy made the only force to which the Convention could look in resisting the Germans on the north-east frontier, and the friends of reaction in the interior. "Paris," he said, "is the natural and constituted centre of free France. It is the centre of light. When Paris shall perish there will no longer be a republic."

Danton was among those who voted for the death of the king (January 1793). He had a conspicuous share in the creation of the famous revolutionary tribunal, his aim being to take the weapons away from that disorderly popular vengeance which had done such terrible work in September. When all executive power was conferred upon a committee of public safety, Danton had been one of the nine members of whom that body was originally composed. He was despatched on frequent missions from the Convention to the republican armies in Belgium, and wherever he went he infused new energy into the work of national liberation. He pressed forward the erection of a system of national education, and he was one of the legislative committee charged with the construction of a new system of government. He vainly tried to compose the furious dissensions between Girondins and Jacobins. The Girondins were irreconcilable, and made Danton the object of deadly attack. He was far too robust in character to lose himself in merely personal enmities, but by the middle of May (1793) he had made up his mind that the political suppression of the Girondins had become indispensable. The position of the country was most alarming. Dumouriez, the victor of Valmy and Jemmappes, had deserted. The French arms were suffering a series of checks and reverses. A royalist rebellion was gaining formidable dimensions in the west. Yet the Convention was wasting time and force in the vindictive recriminations of faction. There is no positive evidence that Danton directly instigated the insurrection of the 31st of May and the 2nd of June, which ended in the purge of the Convention and the proscription of the Girondins. He afterwards spoke of himself as in some sense the author of this revolution, because a little while before, stung by some trait of factious perversity in the Girondins, he had openly cried out in the midst of the Convention, that if he could only find a hundred men, they would resist the oppressive authority of the Girondin commission of twelve. At any rate, he certainly acquiesced in the violence of the commune, and he publicly gloried in the expulsion of the men who stood obstinately in the way of a vigorous and concentrated exertion of national power. Danton, unlike the Girondins, accepted the fury of popular passion as an inevitable incident in the work of deliverance. Unlike Billaud Varenne or Hebert, or any other of the Terrorist party, he had no wish to use this frightful two-edged weapon more freely than was necessary. Danton, in short, had the instinct of the statesman. His object was to reconcile France with herself; to restore a society that, while emancipated and renewed in every part, should yet be stable; and above all to secure the independence of his country, both by a resolute defence against the invader, and by such a mixture of vigour with humanity as should reconcile the offended opinion of the rest of Europe. This, so far as we can make it out, was what was in his mind.

The position of the Mountain had now undergone a complete change. In the Constituent Assembly its members did not number more than 30 out of the 578 of the third estate. In the Legislative Assembly they had not been numerous, and none of their chiefs had a seat. In the Convention for the first nine months they had an incessant struggle for their very lives against the Girondins. They were now (June 1793) for the first time in possession of absolute power. It was not easy, however, for men who had for many months been nourished on the ideas and stirred to the methods of opposition, all at once to develop the instincts of government. Actual power was in the hands of the two committees--that of public safety and of general security. Both were chosen out of the body of the Convention. The drama of the nine months between the expulsion of the Girondins and the execution of Danton turns upon the struggle of the committee to retain power--first, against the insurrectionary commune of Paris, and second, against the Convention, from which the committees derived an authority that was regularly renewed on the expiry of each short term.

Danton, immediately after the fall of the Girondins, had thrown himself with extraordinary energy into the work to be done. The first task in a great city so agitated by anarchical ferment had been to set up a strong central authority. In this genuinely political task Danton was prominent. He was not a member of the committee of public safety when that body was renewed in the shape that speedily made its name so redoubtable all over the world. This was the result of a self-denying ordinance which he imposed upon himself. It was he who proposed that the powers of the committee should be those of a dictator, and that it should have copious funds at its disposal. In order to keep himself clear of any personal suspicion, he announced his resolution not to belong to the body which he had thus done his best to make supreme in the state. His position during the autumn of 1793 was that of a powerful supporter and inspirer, from without, of the government which he had been foremost in setting up. Danton was not a great practical administrator and contriver, like Carnot, for instance. But he had the gift of raising in all who heard him an heroic spirit of patriotism and fiery devotion, and he had a clear eye and a cool judgment in the tempestuous emergencies which arose in such appalling succession. His distinction was that he accepted the insurrectionary forces, instead of blindly denouncing them as the Girondins had done. After these forces had shaken down the throne, and then, by driving away the Girondins, had made room for a vigorous government, Danton perceived the expediency of making all haste to an orderly state. Energetic prosecution of the war, and gradual conciliation of civil hatreds, had been, as we have said, the two marks of his policy ever since the fall of the monarchy. The first of these objects was fulfilled abundantly, partly owing to the energy with which he called for the arming of the whole nation against its enemies. His whole mind was now given to the second of them. But the second of them, alas, was desperate.